Jeff McClendon

The two main reasons are that I didn’t want to be distracted by really small micro can slaw and smaller foil both of which tend to have target IDs in the upper 20s to 40. I am willing to miss a 0.1 gram earring back or a tiny gold chain. I would much rather find a 1 gram to 10 gram gold ring, pendant, bracelet, charm etc. I have limited time right now due to a physical injury to dig those tiny targets. I live in a part of the USA where there is a birthday party or two celebrated every weekend in public parks that involve piñata’s filled with aluminum foil coated sweets and lots of Modelo with foil covered steel crown bottle caps. Just a fact, not a cultural or political statement. Setting discrimination at 40 lets these sub 40 small aluminum targets all have faint iron responses that I can just ignore as viable targets. I don’t mind hearing iron responses. Plus, using the WS6 puck which is all I have, there is only one available notch so I won’t waste it on tiny foil and micro aluminum. I had the iron volume turned down pretty low too since there are many rotting turf staples at about 5” so I just wanted to concentrate on surface to 6” deep, obvious good sounding non-ferrous targets, especially those in the 40 to 88 small to large gold ring range. Any target that sounds good that is above 87 is very likely a USA clad coin, silver coin or silver jewelry which I am going to dig.

OR just 3 lbs lighter

Zed

That is why I post stuff like this. Anyone that hunts in bad dirt can do this by knowing their detector’s capabilities and tendencies, hunting in likely jewelry drop areas and by being willing and able to dig plenty of good sounding trash. Having a detector with high iron mineralization capable SMF tech and an expanded target ID range for gold targets really helps too. That 14k ring has a 14/15 target ID on the Equinox. Any experienced Nox user knows what targets also share those IDs and is possibly why I might not have dug that target using the Equinox simply due to way too many targets in the 12 to 15 target ID range where I detect and I can be sloppy/not willing to dig. However, I have dug 27 gold rings on turf with the Equinox so other than the crowded gold range target IDs, it is a highly capable gold ring detector. Deus 2, Legend and the upcoming Manticore also have the necessary features to make them excellent gold jewelry detectors.

After today’s hunt, my XP Deus 2 Lite is paid for. So is my Nokta Legend since July. Two absolutely awesome detectors that will only get better with updates and hopefully more coil choices.

My sentiments exactly. Like I said earlier, the user interface/navigation kind of sucks compared to the Equinox. My only other minus is the 10X5” coil isn’t available yet. Otherwise, it is an Equinox with a few extra features and improvements in a Legend housing which is totally fine with me……So is Deus 2 and I only have the Lite version. Who needs a Mantipedi….

For this hunt definitely. I would gladly take that ratio anytime. Rarely happens. That dog may be cute but he is vicious. He is named for the American boxer Mike Tyson.

I have been cleared by my surgeon to metal detect but only on flat/level ground and I have to wear my CAM boot. Luckily I have two of these ankle boots so getting goose pooh, mud and snow all over my older beat up one is no problem. I have been out three times in the last week for about 1.5 hours each time. Great way to walk my dog and I get to dig 40 or 50 targets. Getting down on the ground to retrieve deeper targets and back up is a pain but hey, at least I'm walking and metal detecting. Deus 2 has been the detector I chose for the three hunts because I wanted to see if that ugly makeshift stand I concocted would actually hold up......so far it works great and no cartwheeling Deus 2 lately. Lots of people on this forum have been asking questions about hunting gold jewelry with Deus 2. I basically am always hunting for gold jewelry or any jewelry when I go out to one of the many local parks or school grounds in my area. Today I hunted a local park where there are organized sports activities like smaller child mini soccer games, adult volleyball (on grass), ultimate frisbee and also a rugby league. At a place like this it is always a question for me whether I should hunt the actual playing field or the sidelines where participants keep there belongings and where any spectator might sit to watch. Usually I try to find the sidelines by following the trail of trash. That is what I did today and I was rewarded. I had Deus 2 in FMF Fast with discrimination set at 40 and 5 tones for iron, small gold 40 to 58, US nickels and medium gold 59 to 65, larger gold and zinc pennies 66 to 87 and US clad and silver 88 to 99. So I did not have anything notched out and I made myself dig any good sounding target between 40 and 98 that wasn't too deep (down to about 6") with an emphasis on the 40 to 87 range where gold rings can definitely happen. I dug about 40 targets in a little more than an hour. Half were pull tabs/aluminum trash. The other half were US clad, a 1944 silver Mercury dime, a stainless steel/CZ honker ring target ID 50, a 3.5 gram .925 silver ring target ID 96 and a 8 gram 14K gold ring with diamonds and ebony target ID 72. All three rings were in a straight line, just on the edge of the playing field about 10 feet apart. So I got all three on one pass parallel to the playing field. Man did that feel good. I will eventually hit the playing fields too for sure. I did not by any means dig every target I heard. Only the really good sounding ones that were not at the edge of detection according to tone quality and the WS6 depth meter. Dig that good sounding aluminum trash.......it is the only way to not miss quality jewelry and bling that is mixed in with it.

