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Relic Hunting With The Orx Vs. The Deus


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I was invited back to one of my favorite relic sites in Pennsylvania for a couple of visits, recently.  Not only is the site productive but you also never know what just might turn up there.  There have been plates and buttons galore, minie and round balls of various types and calibers, other brass uniform and equipment accouterments, jewelry, and other relics .  Not to mention silver and gold coins from the 1700's to the 20th century, including a couple of large coin caches.  This site appears to have been a CW picket post and/or bivouac area.  It also appears to be a center of commerce based on the number of early 19th century coinage encountered. 

I have had success with both the Equinox and my Deus.  This site, unsurprisingly, is becoming more and more stingy and I have found that I am just more confident with the Deus here, lately, for some reason.  Can't explain it from a detector performance standpoint, because the Equinox has killed it here before.  The Deus in gold field or with pitch tones in discrimination mode just seems to give me a better "view" of the ground and with lots of junk iron, hot rocks, modern trash, and aluminum slag from a previous tractor engine explosion I need the instant feedback the signal modulate gives in terms of signal strength and target footprint.  The Equinox lacks this "feel" with its relatively un-modulated tones and requires the extra step of shifting into pinpoint mode to trace a target footprint to sift through large iron targets and large chunks of slag or aluminum cans.  The Equinox can obviously get it done here, but I am going with the hot hand, and that is XP for now..

On my second trip there this fall, I focused on using my ORX exclusively, which I got as a backup to the Deus and really wanted to see if it could hold its own with the Deus despite some of it's feature limitations vs. the Deus.  The ORX has four built in programs vs. the 11 that are built into the Deus, though many of the Deus programs are just variations on the same theme with different settings pre-programmed in.  The Deus and ORX basically have just two modes.  Discrimination mode and Gold Field(Deus)/Gold (ORX) mode.  The gold mode on Deus/ORX are essentially identical in terms of settings.  Gold mode emulates an all metal setup with VCO pitch based audio that changes in intensity and pitch depending on the strength of the target signal - a visual target ID is used for dig decisions.  Gold Field/Gold mode allows you to set a threshold tone and allows you vary recovery speed (reactivity) and you can cut in some limited iron audio reject which tends to break up the audio signal in the presence of iron.  I usually just keep it off because in mineralized soil, everything gets broken up so it is pretty useless.  You can use target ID to determine probable iron and the ORX has a useful "iron probablity" bargraph and pop up, large font target ID display which is absent on the Deus.  A couple of ORX user interface enhancements I would like to see in a future Deus implementation.  The discrimination or "coin modes" as they are called on the ORX are more traditional iron discrimiantion based tone and visual ID modes.  On ORX the tones are fixed at 3 tones (one of those being iron audio which can be switched on even when using discrimiantion, similar to the Deus).  The Deus meanwhile, has a myriad of tone customization options (1, 2, 3, 5, and full tones) with fully customizable breakpoints and tone pitch selections.  The Deus also provides more adjustability on recovery speed and related filters such as the silencer which is sort of like iron bias on the Equinox.  Other than those differences, the ORX raw performance is basically identical to the Deus.  I decided to put that to the test and the results were not really surprising.  It delivered.  What did surprise me was how much I liked using it vs. the Deus.  Yes it has limitations on settings but for 90% of the situations I would encounter, it would hold its own just fine. 

Below are some of the finds recovered recently at the site.  Deus finds are mostly to the left, ORX finds are mostly to the right including the Mexican 1850 1/2 Reale.  How it found it's way all the way to PA only to be lost for perhaps 150+ years, is a great mystery to be pondered.  In addition to the coin, ,various Eagle buttons and button backs, a few flat buttons, a fancy gold plated button with dimpled design, a sword hanger clip, a very old religious cross pendant, period lead bullets, and some miscellaneous pieces of brass and lead were recovered.

I can see myself keeping the ORX in the truck as my general purpose grab and go machine for moment's notice detecting.  Enjoy.

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Chase what do you think the two coin programs are similar to on the Deus? Deus Fast and Deep? Or maybe none of them?

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13 hours ago, abenson said:

Chase what do you think the two coin programs are similar to on the Deus? Deus Fast and Deep? Or maybe none of them?

Great question. 

Coins Fast on the Orx most closely resembles Deus Fast with the exception that unlike Deus Fast, which has the silencer filter turned off (-1 setting) by default, XP states that some unspecified level of silencer filtering is constantly applied in Coins Fast mode on the ORX (unlike Deus, silencer setting is not user adjustable on ORX in any mode).  Though I generally like to run with silencer off on the Deus to ensure max separation performance, I really didn't notice any hindered performance on the Orx with Coins Fast and it ran with more stability than Coins Deep at this site which does have variable medium to high mineralization.

Coins Deep appears to resemble Deus' Deep mode.  It appears to use the Deus version 2.X deep signal processing which was re-introduced into Deus starting with version 4.2 of the Deus software (currently at version 5.21). The version 2.X processing was known to enhance deeper signals at the expense of noise and signal stability, overall.  XP improved stability in version 3.X but some 2.X fans were not fans of how 3.X appeared to suppress the audible strength of deep targets, so XP brought the 2.X behavior back in the Deus 4.2 "Deep" program.  It appears, XP is using "Deep" processing in Coins Deep on the ORX and without any silencer filtering whatsoever.  The result is a deep but marginally stable mode option on ORX.  So if you want max depth at the possible expense of more noise/less stability, Coins Deep is an option.

Just as on Deus, I like to always run with some level of discrimination between 7 and 10 to mitigate ferrous down-averaging of non-ferrous target IDs.  It has no affect whatsoever on depth. And unlike running with 0 disc, provides stability and reliability to the iron probability and depth indicators on ORX (or the horseshoe indicator on Deus) and with the switchable iron volume feature, keeps me from losing my low iron tone breakpoint when desired.

One other "hidden feature" on ORX vs. Deus is how Target ID normalization is implemented on ORX.  Users of the white HF coils know that there is no selectable target ID normalization applied whatsoever on Deus for the HF coils, unlike the LF and X35 coils where you have the choice of selecting target ID normalization (to 18 khz) on or off.  ORX normalizes target IDs across the board (not user selectable) for all coils and all frequencies.  This prevents high conductive target IDs from all getting jammed up into the mid to high 90's when running at 25 khz or above.

HTH.

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Well I didn't expect such a detailed explanation. But thanks for taking the time to break down all the finer points of the ORX. Sounds like a great machine.

I like the normalization across the board on the ORX with all coils. That's one thing that takes some getting used to on the Deus when using it with the HF coils.

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