Tekkna For The Deus 2, First Impression (updated 3)

[Gary XP]

On 2/21/2024 at 2:03 AM, F350Platinum said:

Recently Gary Blackwell put up two videos informing us about a program someone else introduced to him - "Tekkna".

It has a whizzy name for sure, and some really odd parameters.

Here's the first video:

The idea is that it's supposed to help you find small coins in iron infested areas. Let me first mention that no program or set of parameters for the D2 is "magic", although @Rattlehead's "Silver Slayer" was as close as one could get on V0.71 in my opinion. 🙂 That was for coin shooting.

Today I went back to continue my grid search of the place I was yesterday, but I quickly found out there was really nothing else, I believe it was a spot that was used a few times for a gathering in the early 1800s, there were oyster shells everywhere and occasional big iron hits, I dug a couple of them and they were all kettle fragments.

I then switched to random hunting, located another really trashy spot further away, put the 9" on and tried Tekkna. Purely by coincidence I swung the detector a few times and got an 87 in all the trash, Tekkna really sounds off clear when you have a non-Ferrous target. Between a few odd bits of heavily squelched iron, I dug this:

Yet another Spanish coin, #5 this year. 😎 I believe it to be a Half Reale cob. The reverse is this:

Not much to go by other than the cross size, it would be much larger if it were clipped. Cobs are oddly shaped and cut.

I searched around for two more hours using this program, made a couple of tweaks to it, first iron volume which I reduced to 8, and then Audio Response which I increased to 5. I also lowered Reactivity to 2 rather than 3 and heard a lot more targets, but from then on the only stuff I got was bits of lead. I also put bottle caps at 3 because the first time I used it here I dug a bottle cap. I might change that to 5 if I get another, it really doesn't mess things up, I've found gold in the beach with it at 5.

Here's his second video posted today that gives clear instructions on how to set it up on the WS6:

 

And here, in a nutshell are my notes for setting it up on the RC unit if watching the first video doesn't help:

Tekkna Program

Based on Sensitive Full Tones

Disc 42

95 sensitivity

Frequency Max 40

Iron volume 10

Reactivity 3

Audio Response 4

Frequency offset 10

Bottle Caps 0

Notch off

Silencer 0

My impression of this program is that it is "interesting", it's not for the 13" coil for sure. You're going to be using it in machine gun iron hoping to squeeze one more target out. 😅 You don't need the bigger coils grabbing stuff on edge that might overwhelm the center.

I lowered iron volume because it really hammers you, 8 is rather comfortable. I raised Audio Response because I wanted targets to jump out slightly more, and lowered Reactivity because I felt I wasn't hearing enough.

I don't think the program is really "unmasking" anything, it's just giving you a better chance to find good stuff in the bad stuff. From other tests I've done live in the field I have yet to see any D2 mode "unmask", that seems to be a myth to me.

If you're like Gary (I am) and want to feel like you're hearing everything, albeit a whisper until you catch a diggable target, it works rather well for that. It did find a small desirable coin in a bed of crap. Understand though, my area of the country has a lot of Spanish silver, you're not gonna just go out and have it appear. 🤣

I'm pretty sure the UK is a lot different than my mild soil here in Virginia, but Tekkna might be another tool to add. I did not dig any iron, and had no instance where I might have.

Check it out. I'll be testing it a lot more very soon, and will update this with any other observations I make.

GL, HH 🍀 

Great review, thanks for your feedback 🤝👍

[F350Platinum]

I guess I'm equally dubious and curious about this subject of "unmasking". 🤔 It's been mentioned many times in this thread, and yet Tekkna doesn't seem to do that at all. It merely "plucks" a desirable target from an abundance of junk. The goal is to get a consistent repeatable signal.

"Unmasking" to me is the ability to ignore an undesirable target using discrimination or any other filter to locate a desirable target that is either nearby or under an undesirable target.

