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Calmark

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  1. That is a very attractive display case made up of some spectacular finds! I hope it is like a down payment on karma so you will someday find a valuable cache somewhere out on all of those properties.
  2. Your title got my attention! I've been wondering what to do to find more turf gold with my Deus 2. So far, I've been going by brute force and digging strong mid-conductor and coin targets quickly in a few areas where I know people sunbathe, picnic and have been near concession stands. I have found very little silver for the effort, like you Skate in your park, and even less gold. So far, I've gotten 2 gold items, a VDI# 39 14k gold child's ring weighing .6grams and in a stroke of luck, a #72 that turned out to be an 1866S $2-1/2 gold coin in fantastic shape. That find alone has made up for all of the pull tabs, bottle caps, can slaw and foil I've dug. Those are the only non-nuggets of gold I've dug in the last 20 years, so I may not be the best person to help build a gold slayer program. I have tried the technique of notching out 85 and above to concentrate on the gold-range, but that gets old pretty quickly. Mainly what I do is keep all mid conductors sounding off, though I do cut out up to the 35-40 range at times to limit hearing foil and smaller items. I don't really like skipping or notching out numbers, but I'll definitely listen to everybody's ideas on how to make the hunt for gold items go more smoothly. I think it does pay to mix things up. Some days I just dig and dig all good signals down to the foil level and other days I dig only a few and concentrate on coins more. A gold slayer program set up would be nice to have to be prepared for those days one has a lot of energy, but perhaps limited time to go after the gold items.
  3. Thanks for the suggestion on the density test. I don't have a kit to test gold karat, but your test would help determine if this is indeed gold. I can tell by the look of it, that it is at the very least gold plated. It looks to be a heavy plate and I see signs of a base metal in a few places. This item is a keeper even if it doesn't turn out to be solid gold through and through. I've found plenty of lightly gold plated items with the plate very deteriorated that I've simply tossed in the garbage. This locket isn't some cheaply made, mass-produced junk item, so I'll hang onto it. Very good suggestion with the density test though!
  4. Thanks for some confirmation about my suspicions the symbol on this locket represents a foreign country or Islam. This find is definitely another example of how you just don't ever know what will come out of the ground when detecting. That's what keeps it fun and interesting for us detectorists.
  5. Yesterday at a park where I've found half a dozen small silver rings and a tiny child's 14k gold ring in the past, I hit upon my 2nd piece of gold from this location. I was using my Deus 2 in a modified P4 Fast program to quickly find non ferrous items and dig them out. The idea was to dig a lot of zinc pennies and aluminum ranged signals in the hopes of finding gold. And I at least partially reach that goal when I found the face of an ornate locket. It rang up as a #76 on the VDI and strangely enough, a pulltab was just under it loose in the same hole. The pull tab read #75 and the locket air-tested at #76. Talk about peas in a pod! I don't know the meaning of the symbols on the front of the locket, but it looks middle eastern to me? There are some tiny chips of asymmetrically faceted stones inset on the front. I don't imagine they are diamonds or precious, but who knows? This item isn't attracted to a magnet, but on the backside I do see some green where there is a small scratch on the rim and on the underside of the rim. Some scratching around the hole on the backside by the hole is dark-colored. Not a good sign for being solid gold. It weights 4.31 grams and diameter is a bit smaller than a half dollar. There are no makers markings, but perhaps those would have been on the matching rear piece of the locket? Nice to find something interesting, even if not likely to be terribly valuable. I still think this spot holds more gold, so I'll keep searching there.
  6. As long as you have a plan, then its ok to make a conscious choice to either use these specialized programs with their risks and rewards, or avoid them in favor of doing more digging. A lot depends on the site. Since this spot has potential for older non-silver coins, I tend to favor digging a lot more and plan to keep at this site for a long time in the future where I'll eventually uncover other hidden targets. I did make a "Wheat Slayer" program recently. Same as the SS program, but with a notch down to accept #84 and get most wheat pennies too. I dropped it to #80 last week and used it to score a crusty 1912s penny the SS program would have missed. I'll hit that site again in the future too and try some other settings for sure.
