D2 Epiphany

Well maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration but my experience over the last 5-6 weeks have got me thinking about the D2 in a whole new way. It started with trying Sensitive Full Tones at a few worn out sites and being surprised to dig a half dozen or so buttons and other nonferrous at each of those sites. I wasn’t sure if it was the -6.4 Disc or the Full Tones that was unlocking these targets from these tired sites. A detectorist on another forum suggested I try General with its unique Conductive Soil Subtraction but use it in Full Tones. I used it last Sunday and this Sunday at 2 more worn out sites and I can say is that it brought them both back to life with each giving up a dozen or so nonferrous targets in just a few hours of hunting. Most of these targets were iron masked to various degrees, but the Full Tones Audio excels at alerting you to there being a good target mixed in with the iron. When a mid-conducting tone broke through, it was money in the bank that there was a nonferrous target there.

As I mentioned in my Sensitive FT review, the iron falsing is annoying. I think it is exacerbated when using Full Tones. That’s just a bug with the D2 that they hopefully will work out soon. After a while my brain just listened for the mid conducting tones. Not a good strategy if there is a decent chance there could be iron masked high conductors at your site. I hardly dug any iron when I investigated some of those high tones because I either swung around the target to get a positive iron ID or I toggled to the adjacent Sensitive Full Tones that falses just as much as General but it’s easier to hear the iron.

Most of the time I hunted with Reactivity at 1.5 but bumped it up to 2.5 in the thick iron. I actually pulled a small cuff button using R=4 in an extremely thick carpet of iron.
The 9 buttons a pulled today were all small except one. Some were surprisingly deep. Twice I thought I got called out by iron but when I rescanned the hole, the mid conductor was still in there.

For the type of hunting I do, I believe Full Tones is where it is at. The audio is very informative in PWM. Square may sound nice to you old Minelab users, but PWM is much more descriptive to my ears. Combine Full Tones with General and its frequency subtraction mode, it has a ton of potential.

Jeff

Good review Jeff! I'm still learning the deus 2 for stateside detecting. When I'm in Europe though, it's a different ballgame. The iron falsing is not a problem since I dig all targets anyway. Thanks for the info and happy digging, Dave.

Very interesting, Jeff! I took notes and will give it a go!

Nice to hear Jeff , where you running your silencer through this ?

Gents, my settings are below. Tweak to suit your preferences. Dave after seeing your iron relics, I would dig every signal as well.

General- Full Tones
Disc - 0.0 (the negative disc in Sensitive FT makes the machine extra busy. 0.0 seems to be a good place)
Notch - Off (I may play with some notch to get rid of some of the falsing)
Sensitivity - 98 (Sensitivity it has more of an impact on depth than what I had realized previously)
Iron Volume - 4 (it helps call out the iron when it is falsing)
Reactivity - 1.5 (up it in the heavy iron, or run it at 0 or 0.5 if you want to go very deep in clean ground)
Audio Response - 5 (no easy targets left, most are small and deepish)
B. Caps - 3 (I liked "5" in Park, so I may experiment with "5" in the future to see if it might help with some of the falsing without losing the co-located nonferrous targets)
Silencer - 1 (I intend to play with this setting to see if there are benifits to more Silencer in the real heavy iron)
Audio Type PWM - (much more descriptive to me)

Like I mentioned, when a mid tone sneaks through, there is something in the hole even if it is competing with iron. If you are more of a visual hunter, if you see anything from 40 to 70 on your screen, there is nonferrous in the hole even if there is iron with it too. When the machine falses over iron, you will see low 70s pop up or the typical 87-88 sometimes. If XP fixes the falsing, Full Tones will be hard to beat. If you guys can figure out a way to tame that beast without affecting unmasking, I am all ears. It really is easy enough to ID iron even when it is falsing, I just don't like that audio experience when it is falsing. BTW I also tried Full Tones with Deep HC and Park with the same settings as shown above and it had similar unmasking abilities. General sounded better over all the targets, except one. Deep HC seemed to hit a bit harder as one would expect on a button that came in around 70. But General did sound cleaner over the same target for some reason.