Chime In On Your Silencer Settings

[damatman88]

I am always trying to improve my hunting skills with the D2. I am primarily a wet sand salt beach detectorist. I do enjoy land hunting as well but struggle to find the best settings. I hunt some trashy parks (modern trash and iron) as well as woods with Colonial history that have some iron infestation. From my experience, I have found that raising the silencer above zero tends to very negatively affect depth. I know the silencer is used to quiet the iron, but at the expense of masking good targets. Is this feature used similar to the Equinox 800's iron bias? I used to run that machine's setting at zero. Please share your silencer experiences and settings. Thanks!

[palzynski]

Personnaly I prefer to use use the D2 factory settings with a minimum of changes as they are very well set for what I am doing ( inland coin hunting , low mineralized soils , high iron trash ). I like simple things and it is very easy to reprogram my settings in case of accidental loss.

I have never changed the silencer setting on my D2 or on my D1 

I have used SENSITIVE on my D2 during several months . Now I use TEKKNA ( based on SENSI FT,which requires a little more changes btw .. )

[F350Platinum]

I run silencer at 0, and prefer to use the bottle caps setting at 5. Take a look at my last few posts from the beach. I don't think I'm missing much. 🤔

[Jeff McClendon]

Silencer 0, bottle cap reject 0 or at most 1 for me due to iron mineralization. 

[Rattlehead]

Depends on the site and my mood. For a heavily hunted site with iron, usually at 0. On a virgin or lightly hunted site with iron, I start at 2 with some notch for quickly cherry picking. If the site produces, I sometimes go back and hunt it again with less notch and silencer 0.

[damatman88]

The reason I started this thread was because I tested a target on a dirt site I was hunting. I keep a Mercury dime in my pouch for this purpose. I buried the dime at about 5 inches. Using the fast program, silencer at 2. I could not hit the dime. I lowered the silencer to 0 and it smacked it clearly. Made me rethink my settings.

[F350Platinum]

3 minutes ago, damatman88 said:

Made me rethink my settings.

Wise move. 👍 I agree with all of the above with geographical areas taken into consideration. 🙂

Thing is lots of respected detectorists have been turning off silencer from the start. I'm not one of them, but do trust some people 🤔 @palzynski is from France, and let's face it, the D2 was designed in France for France. 😅 The man finds stuff we can only dream about. 😏

[Chase Goldman]

Since silencer keys off ferrous, it's obviously wise to limit or disable silencer in high mineralized conditions. 

Any filter should be used with moderation and with full knowledge of whether it's benefits outweigh it's drawbacks.  Your simple site dime test is a good way to judge that based on local soil conditions.  What that doesn't tell you is whether the filter would be of any benefit in heavy iron - the best way to judge that would be in conditions where soil impacts are negligible.

Frankly, I'm with F350. - I prefer BC to Silencer for filtering, especially at the beach.  My subjective take is silencer does little for me even in mild soil and challenging iron conditions so I leave it low or off.  However, except for beach detecting, I mainly use Relic mode which has no silencer filter.  So I don't have exaustive field experience with silencer and have also not done a deep dive on how silencer affects target signals under varying condition,  so that's why I label my take on silencer as "subjective".

[damatman88]

I have learned to always be open to new settings depending on the conditions. I like the idea of using very low to no filters so I won't miss anything. I'd rather dig 100 Colonial nails in order to sniff out a great relic or two. I always need a little more squatting exercises anyway!