xp Deus - Seaweeds in dry beach

Skiron

Jr. Member
Aug 18, 2019
62
34
Greece
Detector(s) used
Equinox 800, XP Deus
Primary Interest:
All Treasure Hunting
Hi all,

I was playing around with my Deus this weekend on the dry part of a nearby pebble beach and was trying to get rid of the issue below:

At a certain distance parallel to the sea (in the dry part, about 10m away from the water), there is a zone with a lot of dry or damp seaweeds just under the pebbles. This "seaweeds zone" is about a meter width.

I was using my "dry beach" custom program and whenever my coil was sweeping above the seaweeds it was falsing a lot. Right or left of the seaweeds zone, it was running cmpletelly stable, but above the seaweeds it was going crazy...

The custom program I was using is:

Freq. 28 khz
Sens. 95
Discrim. 7.5
Reactivity 2
Silencer -1
Tx power 2
2 tones
GB tracking (in the dry pebble part of the beach, I have 88-89 readings)
ID Norm on (I'm a lite user....ID norm is always on, so all vdis are normalized @18khz)


The one thing I noticed as I was trying to get rid of the seaweeds falsing, was that if I change frequency from 28 khz to 8 khz, the problem was dissapearing and I had no falsing.
It seems that with the lower 8 khz I'm running a lot smoother in the dry beach, and whenever there are seaweeds below I can handle them much better with the lower frequency.

Furthermore, with the 8 khz im not supersensitive to tiny foil witch is good too.
I must state here that, due to the incredible amount of little foil and aluminum pieces that the beach has, I usually avoid digging vdis of 45 and below (remember, Id norm is on...so this is 18khz vdis).
I'm mainly after gold rings (cause I know that small chains are really dificult and give a very low vdi, and I'm not willing to dig all that tiny foil paper or aluminum tiny pieces that comes in vdis under 45 or so...I have already accepted the millions of pultabs to find the rings, but I can't afford to dig the incredible amount of tiny foil that this beach has! So I'm accepting the risk to loose chains or veeery thin rings)

Some questions based on the matter above:

1. Does higher frequencies like 28 khz are indeed so sensitive to seaweeds??? Is this something common? Would you advice lowering to 8 khz to get rid of them? (unfortunatelly, I can't just avoid seaweeds since they are sitted in the high tide line mark zone and above, and this "towel zone" is where I like to hunt since the deus stragles with the wet beach part as I tested)

2. I already know, that the higher the frequency the more sensitive is Deus in medium conductors like gold...so if I lower my frequency at 8 khz to silent those seaweeds (and some tiiiny aluminum also), will I also miss gold rings??? Remeber, I'm not after thin gold chains...just rings.

Thanks! :)
 

I would try the black coil. Try running 17 kHz and lower the sensitivity to around 85 to 90 or whatever works. I wouldn't run with the coil cover there either. Just a thought.
 

Hi Rook,

I only have the x35 coil....I tried 17 khz but it was also falsing the same (a lot) above these seaweeds zone, just like the 28 khz do. Only @8khz things was smoothed down...
However I didn't try lowering the sensitivity below 90 (and or TX power) to see if this helps...I'm in the dry part of the beach and I didn't thougth it would be needed....I'll give it a try hopping that I won't loose to much depth, since the "hard pack" under the pebbles is already deep enough (as much as 12'' in some areas) and I'm trying to reach this level since most goodies go through the pebbles and stop in the hard pack under them.

Regarding removing the plastic coil-cover....this is something I hear for the first time...how the coil cover affects?

Thank you for your advise!
 

What the detector is probably sensing is the salt water content of the seaweed. Lowering frequency can make it run more stable, but you can also try running wet beach over that area and see if you can run at the higher frequency which is more sensitive to gold. Wet beach runs ground balance in the salt zone which is a lower setting than normal soil or dry sand. HTH
 

What V said, and I noticed seaweed normally has a lot of tiny aluminum stuck to it. The latest version gets rid of a lot of the falsing.
 

