NCtoad

On 1/23/2023 at 11:50 AM, Carolina said:

The upper shaft is metal therefore it prevents the signal unless you run it all the way into the plastic retainer that the RC snaps onto. I coiled my cable like the CTX and ran it all the way up to the retainer and held it in place with a plastic tie wrap so it works with my WS6 module. 

What you posted above is what is confusing me about the remote losing it’s signal.  In that post Parkgt said that he tried running the co-ax cable all the way up the upper shaft but the signal wasn’t good.  What I’m not understanding is that if you run the co-ax cable just long enough so that it hangs out of the top of the lower shaft, some of that cable is still inside of the upper metal shaft.  If the metal shaft is causing interference, why doesn’t it cause interference when the co-ax end is is at the bottom half of the upper shaft?   In other words, if I run the co-ax so it just hangs out of the top of the lower shaft like Parkgt shows in his pic in the original post, the top of that cable will still be inside of the upper metal shaft.  If I made that cable longer so the end is near the top of the upper shaft, why would that make the signal worse?   Maybe I’m misunderstanding something.  Sorry if I am. 

Ok now I’m confused.  Some are saying if you extend the antenna higher up (closer to the remote) in the stock metal upper shaft it won’t work as well.  But leaving the end extended just past the end of the lower (I’m using the cf nokta lower shaft) it works fine.  How can that be because the upper end of the lower shaft is still inside of the metal upper especially in my case where I don’t extend it very far?   

On 1/21/2023 at 10:04 PM, Jed in NC said:

Going to give parkgt's idea a shot on my new 11" x 13" coil. I bought some RG179 removed the shield and double covered with marine heat shrink. Attached to the coil with velcro wire ties so I can easily remove the coil cover. Can still attach the charging clip without removing the antenna. Ran up the outside of a Nokta Legend carbon fiber shaft and hold the cable in place with a section of nylon split braided sleeving that I had left over from an audio job. Thanks again to parkgt for this great idea! Have not tested it yet, but hope to in the next few days.

 

Where did you get the cover to go over you nokta lower shaft?  

Wow!   Those are great finds.  For me, even though I live in North Carolina, I live in an area that had little or no civil war activity.  I’d love to find some civil war relics like that.  
 

As far as disc vs. notch, my take is this, (and please correct me if I’m wrong):

Disc is basically a tone break so setting disc at 40 everything 40 and below will give a low tone just like iron.   
 

Notch is different in that if your disc is set at, say, 7 and you notch from 7-40,  anything below 7 will come in with a low tone and anything from 7-40 will be silent.  

Whether one way or the other unmasks better in iron is, I think, still up for debate.  I know some have posted that notching unmasks better, but I don’t think anyone’s got any actual proof of that.  However since everything 7-40 is silent using notch, you may hear a high blip easier than if you just had your disc set at 40.  

Excellent!   This setup is perfect for me as I rarely water hunt but would like to submerge the coil at the edge of streams or in springs, etc.  Thanks for sharing!

57 minutes ago, strick said:

Ground Balance: It just seems to take forever to do  manual ground balance and then I give up and stop...not going to sit there forever pumping the coil....people watching may think I have some serious issues.  Whats up with that? MInelab seems to have it down to a science takes a few seconds and done with it. How can you trust a machine if you are unsure if it's ground balanced correctly? 

strick

This right here!  It takes at least 12 pumps to get a stable ground balance number.  Too much in my opinion.  Nox takes about half that many pumps to ground balance.  

Wow!   That’s a great hunt!  Two Indian head pennies, a nice sized silver coin, a large cent and some nice relics!  Nice goin’!

Hell yeah!

I tried it out after work last night in my test garden.  My test garden consists of one silver dime buried at 8” in mild soil. Lol  The musketeer hit it but barely.  Definitely enough of a signal to dig though.  I thought that was pretty good for a 7 3/8” coil.  As a side note, my Tesoro mojave with its 7” coil will not hit this dime.  I also tried my nox with the 6” coil and it hit it hard!   

Doesn’t XP say in the manual that most detectors with a ground stability setting won’t even let you adjust the ground stability to the equivalent of setting 1 on the d2?   Something like, that setting is for very experienced users?  I’m going from memory here so please excuse me if I have this totally wrong.  

13 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Spent the day at the farm where I found the Scottish sixpence today, big farm with small hotspots. One of the most unusual things about this place is that despite finding a lot of really old relics in two places, not a single button has been found. This probably means it was detected by others. But, they did leave some interesting stuff behind!

Got there early, it was about 30 degrees and there was a frost, but it was easy to dig, and by the end of the day it got up to around 50. I invited Chase down to see the place and give him a shot at what could be there, I only scouted it so it wasn't hammered by me. I did find some great stuff before but there was more.

Used the RC and 13" for a while waiting for Chase, when he arrived I switched to the WS6 Master with the 9". What a difference. 😀 Just swinging the 13" for 2-1/2 hours got kinda tiring today, and I didn't find anything at all but buck balls. I also tested ground stabilizer a bit but quickly changed back to my original settings. Not here!

