Jeff McClendon

I also detected a shoelace rivet with Deus 2 using the General program. I was impressed that it hit that target at about 2" depth in 10 bar mineralization. I weighed it and it came in at .34 grams. I am definitely one of the people that has wondered where the target size/weight drop off is on Deus 2 since I do a lot of tiny gold prospecting. I will say that my Deus 1 is more sensitive to smaller targets under .25 gram than Deus 2 using what should be their most sensitive modes and settings so far. The same goes for Deus 2 Mono at 40+ kHz vs Deus 2 in any of its 40 kHz FMF modes. Throw in salt or iron mineralization and who knows.......

Have you adjusted the volume on the Bluetooth headphones? They do have independent volume settings. Sorry if I have answered this before….

I own one of these. After using it 3 times it came apart at a seam that it hard to see but it separates near the LED screen and mini connector so that those parts and the wiring can be installed. I just glued it back together and it still works fine. I have not found it to be vastly easier to attach to the two XP Deus coils that I own than the stock charging clip which certainly had something to do with it falling apart. So, the voltage reading going to the coil is a great feature and I think this clip is a viable alternative. You just might need to have some super glue with you if you are depending on this clip when on the road hunting for days and/or when charging with it away from home in general.

As a GPX 6000 owner, I have been learning to best use my GPX 6000 in really bad ground that also has substantial EMI. JP and everyone else that has offered tips and hints about how to best use the Normal/Difficult settings, Cancel and Salt settings, sensitivity settings on bad ground, warm-up time, which coils do best in certain situations.......all of this is helping me as an end user deal with this really great PI that acts like a super hot SMF VLF at the same time. I don't see where this poll is hurting anything when looking at the big picture. Judging by the poll responses so far, it helps me personally trust my investment in the GPX 6000 and in all of you that have been reporting in your experiences and finds. I have not had a super rosy time with this detector. It is not the detector's fault that the only places that I have been able to detect with it are very difficult sites. But with everyone's honest input and with this impromptu poll, I know it will get easier.

Other than the sort of stated in the manual frequency weighting between Park and Field modes 1 and 2, I don't see a huge difference in iron infested or aluminum/steel infested areas between the Park and Field multi modes. I add about half of the iron target ID range to each one for coin/jewelry/relic hunting in each mode and use the 1 modes for most hunting and go over the area (if possible) with the 2 modes afterwards. For micro jewelry hunting on land/freshwater I am usually using either Park 2 or Field 2. For gold prospecting I am definitely using either Park 2, Field 2 or the Gold modes. Iron or aluminum trash......it is all the same to me in all of the land based 1 and 2 modes.

If your coil has a battery issue the XP USA repair center may be able to repair it. A member of another forum who claims to have inside information said that the USA repair center has/had some stock of Deus ll replacement coils. Whether that is true as of now?????

Absolutely. Just hoping for an “easy” fix. I wouldn’t want you to wait months for a replacement coil in case it was good after all.

I Actually, if the coil’s battery runs down enough it will unpair……or at least display the no coil connected symbols. It pairs up immediately when the battery charge level increases enough. It’s happened to me twice. I didn’t notice that my coil battery level was low.

The photo of the display screen shows your coil as having little or no charge. That is what mine did when I forgot to notice its battery level. Are you sure that the charging clip is really making good contact when charging. Does the coil LED stay on continuously when charging?

This is just some preliminary observations so it could all change with a Deus 2 and/or Equinox online software update. Here is my take on some striking differences after 4 hours of head to head wild target hunting. I was using the Equinox in Park 1 Multi, 5 tones with otherwise basic settings, recovery speed 5, iron bias 4, sensitivity 22 and with -4 to 40 accepted...so rejecting -9 to -5. I was using Deus 2 in General with adjusted for my hearing..5 tones and with default settings. On paper, Deus 2 General with a max. frequency of 40 kHz should be hotter on smaller targets than Equinox Park 1 which most would agree is weighted towards 15 to 20 kHz. The actual head to head hunting shows just the opposite. Park 1 lights up the ground and gets solid hits on very small targets better than Deus 2 General. That could be a good thing and it could also be why many new Equinox users coming from some other detectors go nuts with all of the target responses even in Park 1. Someone mentioned how much better Deus 2 handles EMI.....could what I wrote above be related to that. Whether one is deeper than the other on coin sized targets, I don't know. On smaller than coin sized targets.....there seems to be a steep drop off point size wise with Deus 2 in the .25 to .5 gram size/weight just from early results. Whether that effects masking and poorly oriented targets.......not from my experience so far. Deus 2 is really hitting hard on coins on edge so far. In thick modern trash that is a good thing and Deus 2 has shown me it will really hit hard on coins and jewelry. It hits bottle caps and pull tabs really hard too, but it will ignore most of the little stuff that the Equinox even in Park 1 will make all kinds of noise on.

