CPT_GhostLight

I just stumbled across this video. I don't know if the is the answer or not.

That's interesting, Cheddar, has that caused any problems with the 13" coil, like the bolt loosening or anything like that? When I installed the CF lower shaft hack on my D2 shaft, I noticed it had just round holes too, but my 9" coil holds firm with no propblems at all, but it does have a firm grip on the bolt head, so I guess that's all it needs. I wonder if any other 13" coil owners have noticed any problems with their coils bolts?

Congrats, Geologyhound, that's what I run and couldn't be happier with it. Happy hunting!

I'm no relic expert, but I have been doing a lot of experimenting in that arena. My ground goes from medium to wildly mineralized, so keep that in mind for reference. Two of the setups I use for finding target areas and for working in iron infested sites are based on the Fast program. Fast Full Tones in PWM with Sens 94, Disc -2.0, Notch 00-00, Silencer & B-Caps 0, Reactivity 1.5, Audio Response 5. Fast Pitch Tones in PWM with Sens 94, Disc 6.8, Notch 10-30, Silencer 2, B-Caps 3, Reativity 2, Audio Response 5. I also like F350's Relic Reaper to help verify iron falsing. I generally start out with Fast-Full Tones to get a feel for an area and to hear differences in target conductivities. If the area has few targets, I go to Fast-Pitch Tones to find any viable targets and work my way to target rich areas and then switch to Fast-Full Tones to sift for good targets. Trust the sounds more than the TID. The visual ID can be all over the place, specially for commingled targets, but the audio will be more accurate. I generally dig anything that sounds good. Iron falsing will usually reveal itself with a 90° turn and sweep on a target, but be prepared to dig iron. Of course some good relics are made of iron. You have a golden opportunity, Colonel, and I wish you all the best on your new relic site. 😎

Thanks for this poll, Detectornado. Since I'm still pondering my next coil choice, this helps reading the responses from others. With my last detector, I had the 10x5", 11" and 12x15". I used the 10x"5 for 95% of my land hunting. At the beach, I would start out with the 12x15" coil which was not that much more heavy than the 11" coil, but after a few hours it became much more heavy and I would end up using the 11" coil for 80-90% of the beach hunting time. Since I may only hunt a beach once a year on vacation and haven't hunted any farm fields, I'm leaning towards the 11", but the jury is still out for me.

Congrats on the excellent finds, well done! And I completely agree that audio is everything on the D2.

It must be a mineralization thing. Keep in mind, this is hunting in a park situation where I can't dig plugs and have to pinpoint from the surface. I run my MI-6 at 49 on the D2 and the F-Pulse will usually go about an inch or so deeper and if I "super tune" it, it will go an easy 3-4 inches deeper. But in a relic hunt situation where I can dig with a shovel, I don't need to use the F-Pulse.

Time hunting is only dictated by the weather and the site conditions. On some sites, if the weather is good and the hunting is good, I'll go all day until I or the sun run out of juice. If the weather is bad or the hunting is bad, I may cut it short, but typically I never hunt shorter than 4 hours and rarely more than 8 hours.

I think it's a balance thing. If you shorten the lower rod on any detector and swing closer to your feet, it offsets nose-heavy balance somewhat. Personally I like an extended lower rod for wider sweeps, that's one reason I like the 9" coil so much. But I still need to get a bigger coil for my arsenal and keep bouncing back and forth between the 11" or 13" coils. I may end up with all 3 coils at some point, but if I make it to a beach or some large fields this year, I'd like the extra coverage. Now if a 9x5" Relic Hunter coil magically appears, that could change the whole ball game. 😏

Dang, Jeff, you really spanked that hunt, congrats! and well done! Plus 1 on the Tek-Point/F-Pulse. I've started carry my F-Pulse again with the MI-6 and use it to hit those really deep targets that are just beyond the reach of the MI-6.

WOW, a seated quarter and half??? That's awesome, well done!! I love panning, but I'd much rather find those!

