CPT_GhostLight

So I'm out in a park a couple of days after doing the Ring Rescue in a Cemetery and my phone rings. It's my RingFinder buddy, @walkerrj again and he says, "We got another weird one!" Okay, I thought we had topped out the weird meter a few days ago, but he went on to say a couple had an argument and the boyfriend had thrown his girlfriend's promise ring and matching necklace in a swamp. Then the boyfriend apparently got "Thrower's Remorse" and bought a $20 metal detector and tried to find the tossed jewelry with no luck. He gave me the location which was in a very upscale gated community in a nice part of town and I was thinking, "Swamp? What swamp? There's no swamps in that part of the city." Then he said, "You might want to bring your rubber boots!" Great, I was 45 minutes away from home and all I had was my sneakers and the 11" coil on my Deus 2 for park hunting. I mean how bad could it be, there's no swamps in that part of town, or so I thought. With all the rain we've been having this spring and summer, it turns out there are swamps all over the city now and when I arrived in the gated apartments, there was indeed a large and proper swamp right behind them. Richard arrived and whipped out his XP ORX, or as I call it, the Ring Slayer! He has found a staggering amount of rings and this machine is usually his weapon of choice and he's open for business. He talked with the couple and got the details of the throwing incident and we went to work. I think I can put this hunt into perspective by saying, for those of you who have seen the TV show, the Curse of Oak Island, I now know how Gary Drayton feels when he has to plod around with his detector in their stinky swamp. Maybe that's why he makes the big bucks and we work pro-bono. 😉 As I entered the quagmire of reeds, cattails, spiders, and other swampland critters, I was immediately swarmed by a large squadron of mosquitoes like someone had just rung the dinner bell. While my shoes filled with sludge and the delightful aroma of rotting bio-matter, I tried to find areas to swing the 11" coil by stomping down reeds around me while realizing I could be just pushing the missing jewelry farther down in the muck. About the time I was thinking this is a lost cause, Richard yells out from the opposite shore, "I found the ring!" What? It was on land? Apparently the boyfriend had managed to clear the swamp on his first throw and the ring was just an inch down in the soft mud of the swamp edge. Unfortunately the necklace had not shared the same fate and after gridding the entire opposite shore and hillside, we could only conclude it landed somewhere in the swamp. I poked around the swamp as best I could and searched the reeds and trees hoping it would be hung up on a branch somewhere, but no luck. The young lady was so happy to have her ring back, she said she didn't even care if we found the necklace or not. She offered to pay us which we politely declined, so then she said she was an internet influencer and she was going to make us go viral with her millions of followers. I told her that was way better than the last time we went viral and almost ended up in the hospital! 😄 So another ring found and returned. This one was a beautiful little 10K white gold and diamond ring, and although the necklace is still out there somewhere, it may too reveal itself in the future. Richard with the "Happy Couple".

I did a little experimenting yesterday on a hunt looking for deep coins. Running Fast with Full Tones, Offset 5, Silencer & B.Caps at 0, and Reactivity at 1.5, I came across a nickel signal (which did end up being a nickel) that had a stable 62 TID about 5 inches down in a park with iron and modern trash polution. I was running my sensitivity from 95 to 96 and started out with Audio Response at 5 but reduced it to 4 because there was way too much falsing on iron and tiny bits of trash. I hit the nickel signal nice and clear with AR at 4, but before I dug, I decided to see how low I could go with AR and still hit the signal. I reduce AR one step at a time. AR at 3 also hit the nickel loud and clear with 62 TID. AR at 2 still showed 62 ID but was fainter on the target signal. AR at 1 also showed 62 but the nickel sound was barely audible. AR at 0 also still showed the 62 ID but I couldn't hear the target audio at all. If it wasn't for the stable 62 ID, I wouldn't have known the nickel was there in AR 0 or 1, and 2 would have been a very iffy sound at best. This was just one quick test in one scenario and more testing needs to be done, but I agree that AR is most probably an audio amplified and won't affect detecting depth other than your ability to hear deep signals. Of couse everyone has different hearing so it's a season to taste type of thing, but AR level combined with sensitivity, tone types, reactivity, silencer, and audio volume, can give you quite a bit of power to control falsing and EMI mitigation.

