UKD2User

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.

27 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Tekkna is not really a feature, it's just a custom program utilizing an existing D2 target signal processing base program (Sensi FT in this case) and settings.  Unless you were specifically referring to one of the settings or features used by Tekkna and I misunderstood what you referring to.

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?

2 hours ago, Guinea1 said:

I am seriously considering buying a Minelab Manticore and wondered whether there are any peeps on here who regret purchasing the aforesaid metal detector?  Most especially any specific reasons why they regretted their purchase? 

I’m based in the UK and only detect arable land and pasture fields.  Personally, I don’t think I’d find much use for the fancy 2D screen, much preferring to rely on the audio tones instead.  Any feedback would be much appreciated!

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

13 hours ago, phrunt said:

A recent family photo. Maybe my hands were cold, as they look like they would cool down a detector handle.

 

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.

2 hours ago, Digalicious said:

In another thread, you said, "I've often seen the reverse where I will get a solid and loud 85, and dig a cannonball or an axe head"? In that scenario, I'm wondering if the FE/CO meter will clearly indicate that the target is ferrous. Granted, you probably want to dig those targets, but let's say the D2 is falsing on a nail. Would the D2's FE/CO meter indicate ferrous?





 

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.

4 hours ago, ColonelDan said:

Gary Blackwell addresses the halo effect at the end of this video and how CSR impacts it.

 

 

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.

I've always thought of the effect of conductive/salty soil as being different from the halo effect.

I think that conductive/salt subtraction aims to neutralise the effect of a pretty much uniform distribution of conductive mineral salts dissolved in water (mainly sodium chloride solution) evenly spread out in a layer of wet ground and/or water.

I imagine that the return signal from this salty stuff is fairly uniform and is at a predictable frequency/phase-shift - so is easy enough to 'remove' using an algorithm similar to the ones which eliminate the general effect of the ground (as long as the set of frequencies transmitted and analysed in that particular operating program/mode cover the salt response region).

The halo effect, as I understand it, is about corrosion products forming a kind of graduated 'shell' around a metal item - a 'shroud' of rust, or a 'coinball' stuck together by copper/silver/nickel salts leaching into the soil around the coin.   I think that this kind of thing happens to a greater or lesser extent in all soils, and it's obviously not a uniformly distributed thing.

5 hours ago, Lodge Scent said:

Mark, that's normal behavior for the D2. Nonferrous at the edge of detection can sound like ferrous. I'm not surprised that when you raised your coil when over a faint deep target that it went from "good to bad".

I think that all machines probably do it to some extent - perhaps not so noticeably. My Nox 800 definitely does it. I think that the basic laws of physics make it inevitable.

Whoever makes a machine that can reliably discriminate alumin(i)um will make a lot of money!

I believe that aluminum is paramagnetic, although this is a very weak effect I think, which may form part of a technical solution.

With my D2 on the beach I once found an old-style beaver tail ringpull (sans tail) in the same hole as a 925 silver ring.  I could tell there were two separate targets there and they sounded different - even though of very similar size, shape and conductivity.

I find that the audio filter setting (Manticore has similar advanced audio filtering features to the D2) can help to make many pieces of aluminum trash sound trashier than most treasure, but you've really still got to dig the stuff.

Fascinating.  Interesting to see which side is the 'transmit' side!

28 minutes ago, martygene said:

I have but no dropdown showing v 2.0

The dropdown is visible within the web-browser-based update program.

Looks like you need to make sure the phones and the remote are both running the same firmware version.

When you run the web-based updater you can select which version you want to use. Make sure you have already created a user account on the website.

15 hours ago, bklein said:

No, in the 60’s.

Lucky you! 😀 Cold and rainy in the 40's here.

7 hours ago, bklein said:

How does battery life compare?

Just had my ml105 run out on a hunt yesterday at 5-6 hours.  MC had lots left.  Need to check if it’s fw is latest.

Was cold weather a factor, I wonder? All Lithium cells work much less effectively at low ambient temperature.

3 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Actually, the headphones that came with the Equinox (or at least what the manual says below) were ML80's so we both were off on the model number.  But the WM08 did not use the same protocols as the ML80's since it was Minelab proprietary wireless (and considerably faster) compared to the Bluetooth APTX/LL method for the headphones:

Pretty sure the Manticore uses the same standards/protocols for both the WM09 and the supplied-with-detector ML105 headphones, but from what others have said that is also proprietary, just not Minelabs "roll your own" from scratch as apparently was done with other detectors (including the Equinox WM08 channel).

