Chase Goldman

I too am interested in just what is going on with Beach mode. But if it is MF why does the XT Pro say 8 kHz? If its just Nox with only selectable single frequency, then this makes sense only if it's priced at or below Vanquish. If the Beach mode were bare bones Multi-Q (only) and the Park/Field modes only selectable single frequency, then this would be the logical replacement for the Vanquish.

I think limiting top end frequencies to 40 kHz had something to do with it. There is no other technical reason why it lacks performance there, but we know of some potential business reasons. We'll see if XP addresses it. (Though ML and Nokta appear to have no issue with a 40 khz top end). Would like to see XP responsivity like Nokta and Legend in terms of user performance feedback translating into new features, performance, and bug fixes. Interesting that Quest is putting the V80 out there with 60khz selectable single frequency and advertising 80 kHz top end in Simultaneous Hyper Q. Maybe that will put a bee in someone's bonnet. The Holy Grail of the singular "does it all best" vlf detector may turn out to be unobtainium but for business and not necessarily technical reasons. I'll shut up now.

Congrats. Got one too but only plan on using it at the beach or in mild dirt because of the hot ground feedback on the larger coil. I'm generally just using the 9" coil in the super hot stuff.

Agree. But just want to point out that the question Steve was answering was not whether Deus 2 was a good nugget detector (it's definitely not the best choice - no one can argue that) but was making a general statement as to the degree to which it's gold sensitivity lags other SMF detectors. This was in response to Simon pondering whether D2's "decreased sensitivity" explains its ability to better "penetrate" mineralized ground than Manticore. While Steve's "hair's breadth" comment taken literally may be understating how much D2 lags Nox and Legend in terms of gold sensitivity (both in Goldfield and Mono), if I look at your data (reposted below) as plotted by one of the other forum members, from a big picture perspective, the intent of Steve's original comment (and the actual point) still rings true. Namely: No one detector does it all and we are debating relative shades of gray. In other words, by zeroing in on specific performance attributes and repeating them, people come up with generalized perceptions like Deus 2's "decreased sensitivity" or Manticore not performing in hot dirt when it's really as Steve says, "a matter of degree" and, if I might add, of small degrees in the grand scheme of things. Specifically, yes D2 lags Nox and, on some of the targets, Legend but is basically in the same league from a mid-conductor sensitvity standpoint, especially with the higher mass targets. So the magnitude of the reduced gold sensitivity is not likely a contributing factor to D2 performance in hot dirt because it's of a relatively small magnitude vs. the other detectors. Also, as stated by others, your small gold sensitivity testing did not cover other small mid conductors like brass and lead, so there may be certain mid-conductive target/D2 SMF mode combinations that result in an optimal phase shift (resonance) that manifests in data showing generally increased sensitivity vs. the other detectors on targets like brass or lead while gold sensitivity lags in Gold Field. I know you were not explicitly saying that it lacked overall mid-conductive sensitivity, but somehow it started being perceived or stated that way based on some of the comments I have seen posted, like Simon's. So, my takeaways: 1) No arguments from me that D2 lags in small gold sensitivity vs. Nox and to a certain degree, Legend (i.e., "hair's breadth" taken literally is a likely understatement of the lag) but I think the data shows D2 is in the same league, if you step back and take broad view. 2) There is no evidence D2's "reduced small gold sensitivity" has anything to do with how it performs in hot dirt hood or bad though it was an interesting thought. 3) Drawing a conclusion that D2 generally lacks sensitivity to mid-conductors could be a false extrapolation of limited data in one SMF mode and one element type. 4) Steve Herschbach's Maxim that I think was contained in the now deleted post (could be wrong, he has stated elsewhere) still rings true. All of these SMF detectors (Nox, D2, Legend, M-core) have individual strengths and weaknesses vs. each of the others. No one of these detectors does it all, nor does any one stand head and shoulders above the rest. Anyway, the original topic was D2 vs. Manticore on detecting relics in hot dirt. Dan showed us that some specific adjustments need to be made to M-core to make these targets stand out better vs. the default settings. D2 worked better "out of the box" but it was unclear if one coud be considered better than the other at the end of the day. Or what generally drives D2 performance in hot soil (which can best be described as a mixed bag, but isn't a bad choice if you don't have a PI). Which kind of backs up Steve's Maxim. Steve - If I am unfairly putting words in your mouth, let me know... Jeff's Gold Nugget Detector Test Data Plotted:

They are adjustable in all the modes on mine. As Dig said, you may not have been in M on those modes when you accessed the settings submenus.

