Omega 8500 Deep 0 is where its at.

[Mike Hillis]

I posted this last year on a different forum. Decided to post it here too.....

So I’m wavering on it. Does it stay or does it go?

I grab the 8500 and do what I always do when trying to make a decision, I start looking at the instrument’s effectiveness and efficiency at doing what I do with them. I do some bench testing and for some reason get stuck on the 8500’s proportional audio. The 8500 is highly modulated and really fades away. So I grab a bunch of headphones and start switching them in and out. The ProStars do a good job, but I recently acquired a set of QZ99. I noticed the response cleans up a little more. Hmmm. I run through my coils with the 8500 and QZ99 and I’m liking what I’m hearing.

Efficiency requires that I cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. The biggest issue I had with the F5 was it was very unforgiving with sweep speed. You sweep too fast and you can be eyeballing a target but not getting a report. The 8500 in Deep 0 doesn’t have this issue. In Deep 0 you can sweep as fast as you want and you still get a report. Might be a rice crispy pop or crackle depending on distance but you still get a report. I liked what I was hearing with the NEL sharpshooter in 3 tone mode in Deep 0 with the QZ99 headphones. So off to the hunt.

I mainly hunt for gold jewelry. Sometimes I do some dedicated old coin hunting but it is primary gold I’m looking for. That means my sought after sites are playgrounds, schools, parks and athletic fields. I don’t care about the age. I only care about the usage. It is totally different than hunting old coins. When hunting old coins I might stay in the same 20 x 20 foot area for several hours trying to coax something out. When hunting gold, its all about increasing the amount of ground covered.

Anyway my first location with the 8500 is a woodchip school playground. I’m in 3 tone mode, Deep 0, Disc at 34 and Max sensitivity. The 8500 is running stable and I’m sweeping fast. Rise crispy cereal bowl. Cracks, fizzles and pops. Some high tones some medium, ocassionally low tones due to the disc setting. Every one of those tiny pops, and crackles and fizzys were targets. Shallow and deep. Loud or faint. Wasn’t missing anything. I’m down below the floor. Wood chippers would know what I mean when I say I’m down below the floor. The wood chips compress into a layer like particle board. Many foil targets and coins were down there. I’m whipping that coil and its still reporting these targets, and correctly identifying them. No gold there but I’m impressed with the number and size and depth of the targets I’m hitting with speed I’m sweeping. If I’d passed over gold I would have heard it. .

Next stop is the turf around the basketball court. Super trashed out. Here I decided to change the audio and just see if I could pull any high tone out of the garbage. The high tone stands out and I get some shallow dimes and quarters but the noise floor is still too much for the modulated audio in turf. As the high tone modulates it loses the definitive sound. So I change the volume of the segments. I turn the audio off for all the segments except for the high tones. So now the display still shows all target responses but I only hear high conductors. That opened a whole new layer of responses I could react to. Deeper coins that didn’t stand out clearly before were now audible. Still all clad here but I was getting 4 and 5 inch coins in the middle of that trash. Some of the iron would wrap and tink but you could see it on the display. I think if there had been deeper coins there I would have heard them.

I ran out of time but plan on going back this Sunday morning and just tune the audio to the high foil and nickel range and see what I can pull out from that turf trash at the basketball court. Maybe there is something good hiding there. I’ve got a lot of trashed turf enclosed basketball courts Deep 0 will really help with.

Anyway, the conclusion of all this is that I’ve developed a liking for the 8500 and it’s proportional audio in Deep 0. Don’t hear much about it so I figured I’d share.

HH
Mike

 

[Mike Hillis]

I'm settling down into keeping the 8500. I hunted it a lot over the Thanksgiving break in a variety of turf locations, mostly with the 11” DD coil. It did well although there are many places where EMI limited me to staying below 70 on the Deep 1, Deep 2, and Deep 3 settings.

For jewelry hunting in the turf I turned off the audio for all segments except for foil, nickel, and tabs. Then went into All Metal and changed the VCO pitch to A4, its highest pitch. Then clicked back into Disc and selected the D1 single tone VCO tone option. The All Metal tone setting carries over to the Disc VCO setting and Pinpoint. Worked pretty good. I could focus. I could tell shallow from deep, and for signals that bounced out of my audio range I could see what they were doing on the meter display. I often switched audio modes between D1 and D5 if I wanted some more audio variance between segments.

The other thing I liked was that I could dial in one end of the audio range or the other with the Disc setting. When I wanted to dial in or expand the low range I could just adjust the Disc setting. If my trash required me to focus on the higher end of my audio range I could raise my Disc to max, notch in the foil, nickel and tab segments, then adjust the disc downward to tighten the high end and lock down the tab responses to a tighter range, or open it up into the screw cap range.

I also like the quick switch to All Metal when using the other audio modes for profiling. That is much more handy than using the dial to click out of Disc into All Metal. The only thing I didn’t like about this feature is that it would move me off my tone options and I’d have to cycle back around to them when I wanted to change. Not a big deal but I liked the quick tone cycle.