We walked toward the hilltop where I found the sixpence and found some stuff on the side of the hill, here's my haul for the day:

2 spectacle halves that don't seem to fit together, a single buckle identical to my first find in this field. A pewter spoon handle end, some more buckle bits and a bag seal of some sort.

The most interesting thing I dug today (not that 1600s buckles are uninteresting 😀) was the knob on the left, it's knurled and has a pin on the back. Exactly half the alphabet on the front from n-z. 🤔 I wonder what it was used for?

Hope on a return visit I find the other one 🤣 probably won't.

Gotta say it was a pretty trashy day too, buck balls and bullets mostly. A couple of square nails got me too.

It was fun hunting with Chase, and he did pretty well. There really isn't much in these 100 acres.

Those are some great finds!   I’d love to find stuff that old around here.  That round knob reminds me of a knob from safe.  

A minelab musketeer advantage, that is.   It’s in nearly new condition and I can’t wait to try it out.  I need to buy some batteries though.  From what I’ve learned from internet searches is that these musketeers were analog machines and very deep even with the small ts800 coil, which is what mine came with.  Anyone else ever use one of these?

1 hour ago, Dcraun said:

By chance do you remember what your silencer was set to? I had mine on 2 but I believe zero will be more productive I will try it this weekend and let you know

It was on 2.  

8 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

There's very little written about the ground stability setting because it shouldn't make a big difference on target acquisition except in mineralized soils that have variable ground conductivity.

Ground stability settings are not available in the beach/dive/relic/gold field modes.

Ground stability settings need to be set individually for each mode that has the setting available.

Ground stability can be set to 1, 2, or 3.  The default is "2" for all modes except Park where it is "3".

Basically, its a ground feedback filter:

1 - This removes all ground feedback filtering other than rejecting the ground signal based on the ground grab or manual ground balance setting.  This setting allows you to hear it all and might improve your ability to hear faint signals, especially in mineralized ground that raises the balance point above your established ground balance setting.  However, you will be bombarded by ground feedback "micro" changes in ground conductivity due to pockets of mineralization, bricks, ceramics etc. especially if running with little discrimination.  I believe it also increases coil bump sensitivity.  

2 - Mostly rejects ground variations above the ground grab setting but there is some signal processing secret sauce that still enables the machine to still detect targets in high mineralization conditions (conditions that locally raise the ground conductivity above the balance point).

3- Maximum filtering applied to quiet ground feedback due to ground conductivity variations and also minimizes coil bump sensitivity.  It is the "quietest" ride, but you might miss some faint targets as a result depending on ground conditions.

As with all of these things, YMMV and experimentation to see what works best for your local conditions is the best course.  I don't think you can really handicap depth or faint target sensitivity significantly unless you go to "3", and then only for certain soil conditions and targets.

HTH

Once again Chase, a very concise and easy to understand post on the ground stability feature!   

2 hours ago, Digalicious said:

If the D2 is ID'ing coins in trash better than certain detectors, then does it have to do with the following, and would you be able to do the same with other detectors?

1) Using a low iron bias.

2) Using a fast recovery speed.

3) Using a SMF mode that is heavily weighted toward low frequencies such as 3 khz to 5 khz, which often provides much better ID's on coins when masked by nonferrous trash. It seems as though when going above around 7-10 khz, nonferrous masked coins will ID lower than nickel and could have very well been missed with other detectors. For example, to the best of my knowledge, the Nox's Park1 goes above 10 khz.

I don’t know what voodoo hoodoo stuff xp has going on with the d2.  I had silencer at 2, bottlecaps at 0 and reactivity at 3.  

9 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

Nice run NC! 👍

Cool that you said "and now for something completely different", and it came up strong. 🏆 Seems to me the D2 is full of surprises. 🤔

Might give that a shot myself. Saw another post with similar settings that had a good return. 🙂

Did you get a lot of trash?

I think I dug two holes that were nails. You have to remember though how many times I’ve hit this area. Thus I’m digging signals I probably wouldn’t if it were a newer site.  The more times I go over a site the iffier the signals I will dig praying that it might be silver!

I have to give you a “hell yeah” just for the effort!🤗

Wow, I just posted about finding more coins in my pounded site using the Fast program with disc at 40!   Your finds are much, much nicer than what I got, but still a testament to the D2 fast program.  Congrats!

6 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

Absolutely, XP did botch one of the earlier updates with a loss of SW configuration/version control.  Lives were not on the line like with safety critcal sofware (think Boeing 737 Max), but that is still a big no no.  They had about 3 different versions of 0.6 in the wild with different features and bugs, were not updating the minor ver # on each release (i.e., 0.6 > 0.61 > 0.62) so they all had the same version numbers but different "born on" dates (the only way you could tell the difference but you had to take a deep dive into the "about the SW" menus on the remote to tell the difference).  In the process they broke something important from a performance standpoint (I think there was a depth hit on certain modes or something) and there was no way to roll back.  I had unwittingly updated to get one of the desired features, thinking I would be able to roll back if necessary and got screwed just before a week-long digging trip.  Borrowed someone else's D2 for the trip while XP was sorting it out.  I think they "re-learned" this lesson from some Deus 1 false starts, addressed the causes, and are proceeding cautiously as a result.

