Jeff McClendon

Park 1 Multi

Like I reported, the Scottish dealer's video and what I experienced were virtually the same using the same detectors, the same settings and slightly different targets. So, it seems that either that dealer and I are both lying or we have very similar performing Nox 800 and Nox 900 detectors for some reason. I will try to do the same test with the Legend and Deus 2 using similar setups soon.

It's great to have both the 800 and 900 to do a similar test to see what this is all about. I used a slightly smaller but very gnarly, rusty 5" square nail, a US nickel and a US silver Rosie dime. The coins were just a bit wider than the nail. Everything that the video showed was repeatable by me using exactly the same settings. I even put the Nox 900 in 2 tones instead of DP tones and still got the same results. So I tried to find a recovery speed and iron bias setting on the 800 that would simulate what the 900 was doing at recovery speed 4 and iron bias 4. Basically, I needed to set the 800 on recovery speed 7 or 8 and iron bias Fe or F2 on 0 (which isn't actually zero or no iron bias) to start to come close to the 900's 4/4 performance. I then tried to find a recovery speed and iron bias setting on the 900 that would simulate what the 800 was doing at recovery speed 4 and iron bias 4. I had to put the recovery speed on 1 and iron bias on 8 or 9 to sort of mimic the 800 at 4/4. Just like with any test, changing the approach angle of the nail with coin behind it away from as parallel to the coil as possible or rotating the nail and coin 90 degrees slightly changed the responses but all in all, the Nox 900 out performed the 800 in this test, PERIOD. I am definitely not a Minelab dealer or any kind of dealer.

NO.

I have owned the ORX, Deus 1 and now Deus 2. Personally, I didn't buy them because they were specifically wireless. Sure, the lower weight that some on here keep reminding everyone about is certainly a good thing the older I get, but I bought these detectors for their iron handling, speed, selectable frequencies and customization features. Now that Deus 2 is both selectable and SMF, I couldn't be happier. If Deus 2 weighed 3 lbs instead of just under 2 lbs, I would have still bought it. Charging three different components that don't have the same amount of battery life is a pain in the ass. So is remembering to bring the antenna and attaching it securely when I happen to want to get wet. Otherwise, Deus 2 is a fabulous improvement over previous Deus and ORX models even though it still sucks for gold prospecting.......

That’s why white gold and platinum/ silver alloy are much more common now. Yellow gold jewelry and natural diamonds have some bad connotations for many people. So the jewelry industry created a new, very lucrative market for cubic zirconia and moissanite back in the 1980s and the non yellow gold settings industry joined in for the fun and big profits. Lab grown diamonds of gem quality came out in the early 2000s. All of those people who complained about blood diamonds created a new market!!!!!

Natural diamonds are not usually set in .925 silver rings. It’s all about the mark-up/money. Spot price for 1 gram of .925 silver right now is $0.70 US. 1 gram of 10K gold is $25. 1 gram of 24K is $60 US. Most engagement style rings like Ken found, weigh in the 2 to 5 gram range without the gemstones and jewelry makers are going to mark up the setting by a minimum 3 times that price or a lot more depending on who made the setting and how. Lab grown diamonds and moissanite which is lab grown silicon carbide can be found in .925 silver like Ken found out and you can find them in gold, white gold, platinum and plated silver. Moissanite does not have a natural cleavage plane like diamonds. It breaks like glass in rounded fractures. That is good for faceting and makes it easier to make a shiny, smooth girdle which also helps with brilliance. Cubic zirconia has the same property. If you see a shiny, highly polished, continuous girdle on a faceted gemstone that appears to be a diamond……….probably isn’t. Cubic zirconia can also be set in .925 silver and in bling pot metal/brass settings. Anytime I see .925 stamped on jewerly it goes in the “good” container instead of the junk/bling container and deserves a close look. A faceted 1 carat low to medium grade natural diamond can start at $1000 and up. A moissanite of the same size and grade starts at around $199 retail. Lots of people like flashy jewerly and lots of people can’t afford natural or lab grown diamonds. Moissanite is a good alternative both for price and quality. Cubic Zirconia is bling quality. So valuable meaning stones worth thousands of dollars retail are not usually found in .925 silver alone settings unless it’s custom made.

Hopefully you have watched the YouTube Channel The Dutch Metal Hunters-Metaaldetector

Some of the Whites 24K coils (at least two of the three I owned previously) were bump sensitive. The Garrett 10X5 I owned was rock solid with no issues.

So So you have a Garrett 24k with a Garrett 10X5 and a Whites 6" or do you have a Whites 24K with a Whites 10X5 and Whites 6"?

