☠ Cipher

I was interested in this coil for a while as well, but if it’s anything like the 11”x13” for Deus 1 we can expect it to make the machine nose heavy, perhaps even a little sloppy when extended, and very little if any depth advantage. I notice that it’s an often resold item with exactly those complaints. It seems to offer more in the way of coverage than anything. Might be nice for the beach provided you replace the lower stem with something less pliable. 

I just received mine today. I like that you don’t have to disassemble the Deus to fit. Just pack and go. It does seem well constructed and very well done aesthetically too. I feel like $60 was a deal on this, and something every XP user should have. If I didn’t already have such a nice pouch I’d have bought that too. Very happy with the 240 though. 

CB stands for Composite Board. It’s indicated inside the battery door. There were apparently circuitry improvements in the CB version. Monte could tell us more about it, being a sort of historian for these machines. I remember reading his extensive posts on this detector when I had one. 

15 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

This responsiveness by NM to add features so readily on a very value competitive platform in nearly the same performance league as Equinox and Deus 2, really makes the silence from Minelab seem like ML is asleep at the wheel.  We all know that likely isn't the case, but it would kind of make sense for ML to throw a feature-based SW upgrade out there to Equinox about now to sort of dampen the excitement and buzz especially since it has been nearly 2 years Nox Update 3.0.  If ML doesn't respond, looks like NM and XP have collectively stolen the new detector thunder buzz from ML and everyone else for 2022.

 

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I find myself almost frustrated by the lack of response from ML. I do wonder what their engineers and personnel think of how far the competition has come in so short a time span. I had no plans to buy the Legend, but I’m more tempted now than ever. 

A third frequency option, sounds intriguing. I wonder how it would be weighted, and if it will be implemented in each mode or just selected modes. I haven’t taken the plunge into Legend yet, already having the equinox and Deus 2, but I’m getting more and more tempted as time goes on and getting a picture of what the final product will be. 

Here’s a few more notable finds from the same lot. 

1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

Fantastic find!   The condition is museum quality.  I doubt there are many of those still in existence.  Well presented next to the Merc; appears to be silver alloy, sterling?  (I'm not familiar with the Simplex dTID scale.  Is 57 out of a max 60?)  What does the backside look like?

I wish I had a yard like yours.  Mine's so new it only produces Stinkin' Zincolns.

It does seem rare and fairly valuable. It’s occasional finds like this that make it all worth it. It’s odd to find so many military relics from so many different periods on the same lot, but this is the most exciting yet. The Simplex TID goes to 99. I’m not sure yet what the alloy is. The back is missing it’s pin, which sucks, but I marked the spot I pulled it from so I can go back over it. It would be nice to find that too. 

On 4/8/2022 at 6:42 AM, Chase Goldman said:

PS. The 240 also appears to be unobtainium, at least in the US.

They are back in stock at Big Boys Hobbies as of this morning if you’re looking for one. I just ordered mine. 

I have a pretty sizable lawn to detect on, on slow days. It sits right on top of what was the Upper Fort during the revolutionary war.  I’ve pretty much cherry picked all the high tones out of this lawn, so I’m now at mid tones. I got one today at a TID of 57, and singing. At 8” I found this little badge with my Simplex 

Im not entirely sure what it is, but this lawn is good for producing military relics, like a WW1 military dog tag, WW2 Airmen visor pin and numerous musket balls. 

All Deus 2 compatible accessories are selling like hot cakes, going out of stock everywhere, and the Mi-6 is no different. It is either sold out at major dealers like KellyCo, Serious Detecting, and Big Boys Hobbies or seeing a price increase from where it has retailed at $159.95 to as high as $199.95 on eBay and Amazon. 

This has me dubious about the Deus 11”x13” coil as well. It is not uncommon to see an awful lot of these for sale and complaints that they gained no depth over the 11” round, only coverage, which made the unit nose heavy. The Deus II is one unit I would love to see an actual 13” round coil for, but I’m guessing we will never see it. It looks like all they have in store for us is another 11”x13”

I tried VirtualBox and Windows 10. Got no recognition of the remote at all, any which way 

On 1/26/2015 at 11:36 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

Finally, depth is more related to coil width than coil length. Think of a 5" x 10" coil as a stretched out 5" coil, not as a skinny 10" coil. That is why when listing elliptical coil sizes you will often see me putting the small number first. Marketers do it the other way around so you tend to think you are getting more than you are. A truer picture can be had by comparing the total area of a coil, one to the other, but for quick and dirty comparisons, comparing by width will give you a more conservative idea of comparative coil performance, than comparing by length.