So Simon, with version 6 you can pair the ORX wireless headphones=WSAs with the Deus 1 full remote or the round WS4 controller. That couldn’t be done previously. The WSAs cost $99 new here in the USA.

The Equinox is not in any way made or assembled in the USA. A component or two…..maybe. Minelab have never made or assembled a hobby metal detector in the USA. Their military/law enforcement/first responder communications equipment division…….maybe.

That sounds like detecting heaven........I have a 5 gallon bucket that is almost full of pull tabs

My first thought was either Smigo has a bad coil or that he may need to ground balance more often if using ground balance LOCKED or at least pump the coil more often if using automatic tracking. There were places that I could not get my 24K to consistently ground balance due to high iron mineralization and it was very knock sensitive and would overload easily unless I turned sensitive way down below half. I never had the opportunity to run a 24K in mild dirt so I really have no idea. So, that first paragraph of mine is pure conjecture and may be totally wrong......if so, just ignore it.

First, its a Deus 2 not a Deus…….really big difference. The 0.1 gram 10 K earring back was buried at roughly 1.5 inches. The 0.15 gram small nugget was buried at roughly 2.5 inches. The 0.25 gram nugget was buried at roughly 3.5”. I dug the holes, measured them and then filled them in on top of the targets. Disturbed dirt or undisturbed dirt matters some. Iron mineralization levels matters a lot more. There was enough iron mineralization at the test site to completely alter the actual target IDs on the Legend and basically made it very hard for Deus 2 to give an ID. No, this was not a comparison of the Legend against Deus 2. The Legend is what I expect from a good, functioning simultaneous multi frequency VLF that is designed to do well on low conductors like small gold. Both detectors have designated gold prospecting modes that need only a few tweaks to tune them for the site being hunted. Basically the default settings are very good on both detectors in theory. The entire reason for making this video was to publicly once again let XP know that Deus 2 has real problems as a small gold nugget detector even though XP included a gold prospecting mode on Deus 2.

90% of my hunting is on turf Skate where targets are found where they were dropped and where conditions are fairly static except for soil moisture levels. The stuff I said up above applies to that. If I am hunting a saltwater beach or even a fresh water beach with plenty of magnetite (black sand) I am hunting very much like Carolina suggested. I even listen to the iron sometimes too. That's a great haul Carolina....awesome!

Yeah, Minelab have not produced a perfect detector......who has? I was one of the first to complain about the GPX 6000 and its hyper susceptibly to EMI. For me, susceptibly to EMI and extreme sensitivity go hand in hand especially when we are talking about PIs and high gain simultaneous multi frequency detectors like the GPX 6000 and the Equinox. So I will just continue to deal with it and hope for a smaller GPX 6000 DD coil in the future. Also, Minelab have made a real effort to produce lighter weight VLFs and PIs recently. With lighter weight comes more plastic and more cheaper built (in appearance) detector components like flimsy coils, coil ears and shafts.....part of the territory. Do I think Minelab's mid to upper end detectors are overpriced...sure. But they work. So, enough of the bashing here. I too hope that Garrett and Nokta's soon to be released PIs give Minelab some good competition. Minelab USA have always fixed whatever was wrong with my recent Minelab purchases and done so in a very professional and timely manner.

I see you have an Equinox in your signature. The Equinox with its unlimited single digit notching is waaaaaaay easier to setup for a USA gold ring hunter at least in theory. However, so many great and trash targets clump up around the 12 to 15 target IDs that it can also really be frustrating and downright demoralizing digging thousands of pull tabs and aluminum trash that sound really, really good. After digging the 100th pull tab in a session, I start to get sloppy and I start skipping 12 to 15 target IDs.....not good. Luckily, Deus 2 doesn't really have that problem due to its much wider target ID scale. However, just 3 possible notches using the full remote on a $1500 detector.....also not good. If you are like me and just using the WS6 as a master......only ONE notch allowed.......😡

