Nickel Program - ideas?

[Txop]

Yesterday was my first time out with the Deus. We were having a club hunt at an old park. We usually hunt the park for 2 hours. At the end we compare stuff. They pull a piece of paper out of a jar that tells different categories like who has most dimes. I really didn't care much about that. I just wanted to try out the detector.

At the last possible they said they had buried 30 buffalo nickels. They put on on the ground so everyone could swing over it. They also had the area flagged off. On the Deus it read a 62-63. I should have left well enough along and hunted but I decided I would just discriminate everything out but nickels. The setting I did didn't work too well.

Here is what I changed.
- set the DISC up to 58
- set a notch fro 68 to 99.

I was using a copy of the basic program that I had saved. The only change made to it was changing it to full tones. It really didn't work too well for some reason.

This morning I thought I would play around a little and see if I could find some better settings for this. First I tried the saved nickel program and it just didn't hit on the nickel too good unless I really slowed the sweep down.

Here is what I ended up with that works better.

Two tones
Audio Resp to 1
Reactivity to 0
discriminator to 59
Notch 67-99
10 khz

I was just playing with these settings in my house and it seemed to pick up a nickel better than what I did above.

I am just wondering how you would have set it up?
looking back I should have gone to the truck and pulled out my X-terra that I know and closed up the notch squares some but I figured I could sweep faster with the Deus.

I doubt I would use the Deus again in a contest type situation but i have to remind myself this was the first anything I had done with the machine. I only found one of the nickels.

At the end of that short hunt we just opened it up to regular hunting for 2 hours before we stopped. I had put the Deus back into my basic program with the full tones. I hunted for the two hours and must say I was impressed. The machine is very fast and ran very quiet in the park. I dug everything non-ferrous that beeped. I collected a log of bottle caps of all kinds plus a lot of clad. No silver but I didn't expect any being my first hunt.

What was funny is that in the end I won the category for" most nickels". This was not including the buffalo's; just what you dug in the 2 hours. All along the hunt I was thinking how bad I was going to look picking up all the bottle caps.


When everyone got back together we put a all our stuff. I soon saw that everyone else dug as many bottle caps and other junk as I did. It is a very trashy park.

I also played with the sifter program for a few minutes just to see how it sounded. So now I have 3 hours on the machine and love it. The WS4 headphone work great. I had planned on buying a set of deteknix headphones but that's on hold for now. The weight of the machine was the biggest plus. In the parks here you can't take a shovel in so you are on your knees using a Lesche digger. If I needed to re-scan a hole it was easy to grab the shaft of the detector and swing while on the ground. The 9 inch coil is perfect for my style hunting. It really has good separation. The detector's recovery speed is crazy fast.

So any ideas for a program for a specific coin type? I really don't understand why just setting the discrimination and building a notch didn't work well. The nickels sound scratchy and poppy for me.

Thanks for any ideas.

 

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[vferrari]

Yeah, looks like you outsmarted yourself. Despite Calabash's test, I would never set disc that high. I think it would still affect depth. If I would do anything,I would notch up to about 50 and also notch out 70 and above. Give yourself some room. Nothing else should fall in that range except pull tabs and if you notch those out you will also notch out nickels. However, for contests, and I will say the Deus is a smoking contest machine because you can set the reactivity so high (I typically use 3 for contests especially since you do not need to worry about depth) that you can really swing the coil fast and not miss the target which is key for a contest. I recovered over 220 contest targets in three contests in the fall including 90 silvers and a token for a gold coin. Great contest detector IMO.

Note that your operating frequency is key because target ID is determined by your operating frequency - it goes up as your operating frequency goes up. Unless you have ID Norm set to on (which it is by default). I personally don't like operating with ID Norm on because it normalizes all target ID's to 18Khz which tends to jam all high conductors together at the high end of the range (since you cannot have a target ID greater than 99 regardless of which operating frequency you are using). i like to run my HF coil now for contests and will typically run it at 14 khz, but might also run it at 28.8 khz if the contest is favoring mid conductors like gold or nickels.

Let's quickly go over the settings and what they do:

Discrimination - Designed to filter out ferrous and even though it can be adjusted above the ferrous range, there is some debate on how it affects depth and signal quality if you set it higher than necessary (i.e., higher than the ferrous range). I would never run this above 15.