After learning more about the Manticore from this excellent topic started by Daniel, I realize now that what I wrote below about how I setup an Equinox in relation to the Manticore is pure drivel. I would just skip right over this entire post. I am learning that in some situations the Manticore is a lot like the Equinox. In some others it seems to be very different. Reading your account of this accidental head to head hunt made me wonder a few things. So, when I am hunting for small sub gram nuggets in 4 to 5 bar F75 dirt with Deus 1/ORX Goldfield or with an Equinox using Gold 1 or Gold 2, I am setup wide open, all targets accepted, 1 tone VCO audio and reactivity somewhere in the middle like 2.5 on Deus and 5 on the Equinox so I can get less of a look at the ground and more of a look at tiny ferrous and non ferrous targets in the surface to 4" or so depth range. Most of these gold targets will read like they are mostly iron unless they are on or near the surface. You instead, are hunting for 3/4 to to 1 ounce targets at 4" or deeper in 4 to 5 bar F75 dirt. I don't know much about the Manticore at all. I just look at the features and the default settings in the manual. I know plenty about Deus 2, especially its Relic and Goldfield modes. Manticore All Terrain General default disc pattern is +5 to 99 with the entire iron target range and the borderline ferrous/non ferrous IDs 0 to 4 rejected, 5 tone Normal audio and recovery speed 5. If I used those settings at my 4 to 5 bar F75 gold prospecting sites I would not hear a peep on sub gram gold or anything else unless it was big and near the surface. Deus 2 Relic mode even with disc set at 4 (still have 4 to 25 which are all iron IDs and the borderline ferrous non ferrous IDs 25 to 30 accepted) is already a big improvement over Manticore's All Terrain General defaults, and reactivity is 1, audio response 5 and audio is one tone VCO. With those settings, I would hear larger targets easily at my 4 to 5 bar F75 gold prospecting sites and might even hear one gram to multi gram nuggets. Bullets for sure would be easy to detect unless they were way deeper than 4 to 6". I did a little testing using some target free dirt that shows 10 of 12 bars on Deus 2 so really bad dirt iron wise. Deus 2, 9" coil in default Relic mode and Equinox 900, 10X5" Coiltek coil in Field 2, all targets accepted, depth tone audio (2 tone VCO) and recovery speed 2 had almost identical results on a 3/4 ounce Maxi Ball at 7" depth. There were plenty of 4 way iron audio and target ID responses with intermittent non ferrous audio responses with jumpy target IDs between 50 and 99. When I bumped up Equinox Field 2's recovery speed to 5, the audio was much weaker, really choppy and sporadic. Equinox 900 in Gold 1 with all targets accepted, 1 tone VCO audio and recovery speed 2 or 3 had similar results to Deus 2 default Relic mode. I also tried Deus 2 in default General and got next to nothing over the Maxi Ball until I opened up the discrimination pattern to add all of the iron target IDs and lowered reactivity to 1. I hope you will try the Manticore again at that site with settings that are more similar to Deus 2 Relic mode just to see if there is any hope of improvement. I never had many good results with a CTX 3030 at highly iron mineralized sites. Maybe I was just not adept at using it correctly. Anyway, I have had very little interest in the Manticore based on my CTX experiences, so I am definitely not being an apologist for Minelab's Manticore by writing all this. I am very happy with my Deus 2 and my Equinox 800 and 900.

A, G, and F are quick and really easy ways to change the iron discrimination pattern. C is for setting up your own custom discrimination pattern. Sure, you can also take the long route and adjust the volume levels and do something similar by setting up a custom pattern Using A, G or F is instantaneous. Using C and setting it up like you want it will take some time and user knowledge. Even if you only use User Profile 1 and don't actually save anything, the Legend will remember your last setup and will go right to it on startup.