I may have to snag a PF40 just to have a pinpointer with ferrous ID to use for my relic hunts until the Sphinx becomes available, which could be a long time. 🤔

That's a good question. Paystreak states that the Audio Reponse is an audio amplifier which makes tiny and deep target easier to hear so it shouldn't affect the depth the detector is hitting, only the ability to hear those softer deep targets. I will have to do some more field tests on that and get back to you.

Thank you for all your work testing the Shinx, phrunt! It looks really good and can discriminate ferrous and non-ferrous, which is exactly what I'm looking for to use on relic sites. My Minelab Pro Find 35 finally died after 4 years and I don't know if it's worth getting into the new Pro Find 40 or not. I haven't seen any real reviews on it yet. I got the first gen Quest Xpointer Max, but it's just been too unstable to use in my mineralized soil even at lower sensitivity and then there's the whole button issue. I really like the potential that the Sphinx shows in your videos and hope things get worked out so we can eventually get some in the US to try out. All politics aside, us working class detectorists just want to be able to get good tools to detect with. 😎

Thanks F350! I've actually found a couple of them, but this one in November 2021 was my first!

Thanks VL! This is a city cemetery in a rough part of town, so it's not safe at night there. That's why I volunteered to install a security system (that I donated) in the small 100 year old chapel which gets broken into regularly.

As phrunt said, vermeil is gold plated silver. Here's another description of the three types of gold plating for jewelry: Vermiel VS Gold Plated VS Gold Filled

My hunting buddy, Richard,( @walkerrj ) is a member of Ringfinders and he lets me tag along on some of his recover missions. Last week he told me, "We have amission and it's a strange one! Are you in?" "Well of course!", I replied. After all, many ring recovery missions can be strange. We did one in the mountains where a lady lost her wedding set in or near a chicken coop after a snowfall. That was fairly strange. We found that one, BTW. So how strange could it be? He then told me the ring was lost in a local cemetery. Okay, that's probably up a level on the strange meter. Luckily I know the cemetery manager, having installed security cameras in the small chapel there. So late in the day a few days later, we met up with the young man who had lost his wedding ring while visiting his mother's grave. We had to meet him after he got off work and when we got to the cemetery the office was closed and it was just an hour or so until the cemetery would be locked down for the night. So off we went to see what we could do to help the young man. We asked him when he had lost the ring and if he had an idea where it may have come off. He said it had been a week earlier and the was an area about half the size of a football field. Well I was hoping this would be a fast recovery without any unnecessary digging for obvious reasons. We split the area in half and Richard took the mother's grave area and I took the area along the road heading from where he had parked the week before. Well about 15 minutes, 2 bullet casings, and a lug nut later, I hit the black Tungsten band barely visible under the deep grass. Needless to say the young man was very happy to have his ring back and said his wife would be very happy as well because she had engraved a special message in it for him. So the ring was recovered, the guy was happy, the wife was happy, and we were happy too. Of course, as many of you know, the feeling of returning a ring never gets old, but we were also happy we got it done in time so we didn't have to spend the night in the cemetery! 🏛️👻

Both are great finds, Compass, well done!

I agree Jeff. Very similar conditions here. My main take away was that it reinforced what I learned after the V1.0 update. I used to treat AR as a static setting and just left it at 5 for all programs and hunting scenarios. V1.0 showed me that you can't do that anymore. V1.1 taught me that this is a very powerful extra control that can and should be adjusted to conditions just as much as the other controls are. It took me a while to figure that out. 😏 I don't like his swing style either. I'm sure he has his reasons, but I'm not in that kind of hurry unless there's lightning nearby! 😉

@Geologyhound this is from the XP website:

That's an impressive find, kac, and does indeed look pretty old. I would guess, as Valens suggested, a hunting lodge ring or possibly a fraternal organization like the Elks or something similar. Well done!