Tones = I usually run full tones for contests but if you are indeed just going to cherry pick in a narrow TID range using two tones or pitch is fine. For general hunting I run either full tones with minimal disc (what I call hot) or 5 tones with disc set between 8 and 10 (what I call fast).

If you want to run a lower range block, use notch instead. You can set up to three notch ranges. In the nickel "cherry pick" case, I would run disc to 10, notch from 10 to 50 and notch from 70 to 99.

Sensitivity sweet spot is 87 to 93 set it as high as you can in that range without too much chattiness. In a contest you can even run it much lower (down to the low 80's) to reduce adjacent detector interference but I generally have no issues running it right around 90. Tx power for me is set at 2 with the HF coil and 2 or 3 is fine for contest hunts unless the soil is hot, then you want to run Tx power at 2 or even 1. Typically do not see contests in hot soil.

Frequency: If you are running the LF coil - I would typically run 8 or 12 for contests with primarily high conductors and run it up to 18 khz if I wanted to cherry pick mid-conductors. Lower frequencies tend to hit harder and deeper on high conductors while the higher frequencies hit harder on small targets (regardless of conductivity) and hit harder on mid-conductive targets (nickels or gold). For HF, as I said above 14 khz or 28.8 khz for mid-conductors.

Iron Volume = 0 for a contest. Note that the setting has no effect on full tones (and in full tones, if you use discrimination, you will not hear anything in the discrimination range regardless of the setting, unlike if you are using multi-tones or pitch, in which case you will hear iron volume if you have it set above 0). I do use it for general hunting if I am using discrimination and multi-tones and want to hear the iron

Reactivity = 2.5 or 3 or even higher. Contest targets are not deep, you want to swing the coil as fast as possible to pick up targets as fast as possible. High reactivity setting allows you to do this without fear of not hearing the target when you pass the coil over it. In a contest, your pinpoint and recovery skills matter most followed by your swing speed and ability to cover real estate quickly. Setting your reactivity below 2 hampers your speed somewhat.

Audio Response = 4 (which is my default search setting) but it only really comes into play on deep targets. The higher the setting, the less audio level difference between shallow and deep targets. Since contest targets are not deep, a lower or higher setting really doesn't matter.

Lets look at your "final" settings that your settled on after the contest:

Two tones - Yeah, I can see that. If not full tones I would go with pitch if I was cherry picking a certain type of coin (nickel/gold or high conductor or silver)
Audio Resp to 1 - Like I said, shouldn't have mattered in the contest, but I like Audio Response = 4 so I can be sure to hear the deeper targets.
Reactivity to 0 - Not recommended - for a contest you want to swing fast, recommend reactivity at 2 to 3 at least.
discriminator to 59 - Again, I do not recommend setting disc this high. Use notch instead with just a little disc cut in. Also, for nickels, I would use notch up to 50 or at most 55 just to make sure I don't notch a nickel.

Notch 67-99 - Should have been ok for nickels although I might of played it safer and set notch at 70.

In other words, when it is all said and done I would recommend "Disc=10, Notch 1= 10 to 50 and Notch 2= 70 - 99. No reason to really cut the notch any closer than that. Foil will read much lower and you will hear pull tabs and can slaw pieces regardless of whether you narrowed that notch down further (say from 10 - 59 and 67 - 99, leaving 59 - 67 open vice 50 to 70).

10 khz - ?? Must be a typo, not a frequency selection on the Deus. (I would use 18 if target nickels and 8 or 12 (whichever has less interference for general contest and high conductors).

My nickel contest cherry picker for the LF coil:

Disc = 10 or No Disc
Tones = Pitch or Full Tones
Sensitivity = 90/Tx Power=2
Frequency = 18 khz
Iron Volume = 0
Reactivity = 3/Silencer = -1 or 0 (I didn't talk about silencer above, but this minimizes the silencer filter affect which is a good bottlecap filter, makes them sound terrible - so if you waated to pull less bottlecaps, then move it up to 3 or 4, see the other thread which discusses this)
Audio Response = Doesn't matter for contest but I like a default of 4 for most conditions.
Notch = either 0 to 50 or 10 to 50 for First Notch and 70-99 for second notch.

For mild soil, set GB to tracking so you don't have to worry about it during the contest. Swing fast, recover fast.