I won't discuss the Manticore, since I don't own one and have never used one. For me, the easiest to read display on a bright, sunny beach are the Equinox models, followed by the Legend and then Deus 2. Deus 2 can have its target ID numbers enlarged but at the expense of the other important display features. Also, if you happen to detect a tidal pool of just want to barely submerge the coil in gentle, shallow surf, no additional alterations are necessary with the Legend or Equinox models. Deus 2 would need to have its antenna wire attached even in water that is 5 cm deep. Deus 2 has many fantastic features as do the newer Equinox models and the Legend. As Steve H. said in his post, the differences in performance are not worth even discussing comparing Deus 2, Legend and the newer Equinox 700 and 900. Most casual users will not notice much difference. I own all three and the performance differences even for an obsessed metal detector junkie like me really are minimal between these detectors. I used a Deus 2 Lite setup for awhile. I really liked its light weight. However, using it for saltwater beach hunting on a regular basis is not something I would want to do since the WS6 is not waterproof, the display does not have a backlight and glare from sunlight is a real issue. I recently added the full remote. Even it is hard for me to see sometimes. Using any of these detectors regularly with their wireless headphones on a noisy beach and considering salt degradation and possible accidents........ I would want to use over the ear, wired, waterproof headphones. Those are readily available for all three brands but you may need to purchase a wired headphone adapter or headphones with the brand specific waterproof connector. Using the Deus 2 on the ear back phones at a noisy beach is a joke as is just using the external speakers on these detectors on a regular basis. The Legend and the newer Equinox 700 and 900 (Manticore also?) have a handle vibration feature that alerts the user that a target has been detected so at least with those detectors turning off the external speaker and just using the vibration feature is an alternative to using headphones. Weight is definitely an issue when coils get covered with dry or especially wet sand. So is lower shaft torque with a sand coated coil attached. Deus 2 can become very nose heavy with a sanded coil, so the lightest initial weight does not always mean the best ergonomics for sandy beach detecting. Deus 2 lower shaft torque has definitely been reported by beach/water hunters. I personally would not buy a new Equinox 600 or 800. Their many issues with flooding, broken coil ears and broken arm rests are well documented by beach hunters. The newer Equinox models have been designed to fix those issues. I would buy a new Equinox 700 or 900, a Legend WHP or a full Deus 2. Since you specifically mentioned High End detectors I won't recommend the Minelab Vanquish models which are not waterproof. Even minor rogue waves do happen.

Multi frequency detectors like the Legend which is similar to the Equinox have to use iron filtering/iron bias in order for ferrous range targets to be identified a little better. Unlike single frequency detectors that process a ratio of the ferrous vs non-ferrous target characteristics of the return signal, the Equinox (and I am assuming the Legend) when using their Multi settings only use the non ferrous parts of the return signals for processing. If they had no way to bias those return signals towards iron they would probably false on iron even more than they already do. So using Multi, there is always a small amount of iron bias/filtering going on and setting 1 is the least amount of iron bias on the Legend. The earlier Legend software versions only had a fixed iron filter setting which was similar to the current setting of 8. Also, you asked for the "Best" settings. I won't assume that I know what is best for you. I definitely don't. The settings I quoted are what I use on the Legend as a starting point for gold prospecting near Morristown AZ and at a site nearer to me in Colorado. I have them saved as a user profile.

"default is same as Iron Filter 8, which is no filtering....." Iron filter default setting of 8 is not zero filtering. It is full filtering on 1.09. Saying it another way, if you are detecting in Gold mode multi using iron bias set on default 8 using 1.09 AND the ground your are detecting on is highly iron mineralized you better be running the Legend using the A discrimination pattern and dig everything because really small sub gram gold nuggets and especially sub .1 grammers are going to have ferrous target IDs. Put the iron filter setting on 1 (minimum filtering-there is no zero in Multi) you stand a better chance of having a small nugget or picker have a target ID number above 1 and maybe even above 11.

Sounds like there may be another company like Nokta that actually seems to care about their customers besides just receiving their money.

What witwidz said. I like Goldfield Multi better but that is just me. Starting points for me are——Discrimination pattern A, sensitivity on the edge of being chatty if you can stand it or lower it a bit, volume 3 or 4, recovery speed 4 or 5, Iron filter on 1, iron stability 1, bottle cap 0 (if you are using software v. 1.10) ground stability 0, threshold 7 to 9 or just so you can barely hear it. Swing low and slow and do ground balances often. Dig any target with an ID from -9 to +30 that seems to be coin sized or smaller. Practice on small bits of lead.

Not that I know of. That is what the WSA ll audio module is for. It pairs easily with my WS6.

Here is a short video by Calabash using Deus 2 at the same site. He is using a form of Deus 2 Fast with Pitch tone audio so higher pitches are non ferrous or falsing. The lower, harder to hear grunts are iron audio responses.

