mntnflyr4fun
Active member
Since purchasing my Deus in late June, I had found zero, nada, zip nickles, until today that is.
I started hunting a virgin park and spent about an hour digging shallow clad (no nickles) and wondering how I was going to get more depth out of the machine as everything I was getting was in the top inch or so. I hunt primarily in 8khz and started to experiment with the settings to see if I couldn't get some deeper coins that I knew had to be there.
I pumped up the xmit power to three, lowered the sens to 80 so it could breathe a little with the hot xmit, set reactivity to 2 and silencer to 1 and immediately dug a coin at about 4", so I knew I was on the right track depthwise, what I didn't expect to have happen was for the nickles to start flowing out of the ground. Over the next 2 hours I pulled 9 nickles, and one of them a double stack....I had NEVER dug a nickle before and am not sure what to attribute the sudden success to, but I later went to a small site I had been on 5 or 6 times before with the Deus and my Etrac and pulled 4 more nickles. I am still dis-combobulated about what caused that change in performance, but I think I am on the right track now for both depth and getting the nicks........
Another interesting thing was that none of the nickles produced a completely solid signal as did the quarters and dimes I was digging. I almost didn't dig the first one as it was singing the right tune, but was really crackley, but after the first one, I started to just focus on the high sound and the fact that the TID was in the 45-47 range regardless of how much extraneous noise was made while targeting and like I said, the nickles flowed......I just can't quite wrap my head around why the nickles were so scratchy when the dimes and quarters held a good solid signal all the way to the tip of the coil.....so if anyone has any thoughts on that I would love to hear em......
Anyway, it was a breakthrough for me as I knew that as long as I wasn't getting nickels I was probably missing more, so now I feel I have crossed a threshold and its one more Deus lesson down.
Of course, now I wonder how many of the scratchy signals I have been passing over could have been jewelry in some form or another but at least now I can start to focus on trying to figure out how to do a better job discriminating out the junk from the other stuff that I still haven't found with the Deus like maybe a few some wheats, indians, jewelry etc.....I found my first silver dime so the silver hurdle has at least been cleared once.
Tough machine to learn compared to my Etrac as its so dependant on sounds and the quality of the sound. Another thing I noticed today was that several dimes and quarters sounded off with a double hit, almost like an iron nail (like on my etrac, bonk bonk) but when I would use the pinpoint there was only one target, it had the right numbers and the right tone, just a subtle double hit....I hadn't really noticed that before, but it became quite noticeable as it happened quite often throughout the hunt, so another Deus tone lesson to put away for future use.
All in all a good day, found some nickles, and learned a couple new things about the tones.....still gotta get the thing to get me down past 4-5 inches which should have been do-able as the mineralization strength was at 1/2 scale or less all day and registered in the 75-80 range, so the soil was pretty good, just can't seem to find anything at depth....I am sure it will come, learning this deus is like peeling an onion.....
I started hunting a virgin park and spent about an hour digging shallow clad (no nickles) and wondering how I was going to get more depth out of the machine as everything I was getting was in the top inch or so. I hunt primarily in 8khz and started to experiment with the settings to see if I couldn't get some deeper coins that I knew had to be there.
I pumped up the xmit power to three, lowered the sens to 80 so it could breathe a little with the hot xmit, set reactivity to 2 and silencer to 1 and immediately dug a coin at about 4", so I knew I was on the right track depthwise, what I didn't expect to have happen was for the nickles to start flowing out of the ground. Over the next 2 hours I pulled 9 nickles, and one of them a double stack....I had NEVER dug a nickle before and am not sure what to attribute the sudden success to, but I later went to a small site I had been on 5 or 6 times before with the Deus and my Etrac and pulled 4 more nickles. I am still dis-combobulated about what caused that change in performance, but I think I am on the right track now for both depth and getting the nicks........
Another interesting thing was that none of the nickles produced a completely solid signal as did the quarters and dimes I was digging. I almost didn't dig the first one as it was singing the right tune, but was really crackley, but after the first one, I started to just focus on the high sound and the fact that the TID was in the 45-47 range regardless of how much extraneous noise was made while targeting and like I said, the nickles flowed......I just can't quite wrap my head around why the nickles were so scratchy when the dimes and quarters held a good solid signal all the way to the tip of the coil.....so if anyone has any thoughts on that I would love to hear em......
Anyway, it was a breakthrough for me as I knew that as long as I wasn't getting nickels I was probably missing more, so now I feel I have crossed a threshold and its one more Deus lesson down.
Of course, now I wonder how many of the scratchy signals I have been passing over could have been jewelry in some form or another but at least now I can start to focus on trying to figure out how to do a better job discriminating out the junk from the other stuff that I still haven't found with the Deus like maybe a few some wheats, indians, jewelry etc.....I found my first silver dime so the silver hurdle has at least been cleared once.
Tough machine to learn compared to my Etrac as its so dependant on sounds and the quality of the sound. Another thing I noticed today was that several dimes and quarters sounded off with a double hit, almost like an iron nail (like on my etrac, bonk bonk) but when I would use the pinpoint there was only one target, it had the right numbers and the right tone, just a subtle double hit....I hadn't really noticed that before, but it became quite noticeable as it happened quite often throughout the hunt, so another Deus tone lesson to put away for future use.
All in all a good day, found some nickles, and learned a couple new things about the tones.....still gotta get the thing to get me down past 4-5 inches which should have been do-able as the mineralization strength was at 1/2 scale or less all day and registered in the 75-80 range, so the soil was pretty good, just can't seem to find anything at depth....I am sure it will come, learning this deus is like peeling an onion.....