Using 4 or 5 Tones

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Mornington Peninsula
Just wondering if the default tone settings are ok to use for parks etc or do they need to be "tweeked" a bit for Australian conditions.
If they need to be "tweeked" what would you recommend the settings be changed to ?
cheers Keith.

Yeah I'm bored, it's urinating down here atm
 
Hi Mate,

I run the full tone in parks, that way I can identify the main offenders for that park and give them a miss.
Normally I dig anything 84 or so and higher just to make sure.

Full tones is heavy duty at first but once you get used to it its killer for identification of targets and cherry picking like crazy.

I'll use the 4 or 5 tones on older sites as what you dig is a bit wider spread.

Lastly I dig all the good signals on tones that don't come up too often. So If I get a tone that stands out because I haven't heard it before i'll dig it. Found a few rings doing this in the high 50's Low 60's band as the parks I was working had very little in this range, the trash was Mid 60's to mid 70's (Loads of trash targets in that band) so these strong signals outside the trash band where no brainers to dig.

Practice in the yard with a heap of targets and listen to them, then put shade cloth over them so you can't see them. Try and work on identifying each one with the remote in your pocket. It's a powerful little learning tool.

Cheers Big fella.

Clegy
 
Yeah I know that "full tones" is probably the best but I thought I might get a bit overwhelmed by all the sounds at first and that 4 or 5 tones may be a bit easier to learn
Thanks for all the help and answers :Y: :Y:
 
xcvator said:
Yeah I know that "full tones" is probably the best but I thought I might get a bit overwhelmed by all the sounds at first and that 4 or 5 tones may be a bit easier to learn
Thanks for all the help and answers :Y: :Y:

My theory on this goes back to my first detector... The At Pro was my first detector and offers a standard and Pro mode. After a week or so I figured I would eventually need to learn the Pro mode. So why not start there?. Yes it can be confusing at first. I had a mate who ran in starter mode for a long time, than switched to Pro. He said it was like starting from scratch again.
Why learn twice when you can do it once?
 
Really no such thing as "Australian conditions" considering the variability experienced on different sites across the nation. Some areas may be more mineralised, whereas others are quite benign and will offer excellent depth using a factory program. In my area the soil has very little mineralisation (sandy soil), hence you can achieve very good depth from most factory programs. About the only settings that ever get changed on my Deus during a hunt will be reactivity, discrimination, sensitivity and sometimes frequency change (or coil change). Other than that it is just stock "HOT" program settings.

A common and consistant piece of advice given by the "experts" is to pick a tone setting, stick with it, and learn it inside out until you gain a good deal of experience and confidence. Don't be tempted to switch back and forth between tone setting every hunt, as you really need to train your brain and ears to recognise when you come across a prospectively good target, or just another piece of junk.

Still doesn't mean that you can't also utilise the Deus's other programs, along with its discrimination/notching abilities and ID numbers if it makes life easier initially. Think I was using Deus fast with 5 tones when I first purchased it, and ended wanting it to sound more like my Minelab Explorer using multitones with the highest variability setting. Fulltones on the Deus ended up being closest at replicating that tonal setting, and as a result it made it a lot smoother transition from one detector to the other.
 
Well today I got back in the saddle so to speak and tried a local park with my new headphones (thanks Nenad ) stuff me these things certainly chatter and I found it very difficult to separate just random noise from actual targets

I was using the hot program with the following settings
gb 90
reactivity 2.5
Audio resp 3
notch 0
Disc 0.6
Sens 94
Frequency 11.7
Iron volume 2

Really found what I thought sounded like a signal with EVERY sweep, I dug up 1 ring pull, 2 metal bottle tops, and a squashed coke can, all about 100mm down and then gave up.

