Love the Deus - I have had one for the past year and had upgraded from a Teknetics Delta. Mainly beach hunting and coin shooting in parks/schools. Nothing beats it for convenience, portability/light weight, battery duration, and ability to setup a stealth/low profile configuration to minimize drawing attention to yourself when desired. It is super fast (recovery) which makes it a great seeded hunt machine and for picking up multiple targets amongst trash. You can (and should) program custom configurations suited to your hunting goal (coins, relics, salt beach, highly mineralized soil, etc.). That's the good. It does have some drawbacks compared to the F75. (Besides cost). First, there is no true "all metal" mode like on the F75. It comes close, but it is not true all metal based on the way it is based programmed. Second, since most of the smarts reside in the coil, you are limited to basically three DD coil options (9", 11", and 11x13") and each is expensive since it is basically the heart of the machine unlike the multiple coil options including small sharpshooter type coils you can install on the F75 [on the flip side, if you have two coils and shaft assemblies, the main control head and the headphone control unit you basically have two detectors since the control head will link to one coil and the headset can be separately linked to the other coil]. I think XP is coming out with a new coil this year and an upgraded software version for the control head, but I don't have a lot of info on it. The new software release will be free to current owners so there is no reason to wait until that SW comes out to buy. The only reason to wait would be to make your initial coil purchase be the new one, but it may be a while before it is released.
Regarding relic hunting, I tried the Deus on an organized relic hunt in highly mineralized soil in central Virginia. Like most VLF machines, it was highly challenged and I had to go with a PI machine for best effectiveness. Ironically, I recently acquired an F75 and am anxious in baking it off against the Deus relic huniting under similar adverse soil conditions this spring so I plan to post later whether the Deus or F75 fared better (I expect both to do poorly vs. my go to PI machine in those circumstances; Garrett ATX, but the ATX wreaks havoc on my shoulder even with a harness - lol). So far I like the F75 for local coin shooting with small 5" coil vs. the Deus larger coil, but I can see various situations where one excels over the other so I do not plan on giving up my Deus for the F75. Oh, and if you do go with the Deus, I highly suggest picking up a third party book on the machine (see Andy Sasbisch's Deus Handbook as an example) since the manual [though detailed and helpful] will not help you unlock some of the "secrets" of the machine to help it excel at specific hunting duties. Good luck and HTH. HH