Great finds, Doc, that's some serious relic hunting, well done! Love your tool pack too. I'm going to have to make a portable sifter now! 😎

I've been experimenting with this and am having positive results.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with going with what works for you. V0.71 is working fine for a lot of people, but if you want to take it to the next level, V1.1 is it. Once you learn the differences in a few of the settings, it will perform for you every bit as well as V0.71, but with many new and enhanced features, so there will be a slight catch-up curve, but it won't take long to get a handle on it. And if you just don't gel with it, you can always go back to V0.71. Just make sure to write your V0.71 custom settings down before you update because V1.1 will erase those. Also you may want to read through Chase's extensive thread of people's impressions, ideas, and recommendations for the V1.0 & V1.1 updates. Just remember everyone's comments tend to relate to where in the world they detect, so pay more attention to the ones that are closer to where you are for more similar results.

Those are older model Quest and Sphynx pinpointers and neither one did very well in my opinion. I'm sure the new Sphinx is much better and the Quest X-Pointer Max is much more sensitive, if anything it may be too sensitive. My Max is a first generation and it falses a lot even at the medium setting. I haven't figured out where to find the newer version, which is supposed to be much better.

Congrats on the gold rings, damatman88, well done!

Beautiful beach and a great haul for the week, well done! You got silver, quite a bit of jewelry, tons of coins, a caravan of matchbox cars, recovered a lost ring, and stayed on a gorgeous beach, I'd say that a winner of a week! Congrats! 😎

Man it looks so peaceful out there. I'm glad to see you're killing it with your new Matchbox Slayer program, well done! 😎

I'll also add to the Colonel's and F350's replies that Steve's D2 Shaft has nice large feet under the arm cuff so it won't fall over when you set it down to pinponit or hand dig a target. 😎

I have to go with: 1a. WSA-II backphones. I bought them for the extra light puck to make my wired earbuds wireless and use the WS6 for a Master rig. 1b. The 1/8" Audio adapter for the WS6/WSA modules to plug in my favorite wired headphones. 2. MI-6 Pinpointer. Perfect for me. I don't have to remove my headphones to hear the pinpointer and it is punching as deep as my F-Pulse does. It can be completely adjusted by the D2 Remote and even store my favorite setting. 3. Carbon Fiber lower shaft for the stock D2 shaft. I got a CF Simplex shaft for cheap and modded the part that fits into the coil a bit and it works perfectly. Very rigid, lightweight, and strong. 4. Steve's CF D2 full shaft. It's a thing of beauty. I'm saving it for the beaches because I don't want to rip it up in sage brush, cactus, and rattlesnake filled relic sites I hunt in. 5. The MI-7 Pinpointer, that will discriminate between ferrous and non-ferrous targets, but I don't think it is available yet. 😏 6. The 10x5" FMF coil. This would be #1, but it doesn't exist either... yet! 😉

You make very good points. It took me a while to learn the fact that the D2 is a very nuanced sound machine depending on settings. While I don't think I've completely mastered it by any means, I've been hunting and experimenting with it for a little over a year and my ears and brain are getting trained to the sounds. And now, with the arrival of update V1.1, the sound has even better options and I'm really starting to understand its language. I mainly land hunt and relic hunt on shredded iron ghost towns (with permission of course) and I rarely look at the TID unless the audio is doing something weird, which can mean commingled targets. I mainly use Full Tones in High Square audio and can pick out a lot of useful target info with that. The sounds will alert me to a good target more than the TID does. Of course, as I tell my wife, I need more training, and what better way to train than to go detecting! 😏

This is why I'm not too interested in a PI for beach hunting unless I was after pirate treasure. @schoolofhardNox uses a PI and a SMF detector on his beaches and check out the trash to treasure ratios on each. SohN is a digging machine, but I get tired just looking at phtots of his digs! 🤣

I got the Thresher Waterproof Phone for the D2 on my birthday and haven't had a chance to try them underwater yet but they sound good and loud on land. https://www.seriousdetecting.com/product/detecting-adventure-thresher-headphones-for-xp-metal-detectors-deus-ii/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwwvilBhCFARIsADvYi7JXg_jaIzmtkBCEYN26blRCU1VLj7G3s8CAI9Se1pyJxxecV3A5F-4aAj6eEALw_wcB I've also hear the Grey Ghost Waterproof Phones for Deus II are good also.