Glad you asked. I've been wanting to write a bit about the Legend on gold for ages now, but stuff always gets in the way. So here it goes.
The Legend is pretty capable on small gold, (within the usual limitations of VLF machines which is, the less iron in the soil the better they will work). It's only marginally behind the Gold Kruzer on very small pieces, but will beat the Kruzer for depth on larger pieces. It has a lot of settings options, so can be tweaked up to suit conditions.
This is a pretty detailed set-up, which is more a familiarisation exercise. You won't have to go through this level of detail every time once you are familiar with the detector.
1. Select Prospecting mode.
2. Turn threshold up until you hear it - don't set it too faint at this point
3. Turn sensitivity up until you start to hear falsing and then do an auto noise cancel. If the falsing goes away, turn sensitivity up until it just starts to false again, then back off one number.
4. I generally prefer to have Tracking off, and rebalance myself. Do an auto GB now.
5. Start sweeping and see if the detector is remaining steady. Your threshold may be "gurgling" at this point, but don't worry about this, if you are not getting any false signals, then all is well. If you are getting false signals, turn the sensitivity down and recheck.
6. When you think you are good to go, place some targets on the ground, preferably buried in the dirt and see if you can hear them. It is best to use a few different sized targets at different depths. Gold is obviously best, but lead or solder are just fine.
When playing with settings, you want to optimise the signal to noise ratio. What I mean by this is you want to get the best response on the target/s without increasing any background noise (or keep it to a minimum). Sometimes you have to reduce the sensitivity lower than you think to achieve this, but if you're in milder soils crank it up!
7. First step is to play around with the audio tone and see where the target response is best for your hearing.
8. Now that you've noise cancelled, set sensitivity, ground balanced and set audio tone, now play around with sweep speed. Try really slow vs really fast then everything in between. You will quickly find out what is optimum.
9. Now change the frequency to 40 kHz, re ground balance and go over the targets again. See if there's any differences. Now go across the ground. Is it smoother than Multi??
10. Now do the same in 20 kHz.
Remember this is all a learning experience to get familiar with the settings on the Legend.
11. Now set to what you think is the best frequency, do another Noise Cancel, and now go across the targets again while adjusting the recovery speed. A slower recovery speed should give you the best depth, but you can't sweep too fast. A faster recovery speed should handle changes in ground a little better, but you will lose a little depth, so it's a compromise.
12. Finally, play around with threshold level. Threshold too low and the detector will be quiet, but you may miss targets. Threshold set to where it is just audible makes the audio very sensitive, but any "gurgling" background noise will be more obvious. A higher threshold can have a smoothing effect, but if you go too high it will be quite loud, and this is not ideal especially for extended hunts as you will just fatigue your ears. What I would suggest here is to turn it up till it just starts to smooth out a little, then if you find that level a little loud, try turn your Volume down one number. Remember, use your buried targets as your reference, and remember we are trying to achieve the best signal:noise ratio.
At this point, you should have achieved two things. 1. You should have a much better understanding of what the various settings options do, and 2. you should have set your detector to the optimum settings for the area you are in.