So how can I "quieten " down the deus, oh, and I've lost my xy screen when I saved the settings and added a name to it
 
they are the settings I use, plus I go 4 audio response, and tx3. No, you dont want to make it quiet. The only way to find masked targets, is to hear everything. You train your ears to hear it all, if you add some discrimination, you loose out on small, deep, or masked finds. Raise disc to 1.5, or 2.5 then, until you get used to hearing everything. You want full tones as well. Lots of ways to run the Deus, my settings might not be useful for everyone....they might just suit me ;) I wouldnt recommend a newbie use my settings, but the minelab 705 taught me, that you want to hear everything, so you can find everything.
 
Very hard to learn a new detector when diving in the deep end onto a very trashy site, I'd move elsewhere to retain some sanity. I remember several years ago when first using the x-terra 305 in a real junky park that it was enough to nearly make me give up, a real overload of information of hundreds of ring pulls and bottle caps. Instead I moved to a less inhabited area around the outer edges of a nearby older oval to learn on, and I started to concentrate on the deeper/fainter targets in cleaner ground which happily turned out to be in prec decimal territory. The only way you will able to make any sense of those real junky areas is to apply some discrimination, even if it mean raising it right up into the 70's to knock out most of the alloy targets (foil, pull tabs, ring pulls etc), and also step up the reactivity to 3 to help seperate out the targets. That leaves just the high conductors to concentrate on, and probably knocks out 3/4 of the junk, though you may miss out on some 50% silver threepences.

I suppose you could equate it to looking for a needle in a haystack, and unfortunately that's exactly the case in some areas - lots of ground to cover and targets to dig just to find that lonesome silver coin. If looking for older/deeper coins, you really have to learn to ignore good sounding shallow junk, and listen out for the fainter high conductors that could represent deep copper/silver predecimals.

Once you do get your first predecimal coin, that's usually the point where everything starts to click, and you realise what sorts of tones you should actually be chasing vs the previously dug shallow modern junk.

I also think if you are trying to learn a new detector, maybe either concentrate on modern shallower coins or alternately just concentrate on the deeper targets for predecimals. It can be hard on the brain to process audio from both at the same time at first, though once mastered you can combine both to seek out all coin targets in the one session.

Once again, if you get what you might possibly think is a good coin target, have another scan over the target from various angles - did the tone gradually dip or rise from what you got on the original target tone? If so, it is a good chance it is junk and irregular in shape. If the tone stays the same - smooth, consistent and steady ID, then it is a good chance it is indeed a coin.

Rusty crown caps can sound and ID very similar to ozzy $1/$2 coins, and this is where you need to be able to hear the iron report. If you get any sort of iron grunt as the coil moves onto the target, or when drawing the coil back off the target, it is most likely just a rusty crown cap. Most shallow alloy junk gives you a real "in your face" tone, I like to call it a "too good to be true" type tone - sounds nice, but too loud (obnoxiously loud at times) and too shallow for a deeper predecimal, and pinpoints a lot wider cross section. A lot of alloy junk and alloy bottle caps tend to fall in that twilight zone of ID's, higher than your typical goldie ID but lower than your larger predecinal coppers and larger silvers - usually around that 88-90 zone, especially on ID number 88.

Probably the easiest way to fastrack your knowledge on what to listen for is to meet up with another Deus user, especially if you can connect up a second set of headphones to hear what they are hearing, and have a listen to what targets they are interested in, and which ones they quickly discount whilst on the move. When you do get your ear in, it is a very fast method of detecting whilst swinging over multiple targets and covering large tracts of ground. I reckon I can literally go over thousands of targets in a session, and still manage to pick out several good sounding tones from amongst the mix going purely off the audio. Yes you will always come across targets that are too close to call on whether they are good or not, better off just digging them rather than be left wondering what might have been.

As an example, I must have dug at least 15 -20 aluminum bottle caps at that old school site by the end of the day, with a return of only about 4 or 5 predecimals in total, so a lot of hard work and digging for only a small return .

Hence you will always dig some junk, and coins don't necessarily come as easy as what it seems when checking members' coin finds.

I had a reality check midweek, I drove a 350km round trip to an old oval, only to find $1.03 and wallet containing 2 credit cards and drivers license - that's detecting for you, got to take the good with bad. :D
 
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