This explains why we see so little depth gain with coils like 13”x17” and 12”x15” over their 11” round counterparts. The dimension that matters to depth rather than coverage is only 1”-2” larger than stock. So when someone asks on the equinox for example, which is deeper, the 12”x15” Minelab or the 15” round Coiltek, it should be the 15” round depending on the target as well of course 

23 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

A White tab is a USB 1 port (cannot be used to update the D2), a Black tab is a USB 2 port, and a Blue tab is a USB 3 port.

Good information, thank you! I’m having trouble and this might just be why. 

On 4/16/2022 at 12:52 PM, Commonwealthdetector said:

Thanks paystreak legend freak I need counseling now,1 darn day my D2 confidence went from moon to hell! Smdh for real

I wouldn’t base my Deus II confidence on Paystreak. His dig it all methodology is better suited to First Texas single frequency or any old beep and dig units. He doesn’t like SMF, and runs all the latest and greatest SMF machines in single frequency mode digging any two way signal he can find. He believes SMF creates more problems than it solves. He also doesn’t like the complexity that would allow you to learn to cherry pick. He’s an entertaining watch at times though. Particularly his commentary on his “struggling” with the Deus II, yet “smashing it out of the park” and “spanking coins out of the ground” with the Legend, both in single frequency beep and dig setups. I can’t relate to “struggling” with the Deus II so far in such a configuration. 

Sure it’s nice if all can run in the same or similar settings, but in a test like this we aren’t trying to make them similar. We are trying to highlight their advantages in a particular environment, i.e. what is the deepest setup in THIS environment. For his soil, doing a depth test, he used the deepest settings. In other tests gold mode was unusable in that environment. There will always be those to who the information gleaned will not apply and other settings would be advisable. But if I want to know which machine is deepest in a very low mineralized environment this might just be helpful, particularly where one was running handicapped and at the very least keeping up, or at best if you accept these were the best settings for THIS environment, leading. 

I’m going to be doing this on VirtualBox Windows ISO for Mac when I do it. We’ll see how that works out. I’ve never updated an XP product period so this should be interesting. Hope it all goes smoothly as it has for other tech products. 

If you decide to be a guinea pig on this one, let us know how it’s working for you. I’m still on the original 0.6, but pretty tempted to pull the trigger on this one. 

36 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Maybe it's ground (mineralization) dependent.  I've seen a significant difference (and I reported that here a year or so ago).  My soil is moderate (2-3 bars on the Fishers).  Jeff has access to varying mineralized ground and some of his is quite high in Fe3O4.

Someone who understands the Equinox enough to go public (worldwide) ought to know this, IMO.  Maybe his soil is such that Gold mode doesn't do better, but then he should demonstrate that.  But he's not alone with his shortcomings as far as comparison videos go.

In thinking a little deeper about it, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that gold and relic modes would be deeper at times. It’s about as close to all metal as you’re going to get, or am I wrong on that? But I think the object was to get some sort of an ID on the object, and not just a hit. To me it was just surprising that a mode, Deep HC wasn’t deepest on deep HC. The surprise for me is because of the frequency weighting differences in those modes. 

2 hours ago, phrunt said:

I liked the test, it was good as it did give information, but I'd prefer a real overall depth test, showing which detector is actually deepest.  If a video of the Deus 2 pops up with it's biggest coil of 11' showing it beat the CTX with 17x13" coil in this same sort of mild soils on a half penny like this video I'll buy one the minute I've watched the video as that's what I want and need, the Deus 2 would have to be in a usable configuration of course, not reacting to the ground all over the place even though it's mild ground just to register a hit on the target.

I might be able to conduct this for you to some extent. I have the Deus 2 with 9” coil, and I have the CTX with 11” round and 13”x17”. I just have to get over that hump of getting out there with a GoPro. It has to be done sooner or later because I would like to have a channel for many purposes. 

2 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

I consider Jeff's "apples vs. oranges" a valid complaint

I understand the complaint, but there’s apples to oranges here in other respects in that the Deus 2 is running a 9” coil vs others with 11” coils. I don’t have a legend, but I do have an equinox, and I just haven’t found gold mode deeper here on high conductive signals no matter how it’s set up. It was surprising to find the Deus 2 was deeper in Gold and Relic. I know Sid did not run the others in Gold for the same reason because I’ve seen him post on it. He’s not found any mode on the Nox deeper than Field in his soil. I don’t know if he’s tested the Legend, and who knows it could surprise us as well. 

There will always be people who will and won’t like a given test for their own reasons. Same in every forum https://www.dankowskidetectors.com/discussions/read.php?2,184304

15 hours ago, mh9162013 said:

I've had similar thoughts.

For example why can't the metal detector be programmed for the user to tell the machine what was found? After the user does this enough, the detector will have "learned" how to identfy targets in the ground based on what it was detecting and what was ultimately dug up.

It can be limited to just American coins, for instance. Let's say a user (I'm gonna used Minelab's MIQ scale here) finds a target that rings up as a 25 and is 4 inches down. The user thinks it might be a copper penny. The user carefully digs it and notes how deep it was, its orientation in the soil (if that's possible to discern...it sometimes is when the coin is neatly stuck to the side or bottom of the plug) and what the object actually was.

So in my hypothetical, it turns out to be a 2004 Zincoln, not a copper penny. The detector will make a "mental note" of the find and several variables that corresponded with it (including the GPS coords of the find). If a user is willing to take the time to teach its detector to do this, the machine would be pretty darn good after just a dozen or so digs in the same general location.

The problem I see with this approach is threefold. First, it requires a lot of time and patience. Second, there's the problem of "garbage in, garbage out." If the user is wrong in the data it gives the machine (gives the wrong depth of the coin, for instance, when the user swings the coil higher off the ground than is recommended), then the detector can't properly learn. Third, you're basically teaching a machine to do what a neurotypical human being who's really into metal detecting is doing anyways. Basically, this hypothetical machine isn't just a metal detector, but a notetaker and pattern finder. But humans are already pretty good at seeing patterns. They're just lousy with memory and tend to be lazy in their habits. So it's too easy for them to incorrectly remember: the find, the settings used and the ground conditions at that time.

A simpler process would just be to use the machine, tell the machine to note a given signal, then after digging it up, simply telling the machine if it was a "good" or "bad" target. This boolean "process" could also teach the detector about what's a potential good find or not. For coin shooters (gven how standardized the desired targets tend to be), this could be pretty effective. I think in its ideal form, it would still give a tone and VDI like any other detector, but it would have a "confidence bar" to go along with it. It's this confidence bar that would be constantly altered as the machine learns from the user.

It is fun to wonder what would happen if you could incorporate artificial intelligence machine learning into these devices. I would imagine such things aren’t the strong suit of metal detector engineers/programmers and they might have to utilize outside consultation, but some level of this could certainly be done, and enabled to be switched on or off. 

2 hours ago, palzynski said:

Happy to see that Sid's video confirms my results : RELIC/GOLD are by far the deepest D2 modes.  

However from what I have seen , Sid has just tested the Legend and Equinox Park/Field modes and NOT their gold modes ... Then it looks lke this comparison is not so fair ... Or did I miss something ?

 

You’re correct, he didn’t test each in gold mode, just what he considers each machines deepest settings. I don’t know about the Legend, but I found Field mode the deepest on Equinox. 

14 hours ago, phrunt said:

I think that video was a good one, showing no bias towards any detector and it was a fair test. 

I like Sid’s videos. He’s usually right on top of all the latest gear, and very fair, so I keep up with his channel. I too would like to see the CTX in the mix of some of these tests. I plan to start shooting some videos at some point. I don’t yet have a legend as I don’t see where I’d be gaining anything much different than I have in the Nox. Nox has never given me a bit of trouble. But I do have a Deus 2 and CTX to compare and contrast. Eventually used legends will come up at prices that are too good to refuse. So far in my soil the Deus 2 w/ 9” coil seems to have a slight depth advantage over the others with 11” coils. It is too early and too wet to tell though so far. Deus 2 will offer up to a 11”x13” coil, but many people say it offered very little, if any depth advantage over the 11” round on Deus 1 and made it awful nose heavy.