Thank you both....!
I remember that, even if I was in the dry part of the beach and above the high tide mark, these seaweed were still damp so yes, as V said...full of saltwater perhaps in them and that's causing the falsing.
I'll definettely try lowering GB to beach numbers below 30 to see if this helps.

And yes, I also confirm what Smokey said about tiny aluminum foil and tiny aluminum fragments stucked in the seaweeds area, and for me that's another advantage of using 8 khz:

So the facts are:

- seaweed and salt conductivity is less excited with 8 khz and it runs more steady than 28 khz
- tiny foil and aluminum fragments are also less excited and some can be ignored with 8 khz
- the hard-pack level of the beach (under the pebbles layer) is as much as 12'' deep in some areas, 6'' at others, so I need the most depth possible
- I'm after gold rings only and not thin chains or earings


Would you "approve" the use of 8khz (instead of 28 khz or 18 khz) and dig everything over foil range??? (for normalization @18khz, that is dig everything over vdi 45)???
Will 8 khz manage to see the solid un-broken gold rings even the thin ones?
 

Run the 8khz with the highest sensitivity you can use and still be stable. You won't miss any big gold by doing so. Coil cover won't make any significant difference as long as you clean it out periodically. With the cost of the coils, I would rather wear a cover out, than the coil itself.
 

I think that some real time testing should prove me right or wrong.... I believe that everyone saying that higher frequencies are prefered for gold jewelry is right, but the fact is that in order to hear this gold, you have to run stable otherwise the false ground (seaweeds-salt) signals will mask the gold tones and you will miss it between the chatter...and for now, 28khz prove to be very noisy with all this seaweed.
Even "time-spend" wise, digging less holes with higher probability is a strategy also...it's all about the odds afterall.

So, I built 2 identical programs next to each other, with the only difference be the frequency... 8khz vs 28khz.
All other settings left the same:

based on P6 deep platform (v2 deep filters...in the dry pebble-beach part that I'm hunting, iron isn't such an issue to have a lot of iron falsing, so I'm using deep as a base to hit a little harder on depth):
Reactivity 2
Silencer -1 (off)
Sensitivity 95
Tx power 2
Frequency to test 8khz vs 28khz
Ground balance tracking (ground sens default @6)
Discrimination 7.5
2 tones, 202/710hz
Iron vol 3
Audio 5
ID Normalization on

I will dig a hole to reach the "hard pack" level under the pebbles (since I think that all goodies will make their way through the pebbles and reach this level) and will test 8khz vs 28khz with a really small woman gold band.
*I bought a 14k small 2mm thick gold band No4 for the testing. According to the attached plot, which is based on 5.000 orders in a well known jewellery site, No4 is almost the smallest women ring size so I believe that my sample is good enough to judge.

Thinking here is that, as long as tiny gold chains and tiny earings are a completelly different and difficult animal that I'm not after, and I'm only after gold rings, I'm searching for the deepest but steady setting to hunt there...but still be able to clearly hear the rings, and hopefully handle the salsted seaweed falsing problem and avoid the tiniest aluminium pieces with vdis <45.

Thanks for your input guys!

ring_sizes_5000_orders_US.png
 

Last edited:
Yep it is a tradeoff. 8 khz will still get you gold jewelry but you may miss some really tiny or irregularly shaped items. It is all about tradeoffs and there are no absolute right answers when it comes to detecting. Most important is gaining access to a site that has the goodies and then simply getting your coil over them, other than that it is all shades of gray so don't overthink it, just swing and go with what works without over tweaking things.
 

What V said, and I noticed seaweed normally has a lot of tiny aluminum stuck to it. The latest version gets rid of a lot of the falsing.

Smokey
What is the latest version for the XP? I'm still running 4.0.
 

I run the latest version for the Deus but I also use the HF Coils and x35 9" and have zero issues with ver. 5.2.1. Latest good find a silver CTR ring with this version.
 

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