Andy Sabisch
Active member
Several people have asked about how the Deus hits on silver and if it will hold its own against other proven "silver vacuums" out there. I am not going to say that everyone needs to post their current machines for sale and buy a Deus but I wanted to pass along some experience and some finds from hunts expressly made to search for silver in areas that had produced in the past but appeared to have run dry as of late.
I am sure we all have sites that we have done well at and tend to gravitate back to either when we are pressed for time or want to see if there is just a little more remaining. I try to use many of these sites - some a good distance from where I live now - as tests for new detectors as it may see things just differently enough that goodies that everyone has passed over may now be detected.
Over a 2-month period, I hit several sites throughout Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. The sites I am referring to in this post were sites I was looking for coins at . . . . . I will provide some other reports on Civil War relics as well as hunting cellar holes in the woods which while one hopes to find a coin, coin hunting is not really what one does at these sites.
I tried the 12kHz, 8kHz and 4kHz settings equally at the sites. The 4kHz setting does hit well on silver but the response seemed to be altered more in this frequency than in either of the other two . . . Target ID values shifted and the audio response seemed "cleaner" in the 8 and 12 kHz frequencies. Of those two, the 8kHz was the one that seemed to have the best overall performance for the sites being searched - target response, depth, lack of chatter and more stability.
I started with the BASIC 1 program but over time made adjustments depending on teh ground conditions and saved them for recall later (remember, like the T2, settings are not saved when you power down unless you remember to do so . . . it is easy to readjust it but it does frustrate you when you turn it back on and you are at square one again . . . . . a minor habit to ingrain
)
At sites that had a lot of trash - iron was identifiable but some had lower conductivity trash - I bumped the DISC up to "40" or "45" which still retained the nickels but got rid of the trash . . . . you could do the same with the audio disc settings and reject the trash by audio signature - your call.
As with the post I made on beach hunting, I did not find a double-handful of silver but the fact that I found what I did in sites many, many hunters have been through and worked hard says something about what the Deus was seeing in the ground. A few of the silver dimes were literally vertical as I found them in that position in a deep plug once I removed t it from the hole. A few of the rest were in holes that had nails sticking out from the sides or in the plug yet the signal was clear that a good target was present. The quarters were both 9"+ and adjacent to the sidewalk which had rebar in it. The rest of the dimes produced clear signals yet were not overly deep - 7 inches or less . . . . but in comparing signals with other detectors, two did not give any response and the rest were recognizable as signals but it was not a "sure-thing" that they would have been recovered based on the response they did provide.
In summary, the Deus must have a slightly different way of looking at the ground / trash / keeper matrix and analyzing the resulting signal which allows it to ferret out some remaining goodies. Not being able to detect the two dimes at all was a surprise to me and my partner and I played around with settings on the other detectors to see what might be the culprit with little success . . . sometimes it comes down to one machine sees it and the other doesn't . . . . . go figure.
The photo shows the silver that came from "pounded" sites . . . . . (ran out of holders . . . . need to place an order . . . always good to run out of holders as it means you are finding stuff . . . . .
Let me know if there are any questions on the settings I used at these sites or the response to specific targets that you might have.
Andy Sabisch
I am sure we all have sites that we have done well at and tend to gravitate back to either when we are pressed for time or want to see if there is just a little more remaining. I try to use many of these sites - some a good distance from where I live now - as tests for new detectors as it may see things just differently enough that goodies that everyone has passed over may now be detected.
Over a 2-month period, I hit several sites throughout Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. The sites I am referring to in this post were sites I was looking for coins at . . . . . I will provide some other reports on Civil War relics as well as hunting cellar holes in the woods which while one hopes to find a coin, coin hunting is not really what one does at these sites.
I tried the 12kHz, 8kHz and 4kHz settings equally at the sites. The 4kHz setting does hit well on silver but the response seemed to be altered more in this frequency than in either of the other two . . . Target ID values shifted and the audio response seemed "cleaner" in the 8 and 12 kHz frequencies. Of those two, the 8kHz was the one that seemed to have the best overall performance for the sites being searched - target response, depth, lack of chatter and more stability.
I started with the BASIC 1 program but over time made adjustments depending on teh ground conditions and saved them for recall later (remember, like the T2, settings are not saved when you power down unless you remember to do so . . . it is easy to readjust it but it does frustrate you when you turn it back on and you are at square one again . . . . . a minor habit to ingrain
)At sites that had a lot of trash - iron was identifiable but some had lower conductivity trash - I bumped the DISC up to "40" or "45" which still retained the nickels but got rid of the trash . . . . you could do the same with the audio disc settings and reject the trash by audio signature - your call.
As with the post I made on beach hunting, I did not find a double-handful of silver but the fact that I found what I did in sites many, many hunters have been through and worked hard says something about what the Deus was seeing in the ground. A few of the silver dimes were literally vertical as I found them in that position in a deep plug once I removed t it from the hole. A few of the rest were in holes that had nails sticking out from the sides or in the plug yet the signal was clear that a good target was present. The quarters were both 9"+ and adjacent to the sidewalk which had rebar in it. The rest of the dimes produced clear signals yet were not overly deep - 7 inches or less . . . . but in comparing signals with other detectors, two did not give any response and the rest were recognizable as signals but it was not a "sure-thing" that they would have been recovered based on the response they did provide.
In summary, the Deus must have a slightly different way of looking at the ground / trash / keeper matrix and analyzing the resulting signal which allows it to ferret out some remaining goodies. Not being able to detect the two dimes at all was a surprise to me and my partner and I played around with settings on the other detectors to see what might be the culprit with little success . . . sometimes it comes down to one machine sees it and the other doesn't . . . . . go figure.
The photo shows the silver that came from "pounded" sites . . . . . (ran out of holders . . . . need to place an order
. . . always good to run out of holders as it means you are finding stuff . . . . . Let me know if there are any questions on the settings I used at these sites or the response to specific targets that you might have.
Andy Sabisch