99 on the Deus... help!?

[Boondocks]

Hey Y’all, I’m starting to really love my Deus but I have a question for you veterans. I spent the weekend in a park with my new HF 9x5” elliptical coil. I used 31khz and found some wheat pennies and even an old 1930’s transit token. I left several targets that read a 99 because when I dropped down to 14 khz they stayed at 99. I assumed they were iron even though they were deep and repeating consistently. Here is my question, today I went on my test garden in my back yard and I have a silver dime and a 3 ringer that I accidentally put way too deep (long story). I decided to see if I could increase the sensitivity enough on the HF coil to find it. Well, I was able to hear it well and lo and behold I finally got a number. You guessed it, both targets read a 99 intermittently. The one that concerned me the most was the 3 ringer because with my 11” x35 coil it reads a solid 83 on norm id (18khz). I am wondering if I should just ignore the vdi on deep targets with my Hf coil and if so, why they would default to a high 99 as if they were iron. I’m about to go to FH7 and I’m wondering what I should dig as far as deep 99’s go so I don’t miss anything but I maximize my time there. Thank you in advance to all the Deus pros.

 

[vferrari]

Deep targets often up average to 99 regardless of frequency and look like iron wraparound. The only way to be 100% sure is to use shovel discrimination, otherwise, you are always playing the odds because a lot of things can cause target IDs to vary - depth, target composition, mineralization, moisture content, adjacent targets, etc.

 

[smokeythecat]

I agree with the shovel discriminator. MOST times, stuff 96-99 is big iron deep. HOWEVER, that said, the 2 escudo gold coin I found was 6" or so deep and rang up at 96 with the HF coil. Fortunately I dug it. On this one site "95" is either big iron or an early large cent. So we stopped discriminating and dug everything. We have about 10 US large or half cents from the site now doing that.

 

[RussM]

For me, 99 is big iron deep... not once so far has a 99 on an HF coil been anything I took home with me. My rule of thumb is, on HF coils set above 31khz... a 92-95 on the surface is good, and if it gets stronger and cleaner after the plug is out, you're in paydirt. However, digging a 96-98 on the surface, and after the plug still shows the same, I'll probably be chasing iron down deep. In my limited experience with the Deus, 90% of the coins I've pulled have been in 6" or less, which is usually about the depth I dig my plugs out at. So if I pop my plug and pinpoint, and the target isn't right there... then the chances increase on big iron with each shovelful after that... good luck.