UKD2User

In the UK, dealers are offering a "free" M15 coil (previously a "free" ProFind 40) with a new Manti, while keeping the same selling price. From this I infer that Manti sales have been ok but have slowed down a lot, and sales of the M15 and ProFind40 have been very sluggish! I don't expect to see price reductions, but who knows what the future holds? Prices of used Noxes are going down still.

I think the main reason they did that is EU regulations that are coming into force mandating that consumer electronics gear has a USB-C charging connector (and USB-C is just better!). https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220930IPR41928/long-awaited-common-charger-for-mobile-devices-will-be-a-reality-in-2024

For Deus 2 there are three basic wireless headphone options: 1) WS6 - backphones (allow you to wear a hat/glasses easily, but not everyone finds them comfortable. Only slightly rain-proof, lightweight and comfortable in warmer weather. A certain amount of sound can get round these phones in both directions - useful if situational awareness is helpful e.g. in a park. The 'puck' is detachable and is all you need, besides a coil and shaft, to create a functioning Deus 2. An adapter can easily be attached to the puck to allow use of wired phones/plugs of your choice. 2) WSA2 - exactly like the WS6 but 'dumb' wireless phones. Cannot be used to create a full detector without either a WS6 puck or a Deus 2 Remote. 3) WSA2XL - The same functions as the WSA2 but fully rain/puddle proof. Over ear conventional design, comfortable in cold or where there is a lot of external noise. Arguably provide best quality audio. For fully submersible phones, they need to be plugged into the Deus 2 Remote. XP offer bone conduction headphones. Conventional over ear phones are available from Gray Ghost and Thresher, among others - these options mostly use piezo transducers to provide the submersible features.

I appreciate the problem you illustrate, but the batteries are commodity items and changing them is a relatively straightforward task for someone with even fairly basic technical knowledge - considerably easier than changing a cellphone battery I would say.

This is the only thing I disagree with/understand differently. Adjacent iron does make a non-ferrous target look/sound worse (more ferrous) than it otherwise would. 'Masking' is the term I (and I believe the majority of other people who think about such things) use to describe this effect. Whatever techniques you use, and whatever they're called, some will be better, and some will be worse at winkling out 'masked' non-ferrous targets in the ground. Do we agree on the above?

If you were doing air tests then it's difficult to make any meaningful inferences. I find that - in the ground - on good targets in benign conditions at least - the D2 TIDs are every bit as stable as the Nox800 ones - even taking into account that the D2 has two or three times more numbers to choose from! 👍 PS Park mode for the D2 is not super-sensitive to small low-conductors, by default.

I don't think that it's a problem in this case. A magnet moving relative to the ferrite rod antenna would definitely be a question mark though. 👍🙂

Yes, I think he actually drilled a couple of small holes in the red disc - letting more sound out but letting dust/mud/water in - I wouldn't risk it myself!

The only reason I can think that they made it the way they did is that the red disc acts as some kind of resonator to amplify/transmit the sound more. I thought Paystreak had a magnet epoxied into his. The thread on the cap is easy to damage, but so far after 18 months I've not spoiled mine yet.

The meaning of life - because beer was 42 pence a pint at that time. It's about six hundred pence a pint (in a pub anyway) these days....

I'm not Gary (😎😁) - and I'm sure he can/will speak for himself(!) - but I think it's interesting that if you look at PaystreakSuperfreaks recent YT videos he shows his 'VCO' program which he uses with Disc at 44. Paystreak has clay soil with a lot of iron mineralisation in it - probably a lot more than in most of our soils here in southern England, he also seems to hunt in parks with loads of modern trash and a fair amount of EMI (you could imagine he would want to give his ears an easier time!). He says he uses it as a way to ignore most of the foil and other nuisance signals as a first pass - he then goes back using more 'conventional' Disc settings to find the stuff he missed the first time (ie 'cherrypicking' as I said upthread). Basically, I don't think there's any magic in a specific Disc number - just a choice based on experience and local conditions (just like everything else in detecting!).

There's a big difference between falsing and (un)masking. 1) Falsing = iron sounding better than it should (usually because of size/shape/holes/corners/rust). 2) Masking = iron making an adjacent nonferrous target sound worse than it should. Increasing Silencer will move the decision-point towards iron in both the above types of situation. Silencer will help to reduce falsing but effectively increase masking (a trade-off as per usual). I nearly always use Silencer=0 and use other methods to spot falsing.

I think his video shows how good an unmasker the D2 is. His way of 'decluttering' the audio is to put iron volume at zero. I've never tried that, as I find it helpful to hear iron tones to avoid being fooled by big/rusty/mis-shapen iron, but I will try it after watching this video. Gary goes to the other extreme with Iron Volume at 10 in his Tekkna.

I agree that Tekkna really isn't about unmasking - Gary's version is not particularly good at that, as demonstrated by IffySignals' yt video on that subject. I understand unmasking to mean making a good target, which is partially hidden by iron, sound like a good target. Adjacent iron makes good targets sound worse (more like iron) than they should. Increasing Silencer (like iron bias on Nox and others) increases the chance of a borderline good target sounding worse than it should - so does increasing Disc but for a simpler reason. I think that Tekkna is more about 'decluttering' the audio, so that good targets are not drowned out by the audio of bad ones (different from my definition of unmasking).

I'd strongly argue that filters like Silencer reduce unmasking capability in iron.

If I've understood Tekkna at all, it's based around the idea that raising Disc to an unusually high value can sometimes have greater than expected benefits - mostly, I believe, in supressing 'noise' from unwanted targets. I've tried this idea quite often in the past - on the beach and on land - as a way of cherry picking, for example quickly putting Disc up to 85 as a first pass, looking for silver and large copper alloy coins. I think that Youtubers like PaystreakSuperfreak (bless him) have done this kind of thing in the past too. I am perfectly happy with the way my D2 works - there are still some quirks/"features" in the software, though - there probably always will be. I used to write embedded software for a living.

Either by accident or on purpose! My impression is that software configuration management is not their strongest suit 😁

Besides coils, LCD display panels, batteries, and passive components like capacitors that can age, most recent detectors will contain flash memory - for programs and/or data - which can fail after a period of repeated use. I guess that a 'sticky bit' of flash memory is more likely to create an unpredictable level of degradation in performance.

I noticed that Gary says in one of his videos "XP don't fix it!". I see on a different YT vid by IffySignals that unmasking is not very good with Tekkna - at least if based on Sensitive FT prog 3. I think that one of the reasons people like these settings is perhaps simply because it makes it easier to 'see the wood for the trees' in an otherwise 'busy' (audio) environment - psychoacoustics?

Have you decided against the D2 ? The Manti seems to be least obviously ahead of the D2 when it comes to busy European soils.

It's probably not appropriate to try and identify the transmit and receive sides in this photo!! 😇😁

I think that the laws of physics tend towards the conclusion that: 1. Depth and/or ferrous mineralisation, or adjacent ferrous masking all tend to make things sound/look worse than they should; and, 2. Size and shape (holes or points concentrating electromagnetic flux) tend to make things sound/look better than they should. All the clever tricks in software/settings cannot stop these effects, just minimise them in certain situations.

I don't know about the fe/co 'horseshoe' because I don't use it, but certainly on a big, rusty, odd-shaped piece of iron the xy can be as misleading as the tones - only the size of the target gives a hint that it might be big iron.

I watched the video when it came out and again just now. I don't think what he said is at odds with anything I wrote above, except that he mentioned the "halo effect caused by damp ground" - I think this is just his way of describing a general background mineralisation caused by metallic salts dissolving in groundwater making a conductive 'ionic soup'. Google tends to support my definition of 'halo effect' (which is similar to but different from the way he used it) e.g. this example chosen fairly randomly: https://www.metaldetectingworld.com/halo_effect.shtml I don't know Gary personally, although I know the area where he filmed that video - it's a few miles from my home. His videos are great but his choice of words is not always precise!

I prefer to use the XY screen, as it gives more info. I also use my ears and sweeping over a signal at 90 degrees to help make the dig/no-dig decision. I only very occasionally get fooled by big lumps of rusty iron with holes and/or sharp corners. PS I don't feel bad about digging the occasional bit of iron, because I know that it means I am less likely to be missing good targets masked by iron.