HTH

The pic below is from the dreaded wheatie/bottlecap contest I attended this past October. They didn't put a lot of silver in the ground. I recovered A LOT of targets though.

 

[vferrari]

BTW My silver cherry picker would be same as above, except I would set a notch from 10 to 90 and would have no second notch and I would run a lower frequency (8 or 12 khz on the LF coil and 14 khz on the HF coil). I would probably never really do this because the contests I frequent are throwing other things out there including lower conducting tokens for gold and other high value prizes.

 

[Txop]

Thanks for your reply. After reading you post it appears that running a high discrimination is what did me in. You are saying I should have left it at 10 and built notches.

Am I understanding you correctly? The settings from the default basic program are about the same as you listed. I will adjust a little closer to your suggestions.

I just hadn't seen anything that warned me on the setting of the disc at higher levels. I have to search around a little. Being my first time out I just adjusted it in a logical manner. On my Explorer I would have defaulted it to reject everything and then, in the learn mode ran a nickel across the coil several time and it would open the window up to just get nickels.


I am going to try again.

Thanks

 

[Txop]

I tried your setting and I am not sure with full tones and a fast sweep I have recognized a taeget. With 2 tones it was a little clearer. I am still getting a lot of popping and scratchiness.

Most likely with all the EMI at my house I am going to have to get it to a park down the street. It just goes crazy here as where at the park yesterday it ran very quiet when it wasn't over a target, bottlecap or other target.

I'll give it a try tomorrow.

It definitely hit's better with NO disc or nocthes.


Thanks

 

[vferrari]

First - for a contest and if you are really trying to just cherry pick a certain type of target, two-tone is great, but you do need to set the notches. You should also experiment with pitch. On two tone which is basically an iron volume tone for the discrimination range (unless you set Iron Volume to 0, then it essentially becomes a single tone machine that hits on any non-ferrous target) and whatever tone you pick for everything else, it will sound the same for any target above the discrimination setting if you set no notches therefore you would always have to look at target ID to know what you are hitting. If you set up the two notches as I described, you would only get the tone for the target that fell between the notches.

Regarding disc vs. notch. This is an emotional topic. One school of thought is that if you set disc too high, then you will start affecting the signal quality of every target including those that are above the discrimination range and that could actually affect depth. While Calabash has done some experiments that show you can still hit a deep high conductive target with a lot of disc, what I don't know is how its tonal quality is really affected and how the tonal quality of a mid-conductor would be affected. Disc is a signal processing filter and filters are notorious for having side effects on harmonics and amplitudes of signals that are outside the range of the filter. That is why I recommend using discrimination solely for its intended purpose and that is to knock out ferrous signals or signals that fall in the ferrous range which is predominately up to a TID of about 10 or 15. I really see no reason to run disc higher than 10. Some iron will register higher than 10 and round iron or big iron completely fools the Deus (as it does most detectors) and will ring up very high and sound like a high conductor. Also, some irregularly shaped or very corroded iron has a tendency to "wrap around" the edge and ring up in the very high 90's (97-99). This is called iron wraparound and some experts recommend notching these numbers out permanently. I do not, primarily because at higher frequencies, high conductors can get pushed up into this wraparound range and you run the risk of not hearing them. I will sometimes cut in that notch for lower frequencies if I am in a significant iron patch, but otherwise, I stay away from notching the wraparound region. As far as notch is concerned, it is described as simply an audio blanker (not a detected signal processing filter like disc or silencer) and, therefore, cannot adversely affect target signals that fall outside of the blanked range. The key issue is making 100 percent sure that none of your desired targets will ring up in the notched range or you will never hear them. That is why I recommended widening up the un-notched region somewhat so you won't miss any nickels which can have some variation in target ID due to variations in composition. Not sure what War nickels ring up, but those will tend to ring up higher due to their silver content, for example. The other various nickel types have different alloy compositions as well and will give you a spread.

Finally, other than programming your controller, please do not base your settings on any air tests you conduct in your house. You need to get the Deus out of the house, properly initialized to cancel RF interference, and then properly ground balance it. At that point setting the target on the ground (and away from any other buried targets) in your yard is an ok way to test your settings (if you are not trying to test for depth), but it is best to replicate the actual site conditions as much as possible and if that means the nickels are freshly buried in the dirt around 3 inches or so, then set up your test accordingly. I wouldn't say you would have to go all the way to the park, but not knowing what your yard is like, if that is what it takes to best replicate the contest conditions, then I say do it. Also, don't just test the intended target. Take some high conductor coins (all denominations), aluminum trash (pull tabs, can slaw), bottle caps and run your tests so you can see how the various targets sound under two tones and full tones and how you might be able to notch out the undesirable targets.