  7. I went back to the same field a week ago where I found 2 silver dimes (1943s mercury and 1912s Barber) using the Deus 2 and Silver Slayer program. I felt guilty about using it, knowing I was missing all of those possible gold and good penny signals. Well, the following are 3 very good reasons to only use the SS program in moderation, maybe as a last resort, or if you are short on time and want to cherry pick an area. 1919s, 1920d and 1899 Indian head pennies found with Program(3) Sensitive Full Tones with +1 added to audio response and up to +34 notched out to cut out tiny items and foil. VDI# were 84 and 85. The plan this day was to dig up all "zinc" pennies, but these 3 oldies fell into the same general VDI range.
  8. I think you picked a great machine to get back into doing some serious or casual detecting. The Legend has a lot of options and should have plenty of performance too. Just take your time getting to know the machine and don't be afraid to stick close to the factory settings to start. Branch out with small changes initially and then add more changes once you understand what all the functions do. I just studied the Legend manual today to get ready for when mine soon arrives. I found it very well written and instructions for making changes and how the detector works were clear to me, though I have recent experience with 2 other SMF machines to help greatly ease my learning curve. Keep the manual handy, like I have on my phone, and don't be afraid to reference it often. I'm sure I'll reread it often to start. I hope you have tons of fun with the new machine!
  9. Upon the news of the release of the Legend and for a while after it, I didn't think I'd ever really need/want one owning an Equinox 800 already. But, that started to change by last summer when I was impressed by the speed of how Nokta fixed bugs and added a huge number of improvements to user options and some nice features in the last few patches. The slightly expanded VDI range was a plus from the start over the Equinox, and later additions in features like an adjustable iron bias, pitch tones, mineralization meter, etc. made me realize the Legend was a top level SMF machine of a different flavor. Since I no longer have an Equinox and the Manticore won't likely have a small coil for ages (though I pray it is released very soon), the Legend should tide me over for quite a while. JCR, I'll definitely give some reports on how the Legend does in my particularly nasty soil. I can give some general ideas on how it works compared to my other recent detectors too. I plan to go after the gold jewelry with this unit with the 6in coil, so that will be much of my focus. Time to try to out dig all of the gophers crowding the grassy areas in my parks. I'll have to get your silver profile settings at some point Jeff. I have a few spots where that might be productive. I think learning the Legend interface might take a bit due to the hidden menus, but I'm sure I'll figure it out decently quickly. I wish you could borrow a Legend for a day Simon. Then with your experience, you'd know very quickly if it would work in your soil conditions and you could report back. Its too bad soil conditions AND economic conditions around the world vary so much so that a Legend costs a lot in your area, unlike here in the USA. Maybe you'll even luck out someday and find a nice used Legend or Apex to test.
  10. Thank you for your reports, Jeff. I too coin/jewelry hunt in difficult mineralized ground in California that sounds similar to your conditions. Accurate visual ID and strong tones tend to drop off after just a few inches into the ground here. I pretty much never dig an old coin past 5 inches as the ground just swallows up the detector response due to the highly mineralized ground. These newer generation SMF detectors like the Equinox, Deus 2, Legend and coming Manticore have really made a difference for me in my soil. I can get relatively stable ID# and that really helps when deciding to dig or not. I struggled initially too with the Equinox when I got it 4 years ago, but after getting past the 40-50 hour mark last year, I finally figured out how to get decent performance out of it. Going to the XP Deus 2 this spring was fairly easy to do, and now with near 150 hours, I have a pretty good handle on settings that I like to use. With the amazing prices from several of the competing detector companies offered lately, I ordered a Nokta Legend yesterday. I sold my Equinox 800 3 months ago to a friend to get him into the hobby and knowing the next gen Minelab vlf was likely on its way. I've missed having the option of a smaller or larger coil for the Deus 2, and at $400 for an 11in coil, I figured the money would be better spent on the Legend and get both 6in and 11in coils for not a lot more money. I look forward to seeing how it does in my tough dirt, but I think it should do great, based on user reports like these from Jeff.
  11. Its sad to hear you'll soon lose that site. Its a head-scratcher where all the coins are, or aren't at that place. Nice score on the silver thimble, nonetheless!
  12. That combo of Deus 2 and new 11in coil is doing great right off the bat! I'm glad to hear the coil-centering unit did the trick and made the coil much nicer to swing.
  13. I realized later on after my post about the time-frame of the 6in coil arriving for the Equinox, that I bought my Nox 800 and 6in coil together in October 2018, so the 6 inch coil had recently been released. They certainly did not come out at the same time. Thanks for the correction, Chase. Like with the Equinox release, I'll probably wait until the 8x5.5 inch Manticore coil arrives before I jump in and buy one. That said, I do hope the small coil does come very soon.
