Pitch program and hot rocks

[gravityboy]

I'm new to the Deus but old to detecting so bear with me here

I've had my Deus about 3 months now and put a good bit of time in learning the machine, settings, etc. I am pretty happy with my full tones setup for relic hunting but after watching Calabash's video on pitch decided to load his up and give it a try. The program hits hard in my test garden here in Virginia but also opened up my yard to screaming over hot rocks. Is that "expected" behavior for it? One thing I noticed is I get more of a 'ha-ha' pitch over hot rocks but I sure dug a lot of them before noticing the subtle sound. I can do a video if it helps understand the ha-ha sound.

I'm running the LF 9" coil, software v5.2, set pretty much exactly as the Cal/vferrari recommendations say. I get hot rock squeel at 17/11/7 Khz. VDI is either -- or 99 but that's common for many of the relics in my test garden so before with my full tones program I knew the sounds of good vs noise.

Thanks,
Keith

 

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[vferrari]

Pitch program just flushes out potentially masked or borderline targets. Learn to use your +/- buttons to interrogate the target by setting up custom programs adjacent to each other in the custom program slot. Search with pitch then when you get a questionable hit on pitch (i.e., not a solid mid or high conductor VDI that is recognizable as a minie ball, button, or high conductive coin) then hit "-" to switch over to a full tones program or hit "+" to switch to a 5 tones program so you can see if what you got is a hot rock as you hit the target with different tone setups or even different frequencies by setting up clones of your custom programs but with different frequency settings in the custom program slots. That is what I mean by target interrogation.

I have my full tones program set up with a mid frequency (8 to 13 khz), low (4k), mid (12k), high (28k) pitch programs, and a low and high 5 tones program. I also have a custom gold field program set up with iron reject (different than disc) for hunting in really hot dirt. Full tones has the disadvantage that it can be susceptible to down averaging because the best way to run it is without any discrimination. If you do use any discrimination on the full tones program then you silence out any iron tones (iron volume has no effect/does not work in full tones). So I use full tones as my "hear it all" target interrogation program and sometimes use it when there is not a lot of iron around and tend to search in pitch or 5 tones with iron volume as my normal mode. In hot dirt I use gold field since it tends to give the most penetration in hot soil. Forget about getting a VDI though. Lol.

The point is, don't be afraid to switch programs once you have a hit to see what the target sounds like with different tone setups and at different frequencies. The +/- keys that allow you to quickly switch programs make it easy and quick to do this on the Deus so you can make a rapid dig/no dig decision. Much easier than any other detector I have used.

 

[gravityboy]

Excellent point. For my other relic program I do exactly that - I have the equivalent of a max boost, zero disc program I call "check" next to it so I can pop over. I do love the multiple saved programs feature of the Deus!

One thing I learned a bit this afternoon is the importance of ground balance with the pitch program. I'd been running slightly negative manual ground balance in my programs. Once I equalized out the ground balance in the pitch program the hot rocks quieted down quite a bit. There's still a patch in my yard that set things off but the rest of 99's I was digging were deep old iron - I take that as a 'win' for the pitch program. I'm really starting to like it for relic hunting since I pretty much dig it all anyway.

Thanks for the reply!
Keith

 

[vferrari]

Excellent point. For my other relic program I do exactly that - I have the equivalent of a max boost, zero disc program I call "check" next to it so I can pop over. I do love the multiple saved programs feature of the Deus!

One thing I learned a bit this afternoon is the importance of ground balance with the pitch program. I'd been running slightly negative manual ground balance in my programs. Once I equalized out the ground balance in the pitch program the hot rocks quieted down quite a bit. There's still a patch in my yard that set things off but the rest of 99's I was digging were deep old iron - I take that as a 'win' for the pitch program. I'm really starting to like it for relic hunting since I pretty much dig it all anyway.

Thanks for the reply!
Keith

You can also experiment with the ground notch expert setting in the GB settings menu. I have mine set to a range from 75 to 90 and it seems to quite down hot rocks and general ground noise with seemingly no ill effects on depth.

 

[austin_luker]

Watch it with the ground notch, I noticed "things change" and maybe in not such s good way with ground notch. Your MMV however )
When you heading north Vferria?

 

[vferrari]

Agree, ground notch can be tricky and its different now with very 4.1/5.1. Not sure when I am going to be able to go north, perhaps spring time. Lot of relic hunting planned here and south in Nov.