Thanks F350! Your Relic Reaper program was the best of the lot for revealing iron with minmal falsing. It inspired my wide open Fast Full Tones program which acts very similar with iron. I can hear it all, but with the Iron Volume at 3 it doesn't overpower the good targets and reveals itself on the 90° turn. Most of the iron I only dug to verify or because it sounded like something interesting like a lock or spike. I was also testing wide open vs notched programs. I found that using a low Disc (0-6.8) with low Notch (10-30) with Pitch audio helped to find good targets in the vast iron debris and switching to wide open (very low Disc and no Notch) with Full Tones and slowing down helped to hear the deep whispers and that seems to work really well. The D2's audio is amazingly descriptive.

LOL, I didn't get it either, duh! Sweet finds, congrats! It looks like you got your Mandy all dialied in, well done!

Congrats on more goodies and I love the Indian! I was going to ask you about the round thing. I found one just like it at the site I recently hunted and thought the same thing but can't think of what kind of instrument it came from, but it must have been fairly popular if you found one in Virginia and found one in Colorado.

Actually the snakes and scorpions and tarantulas are just about due to wake up. I did find a freshly shedded snakeskin hanging out of a hole, so it's almost time to put the anti-snake gators back on! 🐍 But when the bears start waking up, it'll be time to move on. 🐻

With the recent tips, tricks, and comparison videos out there regarding unmasking in iron, I've been anxious to try out some ideas in what is my personal "worst dirt on Earth". I call it the Land that Time Forgot. I know that others probably have way worse dirt, but for my area, this is it for me. It is an old coal mining area close to home that is strewn with coal, coke, magnetite, hot rocks, all manner of iron from microscopic to huge, and man-made metal trash of all varieties. It operated from the late 1800s to the 1930s and probably began to be metal detected the week after it closed down. It is the proverbial beat to death, hunted out site. Most people I know won't even go there anymore. I imagine this place is probably what the surface of one of the moons of Jupiter looks like. Of course being only a couple of years back into the hobby, I don't have the good sense to look somewhere more promising, so off I went trying to beat the weekly snowstorm on the only warm-ish day in while. Now I've been trying to expand my repetoire of D2 Programs and tricks to enhance my hunting experience in really difficult ground. For this hunt, I wanted to really explore F350's Relic Reaper program, variations of Fast in Full Tones and Pitch, Sensi FT, Park in Pitch, Relic, and Deep HC in Pitch. Now I didn't take the time to do anything even approaching scientifically controlled testing, I was on the hunt, so I just alternated using Fast Full Tones, Fast Pitch, and G1-F350 (Relic Reaper) to find targets and interrogated them with all of the listed programs. Now this was just my area in my worst case scenario and results will vary in your areas, so take this all with a grain of salt. My main three hunting programs were as follows: Fast Full Tones in PWM and Sens 94, Disc -2.0, Notch 00-00, Silencer & B-Caps 0, Reactivity 1.5, Audio Response 5. Fast Pitch Tones in PWM and Sens 94, Disc 6.8, Notch 10-30, Silencer 2, B-Caps 3, Reativity 2, Audio Response 5. G1-F350 (Realic Reaper) stock, but with PWM audio, Sensitivity 96, and Big Numbers instead of XY screen. FYI, for those interested in the Relic Reaper, contact @F350Platinum. It's his program and he might share it with you if you bribe him with Spanish Silver. 🤣 I hunted mainly by ear, only looking at the TID numbers when a target sound confused me or was very faint in the mix. That actually worked pretty well on most of the programs. I dug anything that sounded good and iffy ones as well. One thing I noticed was that Relic, Deep HC, and Fast Pitch liked to false loud on big iron. So did the the Park program in Pitch, but it was just too filtered to hit many of the targets in the iron matrix. The iron overpowered it, so I stopped using Park after a while. The programs with Full Tones seemed to false to a lesser degree, or perhaps it just sounded lower in pitch and volume, but they worked well to tell falsing iron from a non-ferrous target close to iron. I dug several iffies just to confirm. The programs with square tones made it harder for me to tell misshaped targets from round, in my opinion, so I switched all programs to PWM. That seemded to help quite a bit for me and why I mainly use PWM now. All of the programs seemed to hit good targets well, but for me, The Fast and Deep HC in Pitch hit the hardest even on the tiniest targets. The G1-F350 (Relic Reaper) was designed for use in very mild soil, but did amazingly well in my mineralization. It went deep and was great at separating non-ferrous from ferrous targets and I ended up using it to check all deep iffy targets in iron and it was spot on. I also noticed that full tones in PWM was great at telling deep from shallow and small from large targets. It may be because I tend to run a little hot, from 94-96, and larger targets and very shallow targets would distort in the audio like an overdriven amp. So for my ears, I still like Fast the best, but that's just me. I also tried adjusting Reactivity from 0.5-4 to see if I could unmask targets. Anything over 2.5 just didn't sound off as well in this dirt and under 1.5 was just lost in the mix. 1.5-2 seemed to be the sweet spot in this beat up ground. So to wrap up, try everything to learn what works best for you in your ground. You just won't know what will work best for a particular location unless you experiment. I did manage to unearth one sweet surprise in that scortched earth from hell. While poking around under some tumble weeds, I got a fairly faint 90-94 number peaking through the iron grunts and it remainded the same on all programs that I checked it with. Thinking it was a large bottle cap, I dug it because all 90s come out! It was actually a very weathered 1927-D silver Mercury dime! I coudn't believe it! Coins are scacer than hens teeth at this place, except for zinc pennies which must just rain from the sky in this state! Anyway thanks for reading and I hope my quests help others in some small way on their journey. Buttons, bullets, and such. Possibly Native American or Spanish hair or braid decoration. Non-Ferrous. The Iron. The Glass. The trashy trash.