  14. Does the Manticore 8x5.5in coil come out when the unit is realeased like the 6in round was available from the start for the Equinox? Or are we stuck with the stock 11in coil until ML manufactures the 8x5.5 at a later date? Since I like to swing smaller coils in general, I might wait until the small elliptical coil is out before getting a Manticore. I hope the wait isn't terribly long.
  15. Very nice finds! With winter here, you'll hopefully have some extra time indoors to do some serious research to find some promising sites for 2023. At your present good finds rate, 2023 is going to be a great year detecting!
  16. I guess I'll have to rethink my future Gold Slayer program some. I wouldn't want to miss those "pesky" $20 gold pieces. 😂
  17. I took a look at the coin's damage with a 10x loupe and it looks pretty much exactly like cuts I've seen on other coins from a lawnmower blade. It may have been from a gas-powered edger too. A sidewalk area isn't too far away and it was recently renovated in the past 10 years. Construction work may have caused the damage. We will probably never know for sure, but what's done is done. Thankfully it was "just" a 1912S, and NOT the 1913S key-date Barber. I like your idea about a Gold Slayer program. I was actually thinking about doing this very same thing while out using the SS program. Maybe notch out under ID# 40 and over #80 and dig the most probable gold range. It might be a hard program to stick with for too long though....
  18. The Silver Slayer program was definitely the hero of the day. I felt bad knowing I was missing all of the old pennies since those were notched out. Also, basically no chance at gold either unless the piece falls into that narrow nickel band of ID# range. I'll open up the top notch and give that area another pass and hope to find any deep pennies I missed next time. And I can agree its important to listen for those high-pitched squeaks and then investigate. You do hear iron falsing when sweeping over the squeaking target too. I actually left several with both iron sounds and the "squeak". Some were targets that pinpointed to the side of the squeak, which usually indicates iron. I did dig a lot of iron nails on this outing while targeting the deep silver. I'll definitely need to go back and check out more of those mixed target signals if they are high-pitched with iron. One mystery is what damaged the xx12 Barber dime? It looks like it was sliced by a lawnmower blade to me. I really can't figure out how that could have happened. Maybe it was dropped circa 1920 and a mower hit it way back then? One thing I can say is after immediately noticing the missing chunk of dime while still in the whole, I thought, "great, now I won't even get to see how old this thing is." Luckily the "12" was still there to date the dime properly at least. I guess I actually found .19c of silver in face-value that day. 😂
  19. I've finally gotten back into doing some coin-hunting with my XP Deus 2 using the 9in. coil. I've been out for 4 short trips this past month now that the weather in Northern California is cooler and a rainstorm this past month having given us 1in.+ of rain so the soil isn't quite as hard. I hadn't been out since May and to get back into "the swing of things", I've experimented some by branching away from mainly using P4 "fast". Dabbling with Program 3 using full tones was nice for a change. A few hours of using it and I got a pretty good sense of the tones and conductivity range of the targets I dug. It seems a good program for hearing everything and then choosing what to dig. In my soil, things quickly get muffled as I get generally half a bar of mineralization or up on the meter. A good program for quickly targeting shallower, more enticing signals. Due to a few popular posts of late about success using the "Silver Slayer" D2 program, I decided on the spot a few days ago to watch the video while in a park, and save the program to one of my custom slots. I got a quick feel for it at this park about 40 minutes from home for about 45 minutes. It did let me skip the big volume of junk and hone in on a few copper Memorial pennies and a couple of dimes and quarters. The much shorter target response was tough to interpret at first, but I just started to listen for the high sounds and then slowed down to investigate further. Yesterday after fooling around with several programs and settings I decided to use the Silver Slayer program at an old field, but with plenty of current use (and trash) nearer to home. Its the one where I found my 1866S $2-1/2 gold coin and around 60 wheat cents and 4 silver dimes over the years. Even though I felt really guilty notching out targets in the gold zone, I can say the SS program works! Here are 2 dimes I found in about 2.5 hours. ID# were 90-91 and I had reactivity at 2 for the mercury dime and 1.5 for the Barber. I generally run it at 2.5 to 3 in this soil, but pushed the limits more this past hunt. Previous to yesterday, I'd only ever found 4 silver dimes (2 Roosevelt, 2 Mercury) at this location over the span of 25 years. I used to see other detectorists here regularly 20-25 years ago and the easy stuff is long gone. Depth was about 5 inches on both, which is close to maximum in my hot soil.
  20. Thank you for all the time and effort spent to test and report to us on the results of your testing of the various new SMF machines. Your results reflect what I quickly noticed between my own Equinox 800 and XP Deus 2 with regards to sensitivity to tiny gold nuggets. I'm quite happy with the D2 for coin and jewelry searching, so I don't mind it can't easily see sub .25gr nuggets. Anybody serious about nugget hunting should definitely go for either a Nox or Legend. I figured that out after 1 day of nugget hunting with my D2. It just didn't quite perform as well as I would have liked out in the field on my nugget patch.
  21. Its great to hear you are on some nice gold and the rain hasn't totally shut you down. That big concentric coil is doing a super job on depth for those larger pieces!
  22. This was a good video showing the Manticore settings in a real-world environment. It looks pretty good and the 2D screen could be helpful in situations...or make people dig less by being pickier and miss some cool/valuable finds. 😜 "It's 50% more electrical power...so we've got more battery in the handle" at just past the 45:20 mark on the video. Earlier the ML engineer mentioned 2 of the 18650 batteries in the handle. I guess more batteries in the Manticore could explain the 50% more power claim over "detectors in the same class". This definitely looks like an Equinox 1500 to me. Not a bad thing of course.
  23. Hopefully the Manticore quickly comes with a variety of additional coil sizes and we won't have to wait years. 🙃
  24. I forgot to say, my brother ended up with 8 nuggets for 2.87g on the day using the 11in stock ML mono coil. His largest was 1.02 grams, so most were fairly small, but nice looking, coarse nuggets.
  25. I had a chance to go up to the high sierra area 3 days ago with my brother to do some scouting and detecting with our Minelab GPX 6000 detectors. He had the stock 11in round mono and I had my newly-arrived Goldhawk 10x5 made by Coiltek. We found some old-timer workings in an area that was new to us both. Those old miners sure did a lot of work and there were rock piles stacked everywhere. Bedrock was very limited to a few places lower down the slope. We concentrated mostly on the areas nearer to bedrock to see if we could find something the previous miners had missed when cleaning it. I set up my GPX6000 on auto 2 with threshold on and went to work scanning the piles and sides of the gullies. I immediately found small shards of copper bullet jackets, some small lead and the usual nails. The machine ran fairly nicely, without any real noise issues for the first hour, so I figured today might be a day noise-cancelling wouldn't be needed much. Scanning steep slopes was not only a breeze with such a light coil, but I didn't get a lot of extra noise from not having the coil horizontal, like I do when using my stock 11in round mono. I ended up doing about half a dozen noise-cancels throughout the day. Mostly in the later afternoon as temps rose and generally when more emi is around due to distant planes, etc. At any rate, off to a good start so far with the new coil. After about 1.5 hours I hit the first nugget on the sidewall of a cut, right atop some bedrock. It was a very rough piece and weighted .13g at about 1.5 inches of depth. Off to a good start, and gave us hope more nuggets could be found at this location. And, as it turned out, we got a lot of hope quickly after I dug a coarse 2.45g nugget about 45 minutes later 7 inches down out of the side of a throw out pile. Game on now that we knew this spot had some real potential after all! In the end, after 10 hours of swinging that day, my brother and I ended up with 8 and 7 nuggets each, respectively. A great outing to a new spot, and plenty of nugget digging action, even if most were on the smaller side. My brother with his 11in coil beat me by 1 nugget, but he had two "patches" on exposed bedrock knobs where he found all but 1 of them. I did eke out a .25g nugget about 3-4 inches he missed at the first spot. Maybe it was due to the smaller coil size, or just because he left me a bonus nugget. Nice of him to "share". Overall, I really enjoyed using the 10x5 Goldhawk. I could fit it among the rocks and bushes very easily. I "side-wall" scanned much of the day and the light weight of the coil made it very manageable. Sensitivity of the ML GPX6000 with this coil is really nice and its probably similar to the sensitivity of the 11in mono while still getting nice depth on small nuggets. I was able to pinpoint quite easily and quickly with the 10x5 as well. I dug probably 1/3 more targets than my brother, though partly that was due to how jazzed up I was from finding that larger nugget early in the day, haha. I included a picture of the trash just to give you all an idea of how much junk you have to dig to get the good stuff.
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