I have only used one machine with which I was able to do that, literally set discrimination at a level that completely ignored the iron nails placed over a silver coin, by first dialing them out before placing them on the coin. No sound at all passing the coil over the nails alone.

That machine is a Tesoro Vaquero, I'm told that many of the other models made by Tesoro are also able to do it.

However, the machine only indicated a target was there, not what it was. That's less cool than what Tekkna  does in a sense. At least you have the additional ID information. What is under the nails could be anything.

I tried the Deus 2 and the Equinox, both excellent modern digital machines, first by ignoring the iron signal separately using discrimination and then notch, hoping to "see" the coin ID with the nails placed on the silver coin.

Sorry about the detail, but I didn't wish to be thought mistaken in my method. If I am that might be the explanation I seek. 🙂

Both the Deus 2 and the Equinox failed the test at any response level, either generating an iron tone or nothing at all. There might have been a slight chirp but nothing indicated the coin was "unmasked", no steady tone or ID. I would not have made the dig decision.

I performed this test on a board with two very old nails, covering a Barber quarter and dime with them.

All Tekkna does is discriminate one ID, and utilizes fast reactivity and very little filtering, with whatever other unknown advantages Sensitive FT has. I can pretty much get the same effect from other programs by just cranking up reactivity. Ultimately depth is lost, as I don't hear as many targets the faster I turn up reactivity/recovery.

So, I'm curious, what is this "unmasking" mentioned many times here? I watched one video posted in this thread as some sort of truth, but to me it was doing only a "nearby" comparison. 

To be fair I have not tried this under V2 on the Deus, perhaps that will help.

[simsa]

 

[F350Platinum]

@simsa, 

Where can we find the settings for Jack Fast?

Thank you for posting these videos. 👍

[UKD2User]

15 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

I guess I'm equally dubious and curious about this subject of "unmasking". 🤔 It's been mentioned many times in this thread, and yet Tekkna doesn't seem to do that at all. It merely "plucks" a desirable target from an abundance of junk. The goal is to get a consistent repeatable signal.

"Unmasking" to me is the ability to ignore an undesirable target using discrimination or any other filter to locate a desirable target that is either nearby or under an undesirable target.

I have only used one machine with which I was able to do that, literally set discrimination at a level that completely ignored the iron nails placed over a silver coin, by first dialing them out before placing them on the coin. No sound at all passing the coil over the nails alone.

That machine is a Tesoro Vaquero, I'm told that many of the other models made by Tesoro are also able to do it.

However, the machine only indicated a target was there, not what it was. That's less cool than what Tekkna  does in a sense. At least you have the additional ID information. What is under the nails could be anything.

I tried the Deus 2 and the Equinox, both excellent modern digital machines, first by ignoring the iron signal separately using discrimination and then notch, hoping to "see" the coin ID with the nails placed on the silver coin.

Sorry about the detail, but I didn't wish to be thought mistaken in my method. If I am that might be the explanation I seek. 🙂

Both the Deus 2 and the Equinox failed the test at any response level, either generating an iron tone or nothing at all. There might have been a slight chirp but nothing indicated the coin was "unmasked", no steady tone or ID. I would not have made the dig decision.

I performed this test on a board with two very old nails, covering a Barber quarter and dime with them.

All Tekkna does is discriminate one ID, and utilizes fast reactivity and very little filtering, with whatever other unknown advantages Sensitive FT has. I can pretty much get the same effect from other programs by just cranking up reactivity. Ultimately depth is lost, as I don't hear as many targets the faster I turn up reactivity/recovery.

So, I'm curious, what is this "unmasking" mentioned many times here? I watched one video posted in this thread as some sort of truth, but to me it was doing only a "nearby" comparison. 

To be fair I have not tried this under V2 on the Deus, perhaps that will help.

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).

[F350Platinum]

13 minutes ago, UKD2User said:

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).

Thank you! 🙂

I see that we are closer to what I'm getting at, excellent reply. 🏆 This forum is the last place we should be posting discouraging disinformation.