Wow again, F350, that cut 2 Reale is in great shape! A Button and Largey and Spanish Silver, oh my! Congrats again!

I agree, this video also has great information without touting any brand and just points out facts. I'm familiar the down averaging of the VDI on the D2, but this video shows what I am becoming very aware of, and that is while the ID numbers can be affected up or down by mixed targets with different sizes and/or conductivities, the audio is not processed the same way and therefore remains more pure. This video really shows that the audio on the good target stays good, unless the ID is notched higher than the target reads. The audio is key on the D2.

I also agree about the problem with tests that are not buried in your specific hunting grounds, but there were some useful nuggets of information that I was able to test out in one of my worst hunting scenarios yesterday. I'll get more into that in another post.

Iffy is doing a series of tests of unmasking capabilities of several new detector. This one shows the Deus 2 unmasking and a few tips to help with that.

Well Thank You, Brad, for posting the original! I'm sorry I couldn't remember who posted it, but your spreadsheet is the best software tool out there for the D2 for managing and storing settings. It has been a lifesaver for me and I really appreciate you putting it out there. You are the Man! 😎

That sounds like an awesome place to hunt, navydad721, glad you're getting back out there. If you can post some photos because we like to see what my wife calls, "detecting porn". 🤣

Wow, SwiftSword, that is a beautiful find! It's a proverbial retirement gold watch, well done indeed!

You can enter your Focus 1 program in one of the empty user slots (#14-#24). I keep my user programs in the same slot numbers that they are in on my D2 remote to make it easier when comparing my remote settings to the Program Log settings.. The only programs listed in the file I posted are the Factory Programs with all of their settings in V0.71 with blank settings columns for your user programs.

Quite a while back someone posted an Excel Spreadsheet to record your D2 program settings and I'm sorry I forgot who that was but he deserves a big Thank You! I downloaded it and made a few changes, but this has been an invauable tool to keep up with all the program tweaks and changes I have made and experimented with. My version shows the original factory settings for each program (V0.71) as well as slots for your custom saved programs' settings and allows you to keep records of your changes as you build the perfect program for your needs. It also has all your settings saved, (as long as you remember to save the file each time you make changes), so if you do a full update and lose your custom programs, you have a record of all your custom and original factory settings. I'm posting my version of the spreadsheet in a .zip file for anyone that might find it useful. EDIT: This is a variation of the original Program Log created and originally posted by @Brad Plohman, so all credit goes to him. Thank You Brad! DEUS II FACTORY and USER PROGRAMS-V0.71-Logsheet.zip