Point being, that this upcoming release will likely be a "final" production release (i.e., non-Beta ver 1.X), will likely have several new (though likely minor) enhancements and bug fixes and I really want them to do thorough regression testing to make sure they don't break stuff that is presently working well.

Gary Black popped on this thread earlier and basically confirmed it's coming but obviously could not give us a precise release window because testing always comes with uncertainty as bugs are uncovered, addressed and re-tested.  It's an arduous, iterative and often painful process that is not appreciated by those who have not experienced it.

Would like to have it sooner rather than later myself, but definitely not before it's fully baked.  

In the mean time, it's not holding me back in the least...

 

Dang Chase, what a great explanation!   No way I could have replied with such an informative and fact filled post! Thanks!

8 hours ago, parkgt said:

One thing we can count on with the update is that it will arrive later than one hopes for..  XP will not commit to a date so they must still be working out the bugs.

I’m in no hurry for an update.  Version .0.71 works pretty darn good from my perspective as far as raw performance is concerned.  Plus ( like you said), I’d rather have a bug free update than to have to keep updating to fix the update.  I would much rather spend my free time detecting than updating. Lol

I have to admit I’m probably the odd man out in that I prefer the “duck in distress” sounds of the PWM audio!

3 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

Yeah, pitch is not really for precise coin shooting.  

 

I have to disagree.  Rattlehead’s silver slayer program is a very precise coin shooter program.  With the appropriate notching, any of the basic programs can be used with pitch tones to make a very effective coin shooter program.  

7 hours ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

Yes!!! This right here!

Welcome to the dark side, Steve, we've been waiting for you. 😄

From my limited perspective and coming from the Nox 800, when I recieved the D2 last April, I resolved to use only it until I felt like I learned it well enough to be able to switch back and forth between my two detectors at any time. I was very comfortable with the ol' Nox, and early into the D2 learning curve there were a few times that I  though of just grabbing the Nox and go a-finding, but I fought the urges and stayed the course with the D2. Now I'm glad I did.

It wasn't long before the D2 menu system was a non issue and it became just muscle memory with continued use. The real curve for me has been learning all the relationships and purposes of the various controls like sensitvity, iron bias, recovery speed/reactivity, discrimination, notch, tonal nuances, ect., all of which you more experienced detectorists are already familiar with. These controls were conveniently somewhat limited on my previous detector and I really didn't know what was missing or understand the concepts until I had more time on the D2. Now that I understand the D2 (and detecting) a little more, and am continuing to grow and experiment with settings without messing anything up, I no longer have the urge to grab the ol' standby.

I'm now finding things I could only dream of finding before. It's not that the Nox couldn't find these things, it's because I couldn't find them with the Nox. I just settled into a few patterns with the Nox that I was comfortable with and never ventured beyond that. The Deus 2 forced me out of my comfort zone and forced me to learn more about detecting, and it has payed off with more and better finds. The journey continues but I'm having a great time with the D2 and don't really miss the ol' standby. Now when that D2 10x5" coil comes out, my journey will be complete! 😎

 

This almost exactly mirrors my thoughts on the D2.  I say almost because I clicked with deus the first time out.  It’s an absolute joy to swing with that 9” coil.  I became comfortable very quickly with the menu setup, writing and saving programs and the button layout.  (One thing I don’t like about the button layout is turning the pinpoint function on and off.   They should have made use of the same button to turn it on and off instead of having to switch.)

 I loved my nox.  It was my first really, really good and most expensive detector since I started detecting about 6 years ago. I used it since they first came out and thought I was doing well with it.  But since getting the D2 I’ve only had the nox out twice!   And both of those times it felt like a tank with the 11” coil and its tones sounded so foreign.  I couldn’t even remember how to ground balance it.   I had to look up the nox manual on my phone😂.  I don’t think I’ll sell my nox though.  It’s a great detector and makes a great back up detector.  I have the 6” inch coil on now, so it’s pretty light and easy to swing, but I still prefer the deus.  
 

About the wireless aspect.  I too became a little miffed about this when out in the woods detecting a spring.  I wanted to detect the bottom of the spring reservoir but as soon as I submerged my coil the detector quit. It took me a few seconds to figure out why!  However, I can see a real big advantage to not having a hardwired coil if I was ever to detect a crawl space or a cave or some other place where you might be on all fours.  You can just hold that lower shaft and swing it around like a wand.  Other than submerging the coil and losing the signal, I like the wireless coils.  

I like my deus so much that I hardly ever think about the manticore.  I am almost certain I won’t buy one, unless in a year or two’s time it’s really is out performing the D2.  But hopefully XP will keep updating the D2 and it’ll perform just as well or better than the manticore.  
 

Hell Yeah Bob!   That’s an oldie right there and I think anyone that found one of those would be rightfully proud!   
Congrats!   
 

I have to say this though:  If I had gotten permission to hunt the yard around the house, I would have chucked the field and made a beeline to that yard. Lol.  I’m glad you don’t think like me.  Lol