The four segment VDI displays are helpful, too. When you just see one segment display you know you have a strong target id lock. When I saw more than one I could rotate around the target and see if I could get a lock or just a reduction in segments displaying. If I couldn’t then I knew I had some weird shaped trash object or some iron falsing. Still working it out but I’ve always like this feature. Its kind of like a visual box plot where you can see the primary distribution and the outliers. Then you can work the target and see if they outliers pull in.

Anyway…….just wanted to follow up. I’ll put it all together in a more concise manner with additional details at a later date. The 8500 is feature rich and takes a bit of time.

HH
Mike

 

[RLOH]

Mike, I just got a 8500 but will have a long wait to use it as we are in the middle of a very bad winter. I have read that many Omega 8000 users did not care for the audio on the 8500. I had one of the first Omega's and there were several places it was totally unuseable because of emi. It was one of the best coin hunters I ever used where emi was not an issue.

I also have a F5 which fits my style of detecting perfectly. I believe that the Omega is a slightly hotter detector than the F5. I have a NEL sharpshooter as my main coil and it is fabulous. All of my F5 coils will fit the 8500 which is one of the primary reasons I bought it. The price really makes it a bargain.

The adjustability on the 8500 is what I like. As a coin hunter, the ability to adjust the volume of each segment can make the hours I spend in trashy parks more bearable to my hearing. Lot to like and play with. I will look forward to your discoveries about this detector. Keep us informed.

 

[RichW]

I also had a very early Omega. Great machine, loves coin. I also held off on the 8500 for a long time because I kept reading the sound wasn't as good. Finally decided to buy one in December and I really like it. Yeah the tones are a little different (tones are a bit clipped in fast) but it's no big deal to me. I love using the fast mode, it will really pull the coins out of the heavy trash.

 

[Mike Hillis]

Best to approach it as a different detector than to think of it as an tweaked 8000.

HH
Mike

 

[Quisp]

Hey All,

I had an Omega 8000 (v4) which I’ve used on/off since it was new in 2012. I haven’t gotten out much these last few years being busy with other things and I tend to get into poison ivy that quickly puts a damper on my detecting (along with my bowling). I hope to get out more this year. Anyway, I did take it out this last Thanksgiving break and it started acting up on me after a short bit. The screen would freeze up and when I turned it off then back on, all the LCD elements were lit.
Now I take very good care of my detectors and they have not gotten used more than a hand full of times each year. And, a detecting year is at best 8 months long here in western NY. So, I couldn’t understand what went wrong. I changed out the battery and let it sit for a few days hoping that it would heal itself. It didn’t. I then contacted First Texas Products, explained the issued and they offered to repair it for free as a onetime courtesy repair. Wow! What great people at First Texas Products. I took them up on the offer and sent it right in, 11” DD coil and all.

It took a while over Christmas (which was fine) and I know they were moving their facilities but I did finally get the unit back yesterday. I had asked via email what the issue was and they said it was the membrane switch. Cool, something simple I guess. I opened the box and took out the paperwork which stated that they replaced the Membrane Switch, Housing and Circuit. Well, I figured, there can’t be much more inside than that. I put in the battery, fired it up while holding the PinPoint button to check out the software version # (wondering if it would change) and I was presented with all kinds of numbers as it cycled through several pairs of digits (I think it’s the serial #). That’s when I noticed the model # on the front said “8500”. I confirmed this by looking closer at the menus and switch labels which had changed.

Best I could tell, the entire head and foam-covered handle was new. The S-rod with arm rest, upper and lower stems were mine as I could see some wear. I’ll have to look closer at the 11” DD coil, but I swear it looked new as well. I didn’t have time to look it all over yet as I had to run off to bowling last night and there is thing called “work” I must attend each day for like 9 straight hours. Ha.

Now I know some folks have a preference for the older 8000, but I’m pretty excited to have a 95% brand new machine. Especially when you consider my options were a broken 8000 or a new 8500. I downloaded the manual and printed it out so I can learn all the new features. It may take a little while to figure out the features of the 8500 but I can’t wait for the spring thaw.

So, here’s to the customer service folks as FTP. Now if they could only invent a Poison Ivy detector, I’d be all set.

Dan

 

[RichW]

I totally agree Mike.

 

[TheHunterGT]

I used a 8000 V4 and a 8500. I have no issues with audio on the 8500 and much prefer it for its stability over the 8000.

VCO tone...no disc...volume muted on categories I don't want...works a treat for me.

 

[Mike Hillis]

I put the 11" Triangulated coil on the 8500 and took it to the park where I found that good watch last year, or was it the year before? Year before I think.

Deep 0, three tone. About 85 on the sensitivity.

Anyway... I like the Triangulated coil on it. Good ground coverage, good depth and the point of the coil is great for pinpointing and picking stuff out of trash.

Big find is the pocket knife. I love finding pocket knives.

It gave an overload signal (everytime I get an overload I think "pocket knife?"), so I hit the quick switch (menu) button to all metal and profiled it. 4" long and 1-1/2" wide spells pocket knife to me. Dug it up and low and behold, it was a pocket knife!

Washed it up good, soaked it in WD40 and got most of the rust off. Makes another good additon to my collection.

Pic shows some change, a dollar coin, lots of trash and the knife.

HH
Mike

 

[dfmike]

That is one good looking knife. What's that shiny looking coil ?