That .15 gram nugget is easy to hit so, yeah, Deus 2 could not see it. If I lowered the threshold to 5 it would barely even detect it in the air test I had setup........... I think it is the coils and XP wanting Deus 2 FMF tech to ignore tiny trash targets more than anything. I could be wrong. If I setup Deus 2 Mono in PWM Pitch audio and Deus 1 Goldfield with similar settings and frequency, the 9" FMF and the 9" X-35 have almost identical results. They are way better than Deus 2 FMF Goldfield. Both single frequency versions of Deus 2 Mono and Deus 1 Goldfield will easily hit the .15 gram nugget in that dirt sample at 1". Just like Deus 1 with the HF elliptical coil in the video, getting them to ground balance is another story. Being able to remotely ground balance in that dirt is what sets the Equinox way apart from the others. The Legend did pretty well too.

Yep, stupid me......I totally forgot to noise cancel the Legend both times when I turned it on.....DUH. It will quieten down nicely if one follows instructions. There are huge overhead power lines about 1/4 mile to the west of that site where I did the testing. My big bad.....sorry Nokta Makro! I really enjoy using the GPX 5000 at that devil dirt site as far as adjustability and coil choices. I don't like swinging it at 11,000 feet however for very long even with a small coil and a well fitted Hip Stick.

This may not be practical for you, but I often will use both on the same site and literally go behind myself or hunt the same ground from a different direction using Park 1 or Park 2.

My Deus 1 actually does fairly well on that dirt too when it is running at 54 kHz or higher. I have found some nice specimen gold mixed with quartz with it at that site. Some of the dirt has been hydraulicked and rearranged and some is natural. Since this site is on an 11,000 foot mountain side some of the dirt horizon is tilted upward and I can literally swing my coil and pass over several cross-sections of dirt with different ground phases. Mostly with the GPX 6000 I just end up in Auto 1 (11). Also there is the pea sized to ping pong ball sized magnetite that is all over the ground and virtually every metamorphic rock is a hot/cold rock. All of that stuff is easy to recognize with the Equinox 6" coil using a wide open Gold 1 or Gold 2 and then having a modified 2 tone Field 2 in the User Profile. With the GPX 6000, those subtle differences in the soil horizons sound like good targets. So do many of the smaller pieces of magnetite and hot rocks that are under the surface....... Maybe a smaller coil will help.

Right now I keep bottle cap reject on zero. That may be dumb but it has worked for me so far. I go by the tones and their characteristics and sometimes check the horseshoe graph. The dirt here is so mineralized that even good coin targets start to get iffy at about 6” depth with sporadic iron responses. When I use bottle cap reject the deeper borderline good targets get even more iffy.

Thank you for reading and responding. Please feel free to jump right in and offer whatever your experiences have been. I got to hunt for a short period of time today with my Deus 2 for coins and jewelry. It did not disappoint. I have hunted this area extensively with my Deus 1 recently and a little with an Equinox 600 a couple of years ago. It is a school/city park site that had new sprinklers and sidewalks put in about 4 years ago. I have found some older nickels including Buffaloes and Wheat pennies so I knew silver was a possibility. I sure didn't expect silver Washington quarters however. These two quarters and several of the other quarters were on edge in the 4 to 6" depth range. So were the other coins. I was really glad to get the silver ring also. The nickels also really get me excited since they are so easy to hear on Deus 2 by setting up a small tone bin for them. The little pile of trash in the top right of the photo are the square tabs and beaver tails that also can be found in the 60 to 64 target ID area. So can rusted/bent Corona steel crown bottle caps which are found a lot in my area. The "gold" ring is gold plated/Avon bling........too bad! The XP Deus 2, even with basic General program settings, is proving to be quite the coin and jewelry detector.