I did a little digging and found this video by Jack the Templar, very good in-ground test that makes way more sense than any I've seen yet, and it is clever:

It's not captioned but I am going to try and pull the settings from it. Luckily his D2 is set up in English 😀

I think this is the closest to "unmasking" as one can get.

Stay tuned. 🙂

[UKD2User]

12 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Thank you! 🙂

I see that we are closer to what I'm getting at, excellent reply. 🏆 This forum is the last place we should be posting discouraging disinformation.

I did a little digging and found this video by Jack the Templar, very good in-ground test that makes way more sense than any I've seen yet, and it is clever:

It's not captioned but I am going to try and pull the settings from it. Luckily his D2 is set up in English 😀

I think this is the closest to "unmasking" as one can get.

Stay tuned. 🙂

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.

[F350Platinum]

I did try it after watching the video again. I got the settings as best as I could, one thing I didn't understand at all is the threshold expert setting at 603khz. 🤔 He probably explained it but no captions.

I'm lucky enough to have an old 1850-1900s home site right in front of my house, probably one of the nastiest demolition sites I have in my portfolio.

Tekkna managed to squeak a few things out of all the junk there previously, but at the cost of digging a lot of trash. Lifting the coil was the only thing that saved me from deleting it.

I can see JTTFast as a very specialized tool, but just for the heck of it as I was leaving my yard, I ran the coil over some steel rebar that marks property lines here, and it hit it hard as a good non-ferrous target. 🤬

Quite frankly this continued at the house site, and with iron volume at 0 there was no way to know when I was there, so I had to use Tekkna to find the spot. I also often switch between Relic and the other two, Relic was way more accurate and hit targets much deeper. Probably the 24kHz max setting.

I found the fast program sounded off great on all really deep iron, some that both Tekkna and Relic (my main hunting program) also did. Worse, it couldn't "see" targets more than about 4" deep with sensitivity at 75, again something I don't get. 🤔 Lifting the coil to get the target to disappear is also a waste, sensitivity is too low.

Here's the result after an hour of hunting this nightmare:

Nothing but roof steel. Lots of early houses in the Southern USA are covered by steel roofing, some think it romantic, but when cut small, twisted and broken it's horrible.

I noticed one interesting thing in the video, he has a probably tough coin to find with a nail directly ahead of it, and never really passes the coil over the nail.

Honestly I know there are coins out there, but unless they can overwhelm the iron above them like the group of coins with nails on them, this is not "unmasking" either, again merely reactivity playing its part. I can turn it up with just about any program, and it will separate better, but higher than 3 without high sensitivity means loss of deep targets.

These are my impressions from a real site, not a test garden or wood blocks. The patterns he was sweeping over would almost never be something you would find in the real world.

So, my conclusion is "meh". 🫤

[F350Platinum]

For anyone interested, here are the settings based on the Fast program:

Disc 4.2

Silencer 0

Threshold expert Pitch 603 ??

Sensitivity 75  ??

Frequency shift 4

Iron volume 0

Reactivity 4

Audio response 6

After a while using it I switched notch from 23-24 to 00-00, which eliminated "some" falsing on deep iron, but not all of it. This works very well with Relic.

[JCR]

I have watched quite a few videos the last six months or so from some of the Eastern European testers. They have a somewhat different approach than we in the USA because their conditions are also different. Their ancient habitation sites seem to have plenty of very small iron bits, but not a lot of whole nails or the farm & wagon iron we dig on relic sites.  The desirable  targets they search for seem to be much smaller and of lower conductivity than ours.  Still, I have learned a lot from some of them and can use it for my sites. In very heavy nails, their approach is helpful to un mask good targets that are being drug down by the co located iron. I still have to decide how small/low I want to go, but today’s machines can pull some surprising targets.    Picking through the iron with a smaller coil and/or faster separation is a different game for different conditions.  I want to have the ability to set a machine up to hunt the conditions I have. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel.