goldbrick

Hi Reg, a few years back I actually tried a DD on my TDI due to a small blurb in one of your posts I read. If I remember correctly I was in low conductor only, GB9, and as the blade effect of the DD passed the target it would signal high/low/high if ferrous. Your technique worked good except on the smallest pieces of disintegrated tin can. It's funny this DD/TDI subject has come up as I was recently trying to get this technique to work for coin hunting in high conductor mode with a DD. After reading your above post I can now see why my results were unsatisfactory . Thank you for sharing your knowledge. It is only through your easily understood explanations that this prospector has the foggiest notion of how the detector he is swinging works. Regards, Merton

Get the weight down to 3 lbs. +/- then I might buy it to detect "invisible" gold. I think I will stick with the 4500 for now.

After the beating I took the last time I went coin shooting with Klunker I slunk off to the mountains to lick my wounds and do a little nugget shooting. A few days of mountain air refreshed me so now I am back looking for a rematch!

An interesting post by Chris Porter on Findmall's Deus Forum with video of Chris recovering nuggets With the Deus.

Thanks for the download Geojack. Was there a certain article you thought should be referenced?

For an interesting read on pocket hunting posted on a Canadian forum- http://gpex.ca/smf/index.php?topic=12499.0

Hi Steve, I used to have one of the old style orange 24" Coiltek RM coils. That sucker weighed a ton so I couldn't swing it too long. Consequently I did not use it much. Finally got rid of it on a trade. That left me with a NF 16 RM as my biggest weapon. Long story short I bought a new NF 20" RM. I went with the 20" because I had learned with the 24" there are very few places I hunt that a huge coil is an advantage. With the 20" I feel it travels over rough ground and obstacles better than the 24". My coil control is so much better now with the 20" though I used a bungee and swing arm with both coils. Last fall I hunted a patch that had been pounded by two expert detectorists using NF 25" RM coils. I was able to snag a beautiful 2/3 ounce nugget which I credit to the ability to keep the 20" coil closer to the soil on this patch that was not on flat ground. I hope you find a big 'un this summer to pay for that 25". Regards, Merton

Here is another Arizona forum. It is independent, not metal detector dealer sponsored- http://www.arizonagoldprospectors.com/

Thanks for investing so much of yourself into that awesome review Steve. No hype, no axe to grind, just the facts.

Edited-Posting the same time as Steve and he explained it better. Good luck on that porous gold Rick.

Hi Steve, thanks for the explanation. On the Deus or Nasa Tom forums(can't remember where I read it) there has been some speculation that the Deus uses a different type of GB technique rather than the ground signal subtraction found on other detectors. Speculation only, no hard data, interesting.............. I tend to use a similar technique when patch hunting as you do. I will typically put the stock 11DD on my GPX 4500 to take advantage of it's quietness and ability to discriminate shallow ferrous targets. I want to dig more good targets, not dig shallow nails or disintegrated cans all day. I am just looking for that one shallow nugget that most patches seem to have. Once I have found that nugget I put on the mono's and start digging. When I was trying to decide whether to purchase the Deus while mulling over your advice you had offered me I realized that I was willing to fork over a sizable sum of cash to accrue ONLY for coin and relic use the benefits the Deus has to offer. I am glad I did! I can hunt much longer with the Deus just listening to the tones and only looking at the TID occasionally to verify what the audio is telling me. This machine is the most ergonomically correct detector I have ever picked up, it is a joy to swing. Just as the advice you gave me in the first thread I posted on your forum helped me solidify my thoughts I think I will follow your latest suggestion and contact XP. If they would make some mod's to the goldfield program I could cut down on the number of detectors I take on certain forays. After too many hours of getting the skunk nugget hunting I like to switch to coin and relic if there are any old sites nearby. It always refreshes my attitude as I dream of the cool finds I could make. The Deus has the potential to become a first class "all-a-rounder" with a few changes.

Hi Steve, one anomaly that occurred during testing was with a 14 grain nugget set 1 inch to the side of a hot 3 inch ironstone rock and the detector swung first over the rock then the nugget there was no signal on the nugget, but on the reverse swing the nugget would report. The nugget would not report both ways until a separation of 4" was introduced. Because there was no discrimination in effect, only GB notch, I can only surmise whatever process the Deus is using for GB notch does not have a fast recovery time. When I get time I will try the same test but substitute a large nail elevated three inches for the ironstone. Do you have any ideas what may be happening in this instance?

My brother and I took my XP Deus out to the Mojave Desert today to try out the new Goldfield program and to test the GB notch feature. We went to the worst ironstone hell hole I know of to put the Deus to the test. This location is literally carpeted with ironstone. PI's struggle there and it is not somewhere I would ever take a VLF expecting to find nuggets. After I figured out how to GB notch (not covered in the manual that I can see) I set the Deus to program 10 (Goldfield) found a clean piece of ground to GB on (it GBed at 87) then swung the detector for a few minutes around the ironstone patch. It was machine gun audio similar to swinging over a bed of nails. Now what follows is in no way a scientific test, just a couple of prospectors trying to figure out a new machines capabilities. Neither my brother or I are experts with a VLF. Your results in a different location may vary, hell they may vary if you went to the same location. I left the Deus in Factory settings, accessed the GB notch function and started notching as I was swinging above the ironstone. It started notching at GB87. Each successive push of the button adds 1 number above and 1 number below GB87. The upper end stops notching at 90 then each successive push just adds 1 to the lower end. I think it will notch from GB 60-90. When the lower number read 85 most of the signal from the ironstone was gone but there were broken tones similar to ones iron emits when it has been partially discriminated. I notched down to GB80 and the detector was relatively quiet when swinging. The next step was to see if the detector would detect gold in this configuration. Toward that end I had brought some nuggets (2, 4, 14, and 32 grain) in those little round plastic display cases. All nuggets were air tested in the display cases sitting on a granite boulder. I am not going to mention depths achieved as we had no accurate way to measure them. I will say that they roughly paralled a GB Pro with 10" elliptical coil we had brought along. My brothers Pro was set on a discrimination setting of 40 which was the minimum he required to quiet the machine when swung over this HOT ironstone. It was impossible to run it in All Metal Mode at this location. Both machines detected all the nuggets to expected depths when sitting on the granite boulder with the aforementioned settings. The problems arose when we placed the test nuggets on top of or next to the ironstone. Detection depths were drastically reduced. I found that to get better depth I needed to notch at GB 85-90. I also reduced the transmit power from a setting of 2 down to 1 (less swamping of the mineralization) which enabled me to up the sensitivity slightly. This seemed to be the best setting to use to ignore most ironstone and yet be able to best detect the nuggets. We tried all sorts of combinations (different size nuggets next to or on top of different size and/or hotness of ironstone) way to many to enumerate here. Suffice it to say we determined that it was POSSIBLE to run the XP Deus, GB notched at 85-90, and the GB Pro, discrimination set at 40, in this the worst ironstone locale I have ever run across even though the depths attained on the test nuggets were severly impacted. Is it the smart thing to do? Well I wouldn't if I was coming back, I would grab my GPX 4500 and leave the VLFs at home. Seeing as we were already there we decided to detect awhile. I chose a location near an old fire pit thinking no PI guy is going to come within 30' of this place and I was rewarded with about 20 targets, none gold. After we burned out on detecting the ironstone hell we headed for some cleaner dirt about a mile away. I wanted to see how the Deus performed in a more normal setting in regards to the goldfield program and GB notch effectiveness. Upon arriving at the spot I had to change the settings back to what I had settled on earlier as I had failed to save them to a custom program in one of the 8 slots provided for that. When you turn the detector off, any factory program you have tweaked resets to default. The menu tree on the Deus is well set up and very intuitive to learn. This was my 3rd time out with the detector and I have pretty much mastered it. One thing I love about this detector is you can quickly make adjustments to various settings while swinging over a target to maximize it's performance for your current location/conditions. In short order I had made the setting changes so I GBed then started detecting up a small wash. The GB notch seemed to do its job as I observed some of the hot rocks local to the area so turned the notch off/on to double check them. This technique is not "Gods Gift" to VLF prospectors but it is a useful function albeit you do get some broken tones over hotrocks on occasion but they are easily identifiable as such. What was not acceptable was the poor performance of the TID on small targets. Just as the GB Pro has TID numbers in All Metal Mode, so does the Deus. On the Deus it takes a fairly large target (in the world of nugget shooting not coin hunting) at shallow depth for the screen to show any number at all. You have to understand that this machine was not built as a gold machine. It was designed to be a top notch coin and relic machine for the plowed fields and forests of Europe. Any VLF struggles with accurate TID at depth and the designers of the Deus decided rather than provide a TID with questionable accuracy that if the machine did not have a good idea what the conductivity of the target was it would report nothing. This actually makes sense as first and foremost the Deus is a tone machine. When they created the goldfield program I imagine the software designers did not think to change the parameters for TID reporting as I doubt they are gold prospecting in the south of France. Hopefully this will be something they can change when they next upgrade the software. When you purchase a Deus all future software upgrades are free for life. I eventually got disgusted because if I want to dig every target I will bring a PI along so I went and grabbed my GB pro and went back to work. Conclusions - these were two short hunts at very different locations with a new machine that is unfamiliar to me and I am about as dumb as dumb can get when it comes to VLF metal detectors so please don't flame me. The Deus is a great detector. The light weight wireless configuration with blazing fast processor speed will rock your world when it comes to coin and relic hunting. I am impressed by the build quality and thought that went into this machine. With the advent of software version 3.2 it now has the gold field program and GB notch. This was a step in the right direction but the designers need to confer with an expert gold nugget detectorist to get the TID issue up to snuff for prospectors. Once this is taken care of I would think this detector performance wise would be close to the other mid-range hertz gold detectors. As it stands now you will dig way more small iron with the Deus. The GB notch feature could really shine in specific areas littered with hot rocks but more testing needs to be done by the experts in a scientific manner at a number of locations to prove this. The fact that there are no coil or headphone wires to snag on brush is a bonus but the lack of a small elliptical DD coil available restricts where you can use it effectively although the stock 9" round DD seems to be a good coil. This post was in no way intended as a shoot out between the XP Deus and GB Pro. They just happen to be two VLF detectors I own and am slightly familiar with. Regards, Merton XP DEUS Data & User Reviews

I had a few hours out with my new Deus today. Picked it up from UPS at 0830 a.m. and I was hunting dirt by noon ;-) I had read the manual 3 times, Andy's Sabsich's book once, and a lot of posts on the internet including watching videos so I had the barest grasp of what this machine will do. This part of the Mojave Desert had very few people in it up until the 1930's and not a large population after so the coin and relic possibilities are slim. I had decided to detect around an old club house that I was certain had been pounded. I am staying in the clubs RV park so I walked out the door and fired the Deus up. I was not to concerned with finding good stuff, I just wanted to learn to navigate the menu tree, settings, and the tones. I started detecting in a fairly clean area then as I familiarized myself with the machine I worked my way towards the club house and into more trash, changing settings over targets to see the effect of different combinations. I ended up only recovering one silver coin, a 1950 quarter that was almost touching a nail and about a bucks worth of clad. The education I received from the Deus was the prize of the day. I used 4 khz to discriminate iron, I did the backwards wiggle to discriminate bottlecaps and to pinpoint. I dug a lot of pulltabs since there wasn't much for coins but plenty of co-located tabs to learn on. Most of my detecting has been gold nugget hunting with PI machines. I have 3 VLF's but don't use them much. I had tried a F75 about 3 years ago and never could seem to master it, to be fair I did not use it much as I preferred my GPX 4500. If it beeps, dig it. I was a little nervous about buying the Deus for coin and relic and ending up with another machine that did not suit me. My fears were unfounded as that Deus is one sweet machine. Although I only have a few hours on it, the programs, tones, and settings all make sense to me instilling confidence that this machine will produce some finds. Regards, Merton

I purchased one yesterday online but will not be able to spend time with it until mid-February. I will let you know what I think of it once I have spent some time with the coil to the soil. Regards, Merton

Steve, thanks for the reply. I need another gold machine like I need a hole in my head but I would be happy owning a Deus to hunt coins and relics. I will probably purchase one. Regards, Merton

Hi Steve, Thanks for all the excellent info you post on this forum. Your posts here and on Dankowski's forum have piqued my interest in coin and relic hunting once again. I have recently been using my GB Pro and Whites TDI as coin and relic machines around old mining camps. Not too many good finds yet but a lot of fun none the less. I have actually found my best coin with my GPX 4500 while nugget hunting. Anyway, when using the GB Pro I find that detecting in nail pits with disc 26 to 39 (per Nasa Tom's forum) I get a sore neck from watching the TID. If I am at disc 39 I can't just dig all high tones due to the massive amount of lead and brass at these sites. I have been toying with the idea of buying an XP Deus for these activities and assigning tones and/or notching for what I want to recover (site dependent) to get away from reliance on the TID. Now with the release of Version 3.2 that includes the Goldfield program( basically all metal mode and tighter ground balance?) and the ability to notch out some hot rocks in the ground balance range the urge to purchase is VERY strong. This detector since it runs at 18 KHZ, has the new goldfield program, and can GB notch hot rocks, could be a great nugget detector but there is no info on the net I can find. Steve or anyone else, do you have any input or experience hunting small gold nuggets with the XP Deus? Shouldn't it perform somewhere between an F75 and the GB Pro on gold? Regards, Merton p.s. I have a GBII so I don' t care if it recovers fly poop.