Exploring The D2 Learning Curve, Part Deux

[CPT_GhostLight]

To be fair, this is as much a detecting learning curve for me as it is a Deus II learning curve, but as I have been wading through all this, I have been helped immensely by most everyone on this forum who is much more knowledgable and experienced than I am. I can't express my gratitude enough for all the help freely given here. I'd be lost without it.

I felt I'd reached a wall or plateau in my learning as many do when learning new things, but recently I made a break through that was directly related to advice given here and insights from another fellow who I is on another forum but I don't know if he is a member here. Many of you probably know him as NWGA on Youtube and Rattlehead on the other forum, and you may be familiar with his Silver Slayer program for the D2 based on Fast. And I should add the following is just my experience in my local soil so be aware and take that into consideration. 

Now let me first say that I have really come to like the Fast program on the D2 for use in my local park hunting, but I have never really done any cherry picking. I always thought that notching would just make me miss something good. I usually use very low discrimination and no notch and dig everything that sounds good and go into a park and grid like mad until I get worn out. I've also set up a wide open version of the stock Fast program with PWM Audio version of Pitch Tones, Discrim at 6.8, and B-Caps and Silencer at 0, and it has opened up my hearing for all kinds of targets including some really tiny ones. This program and testing a lot of various good and bad targets in air and ground has helped me recognize the nuances of many different target sounds. The only down side is I dig a ton of trash because no matter how good I think I'm getting at recognizing trash a lot of it still fools me.

Enter the Silver Slayer... I tried this program a few months ago and was worried about missing targets so I stopped using it. Let's face it, if you notch, you CAN miss good targets. In my recent learning growth, I have begun to notice a pattern to where many types of targets fall on the VDI and audio scale on the D2. This is becoming very helpful in making dig/no dig decisions, but my overall impulse is just to dig. I have a hard time walking past a good sounding target even if I know it is trash (and it usually is). So a few days ago I decided to get outside of my box and try cherry picking one more time just to try something different. My local detecting club members, some of whom have been hunting since the 70s, all say the parks have been detected out for older coins long ago, and I haven't found any evidence to the contrary. I had a few hours to play on Saturday morning so I decided to load up the Silver Slayer program again and go to one of the older parks in town just to see if it could find anything interesting.

This park is still very active and hunted by locals regularly. As I stepped onto the grass I noticed right away how quiet it was in the headphones. This park is packed with can slaw, pull tabs, and old iron and trash from the demolished houses that stood there from the 1800s to the 1960s. It wasn't long until the coins started popping up. I ended up with a 1993 quarter with a Zincoln penny fused on top of it, 5 more Zincolns, 4 modern pennies, 1 copper Memorial & 3 Wheat pennies from the 1950s, 6 nickels (3 of them were early 1960s), 5 dimes dating from 2020 back to 1967, and a 1945 silver Mercury dime (my 3rd silver coin found in the wild with the Deus 2!)  I must admit, I didn't worry too much about what I might be missing because I was just having too much fun. It's possible I missed something good but I wasn't digging nearly the same amount of trash I normally do so I just didn't care. I was just hunting coins and I hit silver. There is something really special going on with the way the D2 handles notching and I want to learn more about that. It was a freeing experience for me. Of course I won't use the SS program all the time but for the sheer joy of coin hunting, I highly recommend you give it a try if you're into that sort of thing. ?

[F350Platinum]

Way to go Cap'n! Nice Merc and wheats and nickels!

Next time I'm in a trashy area that isn't a relic field I'll try that. Gotta write stuff down soon if there is ever a D2 update, but I'll wait for the smoke to die down before doing it, V0.1.7 is working well for me.

Why won't I use SS in a relic area? Consider this story from my last post:

"I was walking towards Chase and bam..."

What I didn't write there was his comment:

"I've been digging ? 75s all morning and you get a civil war button?"

? He ended up getting a couple nice buttons anyway, heck my Dandy was an 89 or some such. There are a lot of small can bits and junk metal in that spot. Some of it hits the 90s... ?

Now that aside, if I used that program at one of my campground permissions it might really be interesting. Thanks for the proof!

I'm using BC filter up to at least 3 to push out some of the iron that falses, but an ax head was a beautiful 71, and square nails were in the 70s too. ? Noticed your iron and bottle caps. ?

Great to see you out there getting the silver. You might have to go "all metal" to get the gold, that 14k gold chain in Virginia Beach was no joke, kinda scared me. ? D2 was totally blind to it just dropped in the sand in front of me.

Probably one of the most important things I've been told about detecting so far came from @dogodog, who said:

"If you're not digging foil, you're not finding gold" ?

[CPT_GhostLight]

2 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

 

I'm using BC filter up to at least 3 to push out some of the iron that falses, but an ax head was a beautiful 71, and square nails were in the 70s too. ? Noticed your iron and bottle caps. ?