A few more thoughts.

Don't forget about the importance of ground balance. Let the machine GB for you by setting it to tracking. Tracking is very good and only gets fooled under extreme soil or trash conditions.

Use a higher frequency like 18 khz if your focus is mid-conductors like nickel. Otherwise, use 8 or 12 khz for general searching. You can use 4 khz for deep high conductors, but it tends to not do as well on smaller targets and because Tx power is locked at 3 for 4 khz, it may also not work so well in highly mineralized soil (hot soil as indicated by the height of the bargraph on the right side of the screen when the coil is pumped) where you want to lower your transmit power.

Keep reactivity as high as possible (for contests) so you can swing fast. 2 to 3 should be sufficient. Also, whenever you adjust reactivity make sure you know where your silencer setting is. Silencer will adjust automatically to the default value associated with the reactivity setting (this is a hidden gotcha) you set so if you want silencer off (i.e., at -1) or set very low (i.e., 0) you need to set it to -1/0 manually after you have reactivity set where you want it.

Frankly, I rarely use notch because it scares me. I do not want to miss a keeper. That is why I gravitated to full tones and no discrimination. I wanted to hear it all and let my brain discriminate. On the flip side I eventually discovered that there are occasions where disc is important and not just to filter out the iron, but also to keep the deus from down averaging non-ferrous target IDs (both visual and audible) in the presence of iron. With no discrimination, this can happen. I know have both a no disc (hot) and disc (fast) search program and my iron unmasking program uses disc at 10 with a pitch tone.

Finally, don't overly focus on this special nickel program because it is a very niche thing. Dunno how many contests you will be using it for. But i encourage you to experiment with it nevertheless because it is an interesting way for you to get to learn the nuances of how the Deus should be programmed.

Good luck.

Oh and don't forget to "Like" my posts. I get a nickel every time you like them. Just kidding...

 

[Txop]

OK, there is a like. You have to remember it was my first time out with the detector. We just do these hunts after on the Saturday following our monthly meetings. I actually haven't been active in any club for years so haven't been to any of these hunts. They took me by surprise when they set up this nickel hunt. I had a new detector in my hands and thought I would get fancy and kick there butts. I should have just left in in basic and watch for the 62-63 VDI's. There was also a silver half hidden as a token for the pot of cash I donated to. Live and learn.

Like I said I hunted the rest of the time in the Basic program with full tones and did as well as the others. Being in Garrett territory most everybody except me and the wife were swinging AT Pro's. First time I had seen one in person. Looks like a nice machine.

I love the Deus mainly because of the weight and the recovery speed. I haven't had a fast detector in a long time. I do have a couple of Shadow X2's laying around. If I had known about the contest part of the hunt I would have just used one of them for that part but I didn't bring them. We found more using the beepers they we have with VDI machines. It's too easy to get lazy and just pick high conductive targets.

For the foreseeable future all I plan on hunting with is the Deus. I will take a different detector as backup but will probably never need it. My wife did real well on the nickels. She uses a White's Classic ID machine. She likes it simple. She got 5 of the buffalo's. I only got 1 with my playing around. Today we were talking and she ask me what was so good about my new detector. Why do wives always have to ruin your fun? They just don't understand the need we have for new toys.

Thanks again for all your advice.

 

[vferrari]

I was just trying to make a nickel joke so don't feel like you have to like my posts. Lol. Anyway, you made me smile about your wife's comment. You are doing great and as long as you are finding stuff, just keep swinging every chance you get without doing much tweaking until you get used to the sounds. You are working on your brain "muscle memory" at this point and then one day it will really click. I recommend basic or a Deus fast variation on full tones and just go with that for awhile until you get used to it. You can switch back and forth between full and multi-tones and your multi-tone settings (tone frequencies and target ID breakpoints) will stay memorized. Again, I recommend full tones for a no-disc approach and multi-tones if you use discrimination with or without iron volume. Good luck and happy hunting.