You're right about the Nox I'd forgotten about the WM08 'protocol' and of course they were ML80's If I'm right about the Achilles' heel of the WM08 being its poor antenna arrangement, I hope they fixed that on the 09...

My problem with the WM08 was with other people's phones (especially at the beach). The ML85's were always more resilient than the WM08 even though they used ostensibly the same protocols. I wonder if the WM08 antenna was a poor design/location.

I found that the WM08 unit was quite susceptible to EMI - especially from nearby cellphones.  Is the WM09 the same/better ?

12 hours ago, Mylab said:

The Nox 800 max is around 39-40kHz I measured it!!

Don't forget that the 40kHz transmitted signal will have a reasonably strong 3rd harmonic component at 120kHz - so the Nox is actually transmitting signals at 40kHz and 120kHz (plus a little at the fifth harmonic of 200kHz!).

I strongly suspect that the Nox only analyzes the return signal up to about 40kHz though, but only MineLab know for sure!

39 minutes ago, Cheddar said:

only scanned the replies, didnt read them in depth.

i personally use full tones -6.4 discrim. whether my theories are accurate or not? who knows!

i like to think it gives the machine better performance because it is not trying to figure out if it should be iron or not (probably not true, but let me believe it)

also, it gives you all the information you can get out of the machine. which to me, is important. i want to make the decisions of whether or not i dig a target, not let the machine decide for me. i want as many clues as i can get, and having the entire range of audio gives me that.

now that being said, i hunt some sites that have iron under every sq inch of the dirt. sometimes i actually use relic with IAR and notch out everything (within a few #'s) that i am looking for.

so my answer to your question is yes. its worth it, but obviously depends on where and when you want to use it.

 

Yup. Just like using the original Nox 6/800 with horseshoe mode on. I agree.

1 hour ago, raziel900 said:

Are there any advantages to lowering discrimination (-6.4)? It's the main question of this topic, we discussed it before. I'll give an example because I don't understand what you mean, a non-ferrous target with Tid 70 in a mineralized soil is masked with Tid 7 (ferrous zone) if we have discrimination at 10 that target sounds like a ferrous ok? Now, if in that context we have discrimination at 5, that target sounds like "good" but always with TID 7, right? Or do you mean that by lowering the discrimination that target with "drugged" Tid 7 turns into a Tid close to the real 70 so that coming out of the iron ladder?

Lowering Disc on the D2 does not change the TID of a given target - it just makes it sound like a non-ferrous target (if the 'drug' TID is above the Disc value) or ferrous (if the 'drug' TID is below the Disc value).

As a separate but related idea, what TnSharpShooter seems to have discovered - when looking at his 'BirdDog' settings - is that Notch (as opposed to Disc) does seem to alter the displayed (and heard) TID value - which is kind of weird, but useful in identifying otherwise 'drug'/masked non-ferrous.

So - as I suggested previously - the advantage you get from lowering Disc is in hearing more targets (some of which will have been 'drug' down) as non-ferrous than you otherwise would.  You therefore miss fewer good targets, but probably hear/dig more junk too.

1 hour ago, raziel900 said:

 I'm referring to Paystreak's video, in fact even in other videos he explains that in his highly mineralized soil the high reactivity offers more "depth" in that soil if it lowers the reactivity the target sounds like iron.

And I've given my explanation of the effect he describes.

17 hours ago, raziel900 said:

In Paystreak's video it is the highly mineralized soil that allows it to be drilled better with high reactivity.... Could you use negative discrimination in that context? It would only lead to confusion without any advantage

I think that it's sort of the other way around:

The high mineralization means the only way to 'unmask' a non-ferrous target is to reduce the 'swept volume' of soil being analyzed under the coil at a given moment (by using higher reactivity and/or by using a smaller coil and/or - to a much lesser extent with modern machines - slowing your swing).  By reducing the 'swept volume' by whatever means, you are increasing your chances of 'seeing' the non-ferrous in amongst all the other stuff. What I'm saying is that 'masking' can be due to ferromagnetic dust evenly dispersed through the soil (what we call mineralization) and/or by bigger lumps/particles of ferromagnetic junk (the stuff we tend to think of when talking about 'masking').

Based on the above, given that unwanted ferrous stuff (of whatever particle size) under the coil in the 'swept volume' always tries to overwhelm the non-ferrous signal from the same volume - dragging it down towards ferrous - lowering Disc will help you to find good targets that are having their TID being 'drug down' (as some US Utubers say!) by this effect and would otherwise be ignored.  The downside is that your ears and brain potentially get overwhelmed by sound 'information'!