Deus 2 Vs Manticore. Relic Hunting In Hot Dirt.

[Rick N. MI]

My ground is so mild. I can't talk myself into a Manticore or Deus 2. I just don't think they can gain that much more over what I have. I don't think smf gives me much of an advantage in my mild ground. My detectors are hitting a dime at 10"+ and a gold ring in the sand 14"+. The Legend, Orx, Tejon & gold detectors all have incredible separation in iron. A Sovereign XS2 I had with a 7 1/4" coil (called an 8" coil), I dug IH's at 11" with it using a hand digger.

We are all have vlf's, PI's & Tarsacci technology. My detectors are all vlf's with not a lot difference in them. So what advantage would I have with a Manticore or Deus 2. 

My Detectors:  Legend w/3 coils, Xp Orx, Tejon, Gold Kruzer, Gold Racer, AT Gold

[Daniel Tn]

It seems like a good time to tell the Brandy Rock Farm story. By now, most people that relic hunt and have been on the internet for a while, know that Brandy Rock Farm in Culpeper, VA is legendary. Used extensively by Confederate and Union troops, and housed thousands of dug in troops for the winter camps, and also saw action during the Battle of Brandy Station.  When organized relic hunts were first beginning, the Farm was selected as a site to be surveyed by the hunt committee from Texas.  Locals knew how epic it would be if they could get a hunt there...but the committee of Texas "experts" that did the site survey on it, came in there with only knowledge of hunting sandy non mineralized soil, with Tesoro machines.  They passed right through the fields and hills that would later be infamous and nicknamed for the relics they produced....and didn't dig anything.  Why?  Mineralized ground and detectors that were reading everything in the ground as iron...coupled with inexperience to mineralized ground.  They passed on the site.  Later down the road, Diggin' in VA would hold numerous hunts on that farm. Including several I was a part of...and hundreds of thousands of bullets were found, probably well over 100 belt plates, thousands of buttons, artillery shells, bottles, etc from surface hunting and huts.  Even after as many times as it has been hunted now, I could still go back there and find display cases full of relics.  I dug 3 belt plates there and all 3 were iron signals in the ground.  I've experienced minie balls that would still read as iron in the dirt clumps/piles after digging them.  In fact, when the pulse machines started catching on, one of the things we noticed was the amount of good relics that were in other people's dig holes and such.  They had dug them and the signal disappeared so they left it for trash or simply couldn't locate it again.  One of the plates I dug, was in somebody's dig hole that they gave up on.  It always throws people for a twist that have never hunted in soil like that.  Especially when their favorite machines "back home" all of a sudden won't produce signals and people are coming behind where you just hunted, and digging all kinds of stuff.  A Minelab Explorer/CTX will just null out as soon as the coil gets within a foot of the ground.  

Rick -- Nobody can answer that question for ya bud.  You're curious about em though or you wouldn't be in here reading haha.  For me, that's all I need to push me to buy and try....I am curious and always have to see for myself because I've learned what works for somebody else, might not work great for me.  By comparison...I've had several Tejons over the years. I revisited one not too long ago actually, and tested the 8x11 DD coil for it.  In my soil here, a "hot" Tejon with stock 9x8 concentric coil will get ya about 3-4 inches tops on something like a Civil War bullet.  It did seem to hit buttons better though. With the DD coil, it made it about another inch better on bullets.  If you ran it with the disc on the F in Foil, you'd walk over so much stuff and all you'd hear is the occasional pop from the disc circuit.  In fact...the very site this thread is about, was found by me when I had first got the Tejon.  I walked through the 30 acres doing zig zag patterns and never found a bullet or anything.  The landowner told me of a rock wall in the woods so I went to check it out before I left and found a few shallow 3 ringers in the woods. Came back with the Shadow X5 and started popping more bullets in the woods. For the longest time I thought there were only bullets in the woods and none in the fields.  Ohhh they were there...by the hundreds.  I just hadn't learned that I was walking over them.  Those pops and clicks I was thinking was iron...were bullets.  

.  

[palzynski]

5 hours ago, Rick N. MI said:

My ground is so mild. I can't talk myself into a Manticore or Deus 2. I just don't think they can gain that much more over what I have. I don't think smf gives me much of an advantage in my mild ground. My detectors are hitting a dime at 10"+ and a gold ring in the sand 14"+. The Legend, Orx, Tejon & gold detectors all have incredible separation in iron. A Sovereign XS2 I had with a 7 1/4" coil (called an 8" coil), I dug IH's at 11" with it using a hand digger.

We are all have vlf's, PI's & Tarsacci technology. My detectors are all vlf's with not a lot difference in them. So what advantage would I have with a Manticore or Deus 2. 

My Detectors:  Legend w/3 coils, Xp Orx, Tejon, Gold Kruzer, Gold Racer, AT Gold

SMFs goes deeper than monofreqs on medium and big targets in mild soils . Compare for example your high freq gold detectors with a SMF on a 10g copper coin at 11" depth in a moderately mineralized soil . The SMFs will hit it and the gold detector wont, neither the Orx if set on a high freq . The Orx will detect it  only if you set a low frequency like 5khz . This is what I have measured on my bed tests . 

On the other hand monofreqs are still excellent for example in open fields where the targets are usually shallow 

[abenson]

9 hours ago, Daniel Tn said:

It seems like a good time to tell the Brandy Rock Farm story. By now, most people that relic hunt and have been on the internet for a while, know that Brandy Rock Farm in Culpeper, VA is legendary. Used extensively by Confederate and Union troops, and housed thousands of dug in troops for the winter camps, and also saw action during the Battle of Brandy Station.  When organized relic hunts were first beginning, the Farm was selected as a site to be surveyed by the hunt committee from Texas.  Locals knew how epic it would be if they could get a hunt there...but the committee of Texas "experts" that did the site survey on it, came in there with only knowledge of hunting sandy non mineralized soil, with Tesoro machines.  They passed right through the fields and hills that would later be infamous and nicknamed for the relics they produced....and didn't dig anything.  Why?  Mineralized ground and detectors that were reading everything in the ground as iron...coupled with inexperience to mineralized ground.  They passed on the site.  Later down the road, Diggin' in VA would hold numerous hunts on that farm. Including several I was a part of...and hundreds of thousands of bullets were found, probably well over 100 belt plates, thousands of buttons, artillery shells, bottles, etc from surface hunting and huts.  Even after as many times as it has been hunted now, I could still go back there and find display cases full of relics.  I dug 3 belt plates there and all 3 were iron signals in the ground.  I've experienced minie balls that would still read as iron in the dirt clumps/piles after digging them.  In fact, when the pulse machines started catching on, one of the things we noticed was the amount of good relics that were in other people's dig holes and such.  They had dug them and the signal disappeared so they left it for trash or simply couldn't locate it again.  One of the plates I dug, was in somebody's dig hole that they gave up on.  It always throws people for a twist that have never hunted in soil like that.  Especially when their favorite machines "back home" all of a sudden won't produce signals and people are coming behind where you just hunted, and digging all kinds of stuff.  A Minelab Explorer/CTX will just null out as soon as the coil gets within a foot of the ground.

Culpeper, VA is one of my favorite places to go and do the DIV hunts. I've only been attending since about 34 so I missed the hey day so to speak. But yea real eye opener. My home town has lots of 4 bar dirt and some 5, so I figured it can't be that bad. But the difference between that and the F75 pegged out is substantial. Some of those farms you can't even hear a bullet 2" deep with a VLF. Luckily I took a GPX 4000 the first time I went and knew how to use it. Still to this day I see people show up with VLF'S, some find stuff and some don't. Then you have those that show up with a brand new GPX but have never run a PI in their life. Unfortunately they usually end up digging nails the whole hunt. I did luck out one year and dug a breast plate on Brady Rock Farm with my Deus on a really trashy hillside. Dig holes all around it, but I think it was pasted up by the GPX guys as it was so shallow. Probably blew their ears off and thought it was a big piece of iron.

[Chase Goldman]

Hey all, thanks all for the info on how non-ferrous targets behave in hot dirt.  But the point I was trying to make was that on Dan's Manticore the target hadn't completely "turned" to ferrous yet, it was still flashing a non-ferrous TID so I was focused on how the ferrous limits settings needed to be adjusted to prevent masking of targets that are still able to generate a non-ferrous ID (but off center), while still providing some anti-falsing ability and was also thinking out loud as to whether ML could use mineralization levels to bias the ferrous ID component of the signal to give more "headroom" by biasing non-ferrous towards the centerline.  Of course, ferrous would get biased as well so maybe a zero sum game, but whatever, it's a thought.

As Steve said, the Deus 2 appears to ID non-ferrous at deeper depths in hot soil than the Nox but I have also encountered hot soil areas where the Nox and Legend can ID bullets deeper than Deus 2, so its really a mixed bag, but the D2 appears to me to have the upper hand under most hot dirt situations.  I have exploited the capability but I am also spending a lot of hours with it in all types of conditions so I better understand its subtle audio cues.  The Tarsacci does the best for a non-PI in terms of differentiating ferrous vs. non-ferrous at depth in hot dirt but it is relatively difficult for me to set up to best optimize this capability and has other drawbacks that make it less versatile when you are in areas where soil mineralization is not the overriding factor in target recovery success.

I've detected Culpeper (actually more accurately the Brandy Station area) about as long as Andy (abenson) and perhaps Dan and it is like the iron man triathlon of relic detecting.  Lots of relics were left in the ground because of the long-term winter encampments of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of troops who were doing nothing but trying to stave off cold, boredom, and illness for several months at a time while living in makeshift huts.  The trash and inadvertently lost items of daily camp life are on every farm in that area and included firing ranges for target practice.  This was in addition to the numerous battle engagements in the area, including the Battle of Brandy Station - the largest cavalry engagement of the Civil War and countless other small skirmishes.  The Confederate and Union Armies actually camped near one another during the winters and units were spread out across the countryside, often encountering each other when foraging for food and timber.  The problem is that the easy "VLF" pickings are mostly long gone because of the numerous individual and group hunts that have occurred over the past several years.  Sometimes, an inaccessible field suddenly becomes accessible (and cleared of crop) and buttons and minie balls are vacuumed up by the detectorists.  But you really are going after deep targets with a PI if you want to be successful.  I demonstrated super hot conditions where you can detect a minie ball lying on the surface of the ground, but simply stepping on it with your boot to "bury" it, renders it invisible to your detector - not even an iron grunt.  Yeah, its that bad.

I started out there with an ATX and Deus.  Did not find much with either first time out.  

Brandy Rock Farm was the site of my second or third DIV.  Brandy Rock is now closed off to further relic detecting as the landowner has leased his land to the Historic Preservation Trust.  This enables to farmer to still utilize his land for agriculture but the Trust does not permit detecting or artifact recovery without their authorization   Anyway, at BR, I was able to recover a number of bullets in some "hot" areas with my Deus 1  simply due to the vast number of targets (mostly Minie balls) in the ground, several were brought close to the surface where I could detect them with my Deus.  The ATX was just a beast.  It worked but also "worked over" my shoulder.  I used a tactic similar to Andy's to snag some relics in the back fields of Brandy Rock where there was a lot of old iron and other more recent steel junk (fabric staples used around saplings in a tree farm area).  The PI machines either just blanked out (if they were using the GPX ferrous blanking filter) or the users were frustrated by digging staple after staple.  It is in these conditions where you might get lucky using a vlf amongst the junk to capture a shallower relic that was passed over by the PI folks.  I used a similar tactic at another Brandy Station farm by using my Deus 2 under roadside power lines where there were also hundreds of discarded aluminum cans and can-slaw > two factors that discouraged PI users from being effective or even trying.  I dug a lot of cans but was rewarded with a Breast Plate and New York Regimental coat button that were hiding in that trash.

So there are opportunities to be successful without a PI in hot dirt if you look for the right opportunities and conditions.  It's not easy, takes perseverance, but the payoff can be great.

[BigSkyGuy]

Another thing to consider is coil size. The D2 with 9" coil (I think I have this right Daniel) sees less ground than the MC with 11" coil. Should be interesting to see if the MC with 6x8" coil works any better in hot dirt.

[phrunt]

One question, is it possible the Deus 2 hot soil handling is due to it's decreased sensitivity? It's fairly insensitive to small gold for example, yet the Equinox even in Park and Field modes does very well on small gold, I'd guess by reports I've read it's better on Park or field than the Deus 2 is on gold mode on small gold.

Just a thought, I maybe way off track but just wondering....

[BigSkyGuy]

That was my initial thought phrunt. When sensitivity is too low deep targets id as iron. Some of your testing has shown that ID is less accurate at high sensitivity. There may very well be a sweet spot sensitivity setting that works the best.

[Jeff McClendon]

12 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

The sensitivity for tiny non-ferrous is less than the Equinox 800, but only by a hair's breadth. Not enough that I'd think that's the difference here. I think it is in the nature of the secret sauce processing.

Your Deus 2 must have the hottest Goldfield FMF mode on the planet. 

I have had 2 different Deus 2 9" coils to test. They both had the same results.

Let me put it this way. Instead of a hair's breadth at least on the same seven small gold nugget targets I've tested from .03 grams to .89 grams, its more like a 2" hair's length between Deus 2 and the Legend, Equinox 800, Equinox 900, Gold Kruzer and Garrett 24K. Even my 8 year old 19 kHz Teknetics G2+ on 90 sensitivity and Deus 2's 40 kHz Mono program beats my Deus 2 9" coil in FMF Goldfield by an inch on every target whether its in an air test or an in the ground test.

I hope nobody is currently taking a Deus 2 to the Western USA gold fields looking for smaller gold without another, better VLF backup.

[EL NINO77]

Jeff the question is ... what does Steve mean by the word ... "small non-ferrous materials" ... ist 0.1 gram, 0.3 gram?, 0.5 gram.., or something just under 1 gram gold ?

For example, in my tests on a very small earring made of white 18K gold /very demanding target/ the 9" HF coil does not increase the range when using 30/54 khz on this earring, the range is 1.5cm max - but the signal quality improves..

With a small elliptical 5.5x9.5 HF coil, the range is already linearly greater ....-according to the higher frequency used...

so I feel that the 9" coil - Deus2. can work similarly...