Hey all, thanks all for the info on how non-ferrous targets behave in hot dirt. But the point I was trying to make was that on Dan's Manticore the target hadn't completely "turned" to ferrous yet, it was still flashing a non-ferrous TID so I was focused on how the ferrous limits settings needed to be adjusted to prevent masking of targets that are still able to generate a non-ferrous ID (but off center), while still providing some anti-falsing ability and was also thinking out loud as to whether ML could use mineralization levels to bias the ferrous ID component of the signal to give more "headroom" by biasing non-ferrous towards the centerline. Of course, ferrous would get biased as well so maybe a zero sum game, but whatever, it's a thought. As Steve said, the Deus 2 appears to ID non-ferrous at deeper depths in hot soil than the Nox but I have also encountered hot soil areas where the Nox and Legend can ID bullets deeper than Deus 2, so its really a mixed bag, but the D2 appears to me to have the upper hand under most hot dirt situations. I have exploited the capability but I am also spending a lot of hours with it in all types of conditions so I better understand its subtle audio cues. The Tarsacci does the best for a non-PI in terms of differentiating ferrous vs. non-ferrous at depth in hot dirt but it is relatively difficult for me to set up to best optimize this capability and has other drawbacks that make it less versatile when you are in areas where soil mineralization is not the overriding factor in target recovery success. I've detected Culpeper (actually more accurately the Brandy Station area) about as long as Andy (abenson) and perhaps Dan and it is like the iron man triathlon of relic detecting. Lots of relics were left in the ground because of the long-term winter encampments of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of troops who were doing nothing but trying to stave off cold, boredom, and illness for several months at a time while living in makeshift huts. The trash and inadvertently lost items of daily camp life are on every farm in that area and included firing ranges for target practice. This was in addition to the numerous battle engagements in the area, including the Battle of Brandy Station - the largest cavalry engagement of the Civil War and countless other small skirmishes. The Confederate and Union Armies actually camped near one another during the winters and units were spread out across the countryside, often encountering each other when foraging for food and timber. The problem is that the easy "VLF" pickings are mostly long gone because of the numerous individual and group hunts that have occurred over the past several years. Sometimes, an inaccessible field suddenly becomes accessible (and cleared of crop) and buttons and minie balls are vacuumed up by the detectorists. But you really are going after deep targets with a PI if you want to be successful. I demonstrated super hot conditions where you can detect a minie ball lying on the surface of the ground, but simply stepping on it with your boot to "bury" it, renders it invisible to your detector - not even an iron grunt. Yeah, its that bad. I started out there with an ATX and Deus. Did not find much with either first time out. Brandy Rock Farm was the site of my second or third DIV. Brandy Rock is now closed off to further relic detecting as the landowner has leased his land to the Historic Preservation Trust. This enables to farmer to still utilize his land for agriculture but the Trust does not permit detecting or artifact recovery without their authorization Anyway, at BR, I was able to recover a number of bullets in some "hot" areas with my Deus 1 simply due to the vast number of targets (mostly Minie balls) in the ground, several were brought close to the surface where I could detect them with my Deus. The ATX was just a beast. It worked but also "worked over" my shoulder. I used a tactic similar to Andy's to snag some relics in the back fields of Brandy Rock where there was a lot of old iron and other more recent steel junk (fabric staples used around saplings in a tree farm area). The PI machines either just blanked out (if they were using the GPX ferrous blanking filter) or the users were frustrated by digging staple after staple. It is in these conditions where you might get lucky using a vlf amongst the junk to capture a shallower relic that was passed over by the PI folks. I used a similar tactic at another Brandy Station farm by using my Deus 2 under roadside power lines where there were also hundreds of discarded aluminum cans and can-slaw > two factors that discouraged PI users from being effective or even trying. I dug a lot of cans but was rewarded with a Breast Plate and New York Regimental coat button that were hiding in that trash. So there are opportunities to be successful without a PI in hot dirt if you look for the right opportunities and conditions. It's not easy, takes perseverance, but the payoff can be great.