Great to see you out there getting the silver. You might have to go "all metal" to get the gold, that 14k gold chain in Virginia Beach was no joke, kinda scared me. ? D2 was totally blind to it just dropped in the sand in front of me.

Probably one of the most important things I've been told about detecting so far came from @dogodog, who said:

"If you're not digging foil, you're not finding gold" ?

Thanks, Bob. Yeah this was just a silver quest and the Silver Slayer program definitely delivered. I know NCtoad and others have been killing it with that program, so I decided to give it a go.

As for the nails, some were in the holes with the coins and some I just dug early on to verify their ID which was usually a false at 82. The rusty bottle caps was the same thing. It was just a check 'em and forget 'em strategy for the coins shoot. For regular hunts I still use my modified Fast program with no notches and Relic for relic hunting. ?

[F350Platinum]

7 minutes ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

Thanks, Bob. Yeah this was just a silver quest and the Silver Slayer program definitely delivered. I know NCtoad and others have been killing it with that program, so I decided to give it a go.

As for the nails, some were in the holes with the coins and some I just dug early on to verify their ID which was usually a false at 82. The rusty bottle caps was the same thing. It was just a check 'em and forget 'em strategy for the coins shoot. For regular hunts I still use my modified Fast program with no notches and Relic for relic hunting. ?

Yeah somewhere in the above was thanks! ? I'm going to try it.

Here, a silver quest is a skunk day for the most part, so I just dig everything in the 90s ? Coke cans, steel, you name it.

[Jeff McClendon]

Dwayne (Rattlehead) is the real deal. He is a member here too by the way.

The Silver Slayer can be set up as a USA clad coin slayer too or a gold ring/silver coin slayer or even a relic slayer for times when the aluminum or iron trash is just overwhelming. I use it as a last resort, raise the Pitch tones pitch as high as I can stand and lower the iron audio volume to 1 or 2……….great starting point for an emergency “I just can’t stand the noise anymore” program.

I used it yesterday before my ankle surgery at an old home site and came out with similar finds to CPT……including a Mercury that I wasn’t expecting and some 1950s nickels and wheats. I had gridded the same site with Deus 1 and the Equinox so I am impressed. Nothing deeper than 6”……in moderate enough mineralization to alter Deus 1 target IDs pretty severely so notching it in a similar way in the past would have been a joke at this site.

Not trying to hijack this topic by any means, it is great information so far. Here are some easy links for people that haven't seen some of Rattlehead's posts

Rattlehead's Silver Slayer program

Some more of Rattlehead's Deus 2 content from this site.

 

[CPT_GhostLight]

Thanks Jeff and thanks for posting the links. I hope your ankle surgery went well and you are on your way to a swift recovery.

The whole point of my post was to get that info out to people who might not be aware of it. Dwayne's program opened my mind to possible benefits of notching on the D2 when used judiciously. I had always thought that notching was a bad thing and would cause me to miss good targets. I tested many of the signals with my other programs and the Silver Slayer and was surprised by how well it unmasked some targets that my Fast program with no notch missed. The more I learn, the more I realize how much more I need to learn! ?

[NCtoad]

I’ve been using Rattlehead’s silver slayer program a lot recently also.  CPT, I also have your concerns about missing good targets (mainly gold) with a lot of notching.  However I started looking at this from another perspective.  I mostly hunt for silver coins and the silver slayer program is very good for this especially in trashy areas.  So my new perspective on this is that once I go through a site looking for silver, I can always go back using different notching or another program more suitable for finding mid and lower conductors.  I will mention this: one of the first times I tried the silver slayer program I dug a nice 10k ring that came in at 63 in that nickel window that doesn’t get notched out!

[Jeff McClendon]

Personally, it doesn’t really matter so much what land program is used for this type of notching as long as it is one of the first six FMF program which have different frequency weighting. I wouldn’t use Deep HC for small gold jewelry but otherwise any of the rest will do fine. One factor is where to set the notches to match the targets being looked for. The biggest factor to me is the use of the Deus 2 Pitch tone setting whether using PWM or Square and adjusting the actual pitch of this highly modulated tone to fit ones hearing so it will stand out from the low tone used for the notched targets when iron audio is ON. Using the audio equalizer has helped me too along with having the best ground balance, reactivity and audio response settings for the ground being hunted.

 

[Rattlehead]

My ears were burning so I knew someone was talking about me.  Not really, the forum software gave me a notification. 

Thanks for the kind words and the shout out guys. 

Glad to hear the SS program is working well for you. Its just some notching and a few minor tweaks, but man it sure does make those coins jump out at ya! You can definitely customize the notched areas to your liking and use it to cover other target ranges. With the way the Fast program uses higher weighted frequencies, it should work fine for gold jewelry and other lower conductors as well. A lot of the sites I hunt just have so much modern trash that without some serious notching, it would drive me nuts!

I agree with CPT_GhostLight, definitely something special about how the D2 handles notching. I really like the Fast program, and pitch tones in general. The way the D2 is able to convey so much info through audio is outstanding. I'm really enjoying mine.