Alain (Palzynski) posted a response late last year that the Deus/Deus 2/ORX arm cuff "stand" being inadequate may come from it being used on earlier detectors and XP decided to use the same arm cuff design for the Deus/ORX. Obviously it doesn't work very well as people have been complaining about toppling Deus and ORX detectors for many years. Why XP has not addressed this is a mystery to me. I posted this backyard fix for my Deus 2 back in November 2022. It has held up very well even when dropping my Deus 2 in the snow and on frozen ground with the bottom of the arm cuff hitting the ground first. Over 100 hours of use and it is super ugly but still works just fine. It cost me about 15 minutes of my life to make. I tried the clamp idea years ago but the clamp kept hitting me or my finds pouch during swings. All of the aftermarket 3D printed stands I have tried have broken within a few hours of using them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- November 18, 2022 So, I had a few minutes today to mess around with a no nonsense Deus 1/ORX/ Deus 2 stand idea since I can almost walk and we have 6" of snow on the ground. I wanted to try something that would in no way alter my Deus 2's arm cuff/built in stand in case I decide to move on from Deus 2 in the future (doubtful since I really like it but I never know......). I cut a 3" PVC pipe section that was also 3" wide in half and continued to trim it until it sat flat on a flat surface while fitting snug underneath the rounded area under the arm cuff's legs. The two notches on the bottom of my 9" round FMF coil were also sitting flat and stable with the coil itself perpendicular to the flat surface. The area underneath the hand grip with the two screws that is usually touching the ground poorly was just barely touching. That size pipe sat flat underneath the arm cuff very nicely when I trimmed the PVC pipe's "feet" at a shallow angle. I taped it to the arm cuff's legs with strong black tape and then used two sturdy zip ties to secure it nice and tight. This looks ugly but it is very stable on a flat surface and PVC is definitely stronger than the plastic used in 3D printers. I will get to try it out for real soon hopefully. I doubt this will work using Deus 1 or the ORX and the HF elliptical coil. I only have the Deus 2 9" coil so it may need adjusting for an 11" I usually have my lower shaft between setting 1 and 2. This worked with the shaft all the way to setting 3. Shortening the shaft to "dive" mode...........the arm cuff is a couple of inches off the ground so definitely not for wet work.

Here is the video that Rick referenced done by Calabash. For my ears, this video sounds like typical USA iron trashed site hunting whether I'm using a Legend, Minelab Equinox 800, Minelab Equinox 900 or Deus 2. Don't have a Manticore. It mostly refutes a technique recommended by Neal (Neil?) Jones and all of us that turn 90 degrees. I was joking earlier in my first post about the reason why the Manticore was falsing. It's not Calabash's fault. Every detector will false at sites like the one where he is detecting.

As an example, go back and look at the Detector Comparison videos I posted on this site by Carter Pennington using Deus 2 and his friend using the Manticore. There is no agenda in those videos. Unfortunately they are not using the external speaker audio. But, when both detectors investigate what turn out to be ferrous targets, Deus 2 is throwing up non-ferrous target IDs and as Carter says…. “blips” or falses. First iron target in his first video is at the 14:30 mark. It’s hard to see but that target has IDs from 61 to 86 when I can see the Deus 2 display. It is all about the narrative for the agenda driven videos. I can easily setup a video scenario that will make Deus 2 false big time.

Why Is It Hitting High Tones On Small Iron In Calabash's Hunt? Because Calabash is using it.

For those that don't visit Friendly Forum (nice new server and host by the way), this post by Carl Moreland covers most of the 50% question really well. Thanks Carl. ------------------------------------------------------------------ "I'm sure what Mark is doing is using lay-terms that people can relate to. Anyone who's ever watched Tim "the Toolman" Taylor knows what More Power means. But Tim never discussed what more ampere-turns means, or more B-field strength. I suspect what Mark really means is that Manticore has a 50% stronger TX B-field. This can be achieved with 50% more coil current or 50% more turns in the TX coil, or some combination. In a detector with user control over the TX current (like the White's V3) you can decisively demonstrate what this does for target detection. It ain't a whole lot, but like the old man who pee'd in the sea said, every little bit helps. From a strictly technical view, metal detector transmit "power" makes no sense because, in most designs, the power is mostly recycled. Including MF designs. That is, you can have 500mA of coil current but the TX circuit only consumes 25mA. Unlike RF antennae the detector coil does not emit RF power, it only produces a local magnetic field. However, real power is consumed by target eddy currents, but it's not much. This is why it also makes no sense to talk about FCC power limits on detectors. They don't really emit power."

I really regret ever buying a Fisher Gold Bug Pro, Fisher F19/Technetics G2 series detector. (I somehow have heroically resisted the temptation to buy a new Bounty Hunter Time Ranger Pro.) I don't regret it because they were bad detectors. I regret it because I really liked them even though they were easily outperformed in every detector use I could think of by my former $179 US Minelab Vanquish 340 except on really small nuggets. After experiencing that realization my rational self just reminds me that I own 4 simultaneous multi frequency detectors that also have selectable single frequencies (including 20 kHz) and that they detect circles around those FTP products absolutely, end of story, where I use detectors the most. I still really want one though And then there are all of those fantastic single frequency detectors that operate below 15 kHz that I have tried out and really liked except for how they utterly fail as detectors where I most often detect. It's not those detector's fault. I love Colorado and the Western USA. Most "normal" VLF detectors just don't do very well here unless targets are literally laying on top of the ground.