Of course which one is better is determined by ones needs: My take is that XTerra Pro and Vanquish are missing features that would benefit the other. I know I'm considered a detector snob, or whatever, but I consider the omissions as flaws, despite the great features both detectors bring to the table. And, yes, I know that when you add these features, you start moving the detectors to the Equinox low end, which obviates ML's intended hook and upsell strategy. But to me the omitted features just seem like random omissions, at least in the case of Vanquish and ground balance, that are almost essential features, done just to justify lower price points. But even without Multi-IQ, the Xterra appears to be the most well rounded value of the two and if I was given the choice to use either detector, it would probably be Xterra as it has most of the features of my preferred detector (Deus) before the Nox came along. Re: Vanquish. Besides the dated Ace-like control box styling that even Garrett abandoned for the Ace series when they released the Apex (love the overall look/feel of that detector BTW), the Vanquish was a great value detector with a great coil selection that was missing two and half key features. It used a fixed default ground balance reference that happened to be different depending the mode selected. Also, if you were in an EMI heavy environment, there was no provision to go to single frequency > even just one "middle of the road" selection like 10 or 15 khz would suffice and the ability to do a ground grab. Especially with the Multi-IQ DNA, ground grab should have been a no-brainer feature. Also, with no memory slots available, it would be great if the Vanquish would simply hold settings in non-volatile memory on power off (this is the "1/2" missing feature). To make Vanquish work in "all metal" in even mildly mineralized ground, required a custom discrimination pattern to knock out ground noise signals at -7 through -9 on each mode and that pattern disappeared on power off. Aggravating. Re: XTerra Pro - Looks like a great selectable-frequency detector and hopefully you CAN ground balance it, unlike the Vanquish. But the omission of at least one rudimentary SMF mode makes it great detector if it was priced just somewhere between the Nokta Simplex and Vanquish price points. If they somehow allowed the Vanquish coils to be used with the XTerra Pro, that would be a bonus. Because of this, if I need SMF/Multi-IQ (a lot of wet salt beach detecting) and was forced to go only with ML, I would probably just skip Vanquish and go with the Nox 700. Otherwise, if I didn't need SMF, it appears that XTerra would make a versatile selectable single frequency detector that might outgun the Deus 1 if the price is set at a realistic level. If I was allowed to choose any brand, Nokta Legend appears to be the best value around and combines the best of both these detectors at about the same price point. So to answer Steve's thead title question: Do we need another single frequency detector? I would say the answer is, not really. FWIW

Can someone point me to the wired metal detector that does not require batteries. I would like 3, please. I’ve thought of using ChatGPT and have posed a couple basic metal detecting questions. What’s interesting is that you can pose the same question multiple times and you will get a slightly differently worded answer each time.

Yes. It's all a matter of whether someone sees the opportunity and makes the investment to capture those who are not enamored of the baggage that comes along with wireless while still reaping a profit. Yes, D2 has great performance and XP is in the best position to emulate that with a wired platform. Not sure they have the motivation to try. It's been hard enough to get them to field a 10x5 coil for the D2. They would have to invest in the redesign, but it would not be a technical hurdle, just brute force engineering to repackage the platform. So it might be someone else. But who and when? That is not readily obvious to me. Maybe the post-Manticore machine will be a combination of the CTX, Manticore, and D2. As a "Stranger Things" fan they should call it the "Demogorgon"

You’re right, Chuck. You just have to “lower” the upper ferrous limits around the TIDs of interest (i.e., where the bullets show up and/or buttons, and/or nickels etc.). That is the bandaid or permanent fix if ML can’t figure out how to make deeper pure non-ferrous targets show up on the centerline in hot dirt.

Hasn’t Minelab already exploited that opportunity with Manticore? Equivalent performance on the beach and in water without all the pesky wireless downside. Too late XP, you blew it.

Thanks. Interesting. Shows that soil mineralization can potentially push pure non-ferrous at depth into the ferrous limit regions (depending on the profile) such that ferrous limits will potentially mask keepers. This can also potentially happen with the Nox and too much iron bias. So with the M-core it is probably best to go with minimal ferrous limits in hot ground. Perhaps ML can further tweak their Multi-IQ+ signal processing algorithms further to keep pure non-ferrous at depth as close to the centerline as possible in hot dirt. Kind of an anti-mineralization-bias applied to the target signal to remove/reduce the ferrous component of targets so they fall as close to the centerline as possible. This might result in more falsing ferrous but at least you won’t be filtering out keepers.

Dan - did you see my question whether the Minies were showing up OFF/above the 2D centerline such that they were being masked by the ferrous limits? Was that the case?

Great perspective, finds, and pics. Thanks for sharing.

It's kind of like Festivus for metal detectors. It's time for the "airing of grievances".

No, old school Duracell, man.

Frankly, the yard where we pulled those coins WAS mostly machine gun iron, with nails in most of the non-ferrous target plugs. There's more there, no doubt, masked to even the Deus. So it's going to be tough sledding.

No checklists, I just make sure I have backup options if I forgot to do something the night before.

In my perfect world that Apex would also have a PI/VLF selector switch for Culpeper.

4 if you have the XP pinpointer, and 5 if you have a second coil and the provided charger cables only have 3 heads! We're creeping there across the board with wireless audio, though. On my GPX I have to charge the GPX battery, the Z-Lynk wireless transmitter I plug into the GPX and the Z-Lynk MS3 headphones. Thank God the wireless Carrot takes a 9 volt. If you have a built-in transmitter, like on the Nox, then two dissimilar devices that have to be charged if you are using the wireless headset. Back in the day, the Deus three-headed charge monster was daunting and somewhat unique. Yes, a pain in the ass. Today, with wireless audio and utilizing diffrent detectors with rechargeable cells charging multiple devices before a detecting outing is now just a fact of life for me.