Being a former AT Pro and AT Gold owner, the Equinox 600 and the Legend are outstanding steps up. Even when compared to the AT Max they are a big step up. Not knocking the Garrett AT Series one bit here. They were state of the art 10 years ago. They just can't compete now with the great features included with the Legend and Equinox and I can assure you they will detect just as well as the AT Max. Selling the AT Max and buying even a $254 Nokta Makro Simplex, as recommended by Steve is not a joke by the way. He is serious as far as the excellence of the Simplex and so am I.

I just want to add two things. I was never a big fan of the X-35 Deus 1 coils for small gold prospecting and for ground balancing in bad mineralization. I found it to be a very noisy coil. The 9" FMF coil sure looks and acts a lot like the X-35. I could have run Deus 1 using the HF elliptical at 54 kHz or higher and it would have performed much better. I was just trying to keep the testing as level as possible. Also, what I am showing here has already been proven by Andy (abenson) in his Deus 2 (11")/ Deus1/Equinox/GPX 5000 nugget testing videos which are posted on this site and on his YouTube channel "Relics and Rings"

I agree strick. The ability of the Equinox to ground balance in that dirt is remarkable. I could have done a lot of settings adjustments (and did off camera) but I decided to at least stay with default sensitivity settings if possible. I kept Deus 1's frequency close to the other detectors 31.3 kHz and Deus 1 and Deus 2 Goldfield sensitivity at default 95.............lowering it and raising the reactivity a bit helped some but depth loss was even bigger. So I just made sure to set up the two Goldfield programs as close to the same as possible by using PWM VCO on both, adjusting audio response the same and maxing the volume. For me, the Legend did just fine. I have had my GPX 6000 at the location where that dirt came from and I usually spend hours chasing ghost/hot ground signals. I get frustrated, pull out my Equinox 800 and enjoy the hunt.......go figure. The work required to make a little video like this with just an iPhone and Youtube's video editor is ridiculous. Anyone who does this regularly should be commended. Making it also helped me make some decisions. I am just going to have to put up with Deus 2's Goldfield performance and not take it to places with dirt that bad. I have found gold with Deus 1 at that location so I just figured Deus 2 would automatically at least be the equivalent of Deus 1.

I have been hunting with Deus 2 exclusively for about 2 weeks and I must say, I really like it. Of course, I really like Deus 1 except for how it detects (poorly) in high mineralization on deeper than 3" coin sized targets. Deus 2 fixed that for sure. So, I gathered up a .05 gram flattish nugget and used half of an XP audio module/backphones container which is 1.25" high for a minimum height air test. Did the same with a .15 gram nugget with the other half (1.75") of the XP audio puck container and used a whole XP audio puck container (2.5") with a .25 gram nugget. I also did a surface and 1" deep buried test with the flat .15 gram nugget in a container of highly iron mineralized dirt from a hydraulic mine site in the Colorado mountains. I removed all of the bigger pieces of magnetite which filled a sandwich bag and the dirt still maxes out the mineralization bars on Deus 1 and Deus 2. Even my GPX 6000 hates this dirt. There is some wind noise and some drag racing noise from Bandimere Speedway. There is also a good deal of video of my butt....sorry. My IPhone also overheated twice so this video has a couple of splices. The Deus 2 audio sounds a bit weak during the air testing of the .05, .15 and .25 gram flat nuggets. It actually isn't weak. It is PWM VCO audio and the targets are at the edge of detection. The volume is maxed out on Deus 2. I also totally forgot to do a noise cancel on the Legend. It is a bit noisy and it is my fault. The video is kind of long.....19 minutes with no talking. Hope you can see the detector displays most of the time. Making videos is definitely not my thing but some people won't believe it until they see it. One's word used to be enough.....

It is kind of hard to do a hardness test using a polished sphere..... I am going to unequivocally say that the sphere in your photograph is not Lepidolite mica. If it was Lepidolite you should see many cleavage faces and much smaller polished individual platelets of mica. Personally, I think your Kunzite supposition is an excellent one. I do see some evidence of cleavage planes and the white/lavender color zoning is just right for less gem quality Kunzite that is tending towards more common Spodumene. It is very beautiful. The Harding Mine near Taos NM had some Spodumene crystals that were also tending towards Kunzite that were huge along with Lepidolite and other amazing lithium rich pegmatite minerals. I say had because I have not been there in 30 years.