I am attaching a photo of some of my gold items and many other commonly found USA targets and their corresponding target IDs with them being held about 2" from the Deus 2 9" FMF coil using Program 1 General. Studying that photo for the commonly encountered trash along with US nickels and zinc pennies and using the information you already have may help you with a strategy. Whatever that is, it won't be as simple and easy as just running up Deus 2's discrimination to 86 and digging everything that gives a high tone which is an easy way to just dig US clad dimes and quarter along with any silver jewelry and silver coins that might be in the area. I have been known to cherry pick when I just don't want to dig a lot of trash and I only want to concentrate on coins and any gold or silver rings/coins that I know can overlap those modern clad coin numbers. However, there are gold rings and jewelry all over the place in that photo. Aluminum and steel alloy targets are all over the place too and I didn't include canslaw and foil since their target IDs are totally random depending on size. You also need to take into account the ground your are hunting. If it is moderately to high mineralized or a saltwater beach, there may be some up averaging on deeper targets. When one is just hunting for silver, that is not a big deal. However, when low and mid conductors get up averaged out of the low or mid conductor range due to mineralization............notching can become not such a good idea. So, know your ground and its tendencies. As you noted, women's small gold engagement and promise rings do seem to clump up in the 40 to 50 target ID zone. However, the big men's class rings that I have found are normally in the 65 to 75 target ID area where there are lots of pull tabs and then there is that big 18 k honker right next to the zinc penny target ID. Sometimes I will hunt an area several times for gold rings and I will split things up. So for example, you could notch out everything including zinc pennies and above so 86 to 99, and also notch out 65 to 72 for most of the common pull tabs and then run your iron disc up to 39. That way you would only accept target IDs from 40 to 64, and 73 to 85 and just dig everything in those two accepted ranges. Come back another day and just dig the 65 to 73 range if you are feeling lucky and don't mind a million pull tabs. I would use any of the first four higher frequency weighted programs Gen, Fast, Sensitive or Sensitive Full tones for gold and low/mid conductors. To make those accepted target IDs really stand out I use Pitch tones so for instance in that first example I would get soft iron tones for the targets encountered with target IDs from -6.4 to 39, strong single tone higher modulated audio for the 40 to 64 and 73 to 85 target IDs and silence for the other notched out target IDs. You could use 3 tone too all the way up to full tones or whatever you want that matches your hearing and style and adjust the tones to the pitches you like.

I got my power/speaker unit back from the Minelab USA Repair today. It made it safely in a medium USPS Priority Flat Rate box and it was insured (don't know how much). I got it all back together and attached the 14"DD coil and tested it in my house (WHAT!!!!) and in my backyard. I tested it using the 14" DD on normal and difficult using both the EMI Cancel setting and the Conductive Ground setting. Sensitivity was equal to the before the upgrade performance judging from my notes on the testing that I had done previously on air tests and in the ground tests using the exact same targets. With headphones, everything was normal and fairly quiet with sensitivity on level 3 or 4. I didn't go any higher due to EMI from over a million people in my area. Same goes for testing my Mono coils.....not happening where I live. With the speaker on and just setting my GPX 6000 with 14" DD on the ground, it never got out of control even in this very EMI rich environment. When it got a little squirrelly a quick noise cancel brought it back to being useable. I let it sit on the ground for about 15 minutes and only noise cancelled three times. Previously, I would have been noise cancelling at least every minute while hoping my neighbors weren't calling the police for my disturbing the peace.......

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.

I am inserting this video here just for Bob so he can see and hear how the Legend does on sub .25 gram and smaller gold nuggets and micro jewelry. No agenda here. I love both detectors in this short video and use them regularly so again, this is just for Bob (or anyone else that is wondering) to get an idea of what the Legend can do. Here is a link to a short, 4 minute, really bad video I made back in early September using the Legend and Deus 2. Plenty of road noise, EMI and moderately mineralized ground. So at least for me, I don't "think" or "it seems" that the Legend is strong on small gold nuggets and micro jewelry. I know for a fact it is.

IronDigger, here is an unbiased, no agenda video for the Equinox testing depth of the 11" and 15" coils on three UK coins in air tests and more importantly on those three coins buried down to 21". Long video by Sid (27 minutes) but its easy to skip to the in the ground testing. Just for a reference since you asked the question. Whether an 8" coil SDC 2300 would do any better....???? No clue. No doubt, the dirt Sid is testing in is probably pretty mild.

USPS Priority maxes out at $500 online but you can buy up to $5000 in person at your post office. That should cost around $80 and then add the shipping cost. Minelab pays all shipping costs and related fees and insurance for the return trip back to you per the GPX 6000 warranty.

My GPX 6000 did not cost me $6000. I paid much less. I did not ship the entire detector. Only the PCB/Speaker housing. I did not even ship the battery. So what are you surprised about????? If something had happened in shipping from me to Detector Center or from Detector Center to me….its covered by the 3 year warranty…..if a part of the detector was damaged in shipment to or from for a covered under warranty repair especially a repair that was instigated by a known issue bulletin from Minelab.

Not in anyway making a suggestion here. This is just what I did in the beginning. I spent a few hours setting my Legend up for US modern clad by using 6 tones and setting up an audio tone bin for each major coin type with the volume level and actual pitch that I wanted to use that I could remember in the field. I got to learn some of the inner, hidden menus that way too along with just basic navigation and the pitch recognition for each coin type also let me just listen first. I also just hunted in Park M1 with recovery speed 4 or 5, iron filter on 3 or 4 for many, many hours using the G=ground discrimination pattern which helped to silence my hot dirt. I always did a noise cancel and ground balance and I learned how to use the Ferro Check meter for shallow iron and mixed alloy steel targets. Pinpointing a target with the onboard pinpoint function and then rechecking it using the best onboard pinpointer location for it also improved the target IDs a bit too. Have fun.

So, from what I can tell, Irondigger is a USA based detector user that is hoping to go to a European site (wooded, plowed field, pasture, beach, mineralization??????) in the future and is asking what detector to take with him. So, which detector can he not take with him on an international flight due to lithium ion battery restrictions........? How does that change the picture?