That's what I do. I love them all for different reasons. Some even have wires.

No it's not the Cult of Wireless. Some of my best friends are wired. It's whether wireless and wired coils can co-exist without a net decrement to the wireless platform benefits. The question should definitely be asked. It's not like we don't constantly feed back to XP that we need a small elliptical coil, and if wireless is preventing that from happening, well that's not a good thing. I'm just saying is it's a little more complicated than just adding connectors to existing D2 hardware. Though it's unlikely to be considered, based on XP's track record and the investment required, people should lobby XP for an exclusive wired-coil D3 variant because the technical compromises required to accommodate wireless and wired coils (connectors on the remote and WS6) with the existing D2 peripheral hardware would likely detract from some of the D2's best attributes, primarily weight and modularity. For example, I see that to make this workable without compromising the existing design, a minimum of two different remote variants would have to be provided to accommodate the real-estate for a wired coil cable connector and associated larger battery in the remote for power to the dumb coil to avoid increasing the wireless variant form factor and weight. Interesting thought question: It's been over 12 years since Deus 1, why has no one else even come close to equaling the Deus weight class AND performance in a wired design? Is that attributable to the wireless platform? 🤔 Anyway, it's not up to me or you to accept this. It's up to XP. As long as the positive attributes of the existing D2 wireless platform are not compromised and that continued innovation of that platform is not stunted by intoducing wired coil variants, I'm all in. Especially if it results in more accessory coil varieties. It would be great if Gary Black weighed in with his perspective. I think we should all take a hike, quite frankly...to our nearest favorite, unfrozen detecting spot.

Well if I thought the case for wireless was airtight then I wouldn't own any wired detectors and we know that isn't true so maybe we don't want to be throwing the term ludicrous around and putting words in my mouth. I am not here saying Minelab is jacked up for going wireless. So why the burr in your saddle on this one? Live and let live and I'm just expressing my opinion because Simon asked the question.

Because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Also, that's why God created options like...the Manticore. I understand where you are coming from on this, believe me. But just as you wireless coil haters keep telling us D2 people to not try to convince you that wireless is better, you need to flip that sentiment around, and think about it from the rabid D2 user's perspective. You are going to get pushback from me on making the case for wired on D2 because it is, in fact, a technical regression for the Deus platform in terms of the added weight and complexity that is needed to accommodate what appears on the surface to be technically simple but in reality is anything but that - primarily because of the design decisions that have already been made by XP and are now water under the bridge. For one thing, the antenna if installed and secured properly, works exactly as if the coil were hard wired and can be permanently left in place if desired or removed when not needed. So why does it need to be screwed on (including requiring an additional connectors to accommodate it more parts more weight and more potential failure points)? Once you've got the antenna sorted, it works quite well. No connectors to break, requiring wholesale repair or replacement. The antenna is cheap and easily replaceable if it does eventually fail (never heard of one actually failing btw). If you are talking about a traditional coil cable, then things get more complicated. The wireless architecture is fixed in the sense that active electronics exist in the coil because there is target signal preprocessing going on in addition to the wireless radio electronics. That is not going away with wired coils because that would require a platform-wide architectural change to both the coil and the remote peripherals to accommodate the wires and additional external processing for a "dumb" coil and since real power and signal is now flowing through them, more complex (i.e., heavier, thicker) cables and connectors - further growing the size of the peripherals. Believe me. Deus fans embrace the modularity and light weight of the platform and live with the quirks/shortcomings that come with total wireless and would not appreciate this "upgrade" as the downsides/compromises necessary literally outweigh the upside for those of us who've successfully used the Deus/Deus 2 for a number of years. But if you really want to know why XP is not going there, it is because the Deus is XP CEO/CTO Alain Loubet's baby and no one is going to convince Alain that Deus needs to go wired. Just believe me on this one. And from the looks of the popularity of D2 in Europe and the US, there is no compelling reason for XP to do so from a business perspective. When it comes to design decisions wrt wireless coils you literally hit a fork in the road, either you are all in on wireless or not. If you try to accommodate both then you are just making design compromises that emphasize primarily the worst vice the best of both worlds. XP made their decision to march to a different design drummer and I don't think they are inclined to look over their shoulder and re-think that decision. From a business perspective, it makes sense to differentiate yourself from the competition rather than emulate or copy them if you've got a successful approach to skinning the cat a different way. And for now, they have the totally wireless, ultralight detector market pretty much to themselves, especially after the Air Metal Detector effort failed to deliver. So if you want wired, go with Nokta, Minelab, Quest. Garrett. I hear they all make pretty decent wired detectors. Live and let live in this case.

Yeah. Big problem here in the States. People are robbing mailmen just to steal their post box keys so they can help themselves to credit cards and gift cards sent through the mail and cash in until the cards are cancelled.