That is what happened today for me too. I got mostly strong hits on 6 to 8” coins on edge. A few were like you described and were clad coins with slightly different quality hits on each side. On edge copper pennies did not respond like that. I can also hear weird audio when locating coin spills or multiple coins stuck together. I can’t describe that sound yet but it is very distinctive.

I have not seen Deus 2 do something that the Equinox or Legend can’t do yet. I knew there were still targets in the area I hunted since I had only gridded it in one direction. I only got my coil over four shallow targets out of the 60 that I dug today. Those 4 were recent drops according to their 2021/2022 dates. The rest of the 56 coin and trash targets I dug today were in the 4 to 8” range and could have easily been masked/poorly oriented hunting in one direction. There are so many steel crown bottle caps and pull tabs on or near the surface that accidentally moving them an inch when people are using the park, when the grass gets cut or when we have bad weather can easily unmask a deeper coin.

I don’t use notches unless the trash or hot rocks are just unbearable. I do use tone bins to help learn the detector. Tone bins were 0 to 10, 11 to 59, 60 to 64, 65 to 88, 88 to 99. I set my tones to pitches I like and can remember…….but I am a classically trained musician so my tone choices are very subjective. thanks for asking

I have been out a few times during some insane weather with the new Deus 2. Finally today we had some good weather conditions and good soil moisture levels in the local parks for perfect deep target conditions. I was using the 9" coil in stock General mode. The only adjustments I made were to use Square Wave audio and to set 5 tone bins for iron, low conductor gold/aluminum, US nickels, mid conductor aluminum/zinc penny, and the last bin was for copper pennies, dimes, quarters and any silver coins or jewelry. I only dug targets with tones and IDs in the US nickel and copper penny/silver ranges. I walked over hundreds of other trash targets that were visible or heard along with what were probably zinc pennies/small shot bottle aluminum screw caps. I had hunted this park originally with Deus 1 and later gridded part of it with the Equinox. The Equinox has tallied 8 silver dimes and 27 wheat pennies at this one park. It is the kind of place where most of the good targets are 6 to 8"+ deep and are covered with a dense surface to 6" matting of can slaw, pull tabs of all sorts, and thousands of steel crown bottle caps and aluminum screw caps. I deliberately hunted mostly the area that had been gridded with the Equinox. Due to the numerous aluminum targets that crowd into the US nickel range on the Equinox (11,12,13) it has been really hard for me to hunt nickels and gold rings that respond with those numbers since I would have to dig hundreds of targets in a small area and might only move 10 feet during a 2 hour hunt. Denver Parks and Rec. would also have something to say about hundreds of dig holes in a 10'x10' area......not happening. Limiting that US nickel bin to 60 to 64 on Deus 2 cut way down on the aluminum targets that I dug today. I easily located 6 nickels (one was a 1934 Buffalo) and all were in the 6" to 8" range. They had no doubt nickel bin tones and IDs. I only dug 4 other targets in that range. 3 were detached, deep beaver tails from ring pulls and one was a thick, nickel sized piece of can slaw. Very impressive since Deus 1 for instance would up-average US nickels from 62 to the low 90s after 3" depth. It would do the same to pull tabs/can slaw........extremely annoying considering the price and reputation of the original Deus and one reason I am very glad to have a Deus 2. Detecting targets in the copper/silver bin was super easy. I did experience a little up averaging of 6" to 8" copper pennies and clad dimes but I quickly learned what Deus 2 was telling me. Those deep high conductors in the 8 to 10 mineralization bar dirt that I was hunting in had mostly good numbers. The up-averaging happened more in the Deus 2 audio which had the correct high tones but also had some sporadic iron tones mixed in. Occasionally I would see a 00, 01 to 05 pop up along with the correct 90 to 95 depending on the target. I checked each hole that had some iron responses mixed in with high conductor responses and there were no man-made iron targets present. I managed quite a few copper Memorial pennies, one Wheat, several clad dimes and two really deep late 1960s quarters. Most of these targets were on edge or at least tilted. So, Deus 2 as opposed to Deus 1, is an outstanding modern trashy park detector for sure in even moderate to high mineralization. Very impressive. Next time I will go after some of the deeper, more iffy signals. Today this park was full or city workers who were trying to deal with all of the broken limbs and damaged trees from our weekend late May snow/wind storm. I did not want to look like I was digging too deep or for too long in one spot.