My Blog 2020
14/1/20
Not been out this year due to illness, i seem to be picking up one virus after another
My new Equinox coil will not be here for a day or two so in the meantime i bought one of the 'lug repair brackets' off ebay for £8.00 , i just happen to have a coil here with broken lugs kicking about, it did the job really well, i had a go for 20 mins on one of our fields on Sunday, what a delight , i had forgot what a Equinox that works correctly can do, pity i had just wasted 6 months with my previous one.
Made me think about why there is a market for these brackets that allow you to repair your broken coil, great for someone like me who might have one knocking about but surely 'joe pubic' if they had a knacked coil would just simply have it replaced under warranty so why repair it?
28/1/20
Raining last Sunday but despite the absence of my detecting friend , due to not wanting to get wet. (fair enough) i decided to give it a couple of hours, mainly due to the fact i had already made my sandwiches!
I was aiming for 10 acres of Woodland (bit of shelter was the plan) but i got side tracked by 40 acres of stubble as i drove past, seemed like the right option, out of the 1000's of acres i have to detect on only 40 acres has ever been ploughed , 4 fields in the middle of nowhere, not been on the fields for 3 years, the stubble was very flat , over the previous years over 30 Silver coins have come off the fields from every period of time, from Roman to 1946 and quite a few rare artefact's? no idea why, with only the odd copper coin turning up, so after wading though a foot of water to get to an area i could detect on Started off with my Equinox then the last hour with the ORX
I dug 29 holes in 3 hours, first find was a 1943 Sixpence with a Musket ball down the same hole, this rarely happens on ploughed land but happens quite a lot on Pasture, and being as 99.9% of the time i am on pasture it's something i do without thinking, how many of you check your hole after extracting your find?
Next find another Musket ball, never found a Musket ball on these fields before.
And finally my last find with my ORX (on it's farewell outing) was a Boy Scout Badge , now not an earth shattering find but makes me think why do you find 10 times more Girl Guide Badges than Boy Scout Badges, bet you have never asked yourself that question before!
Were Girls more careless than boys, or were there more Girl guides out there than Boy Scouts? were the pins on the back of Boy Scout Badges weaker and more likely to break than the ones the Girl guides badges we will probably never know the answer!
Now the reason it was my ORX's last trip out is because i sold it by accident, this happens more often than you would think, I have one for sale on my website, someone buys it by text/Website/Phone /E-mail whatever, and some one else buys it at exactly the same time, two customers have both paid at the same time for the same detector, this happened on Saturday, two choices i either disappoint a customer or sell mine as well, i now have to find myself another one!
At the moment i only have one detector up for sale, there were 11 on Saturday morning, 10 went in 24 hours!
29/1/20
My Minelab Vanquish is on it's way, so an hour on my test bed tomorrow then off to have covers made for it, unless of course the covers off another detector fit, this has only happened once before when the Equinox Covers fit on the Quest.
30/1/20
Vanquish arrived today.
1st impressions were that the Red plastic was a bit naff, the arm cup looks like it could snap in half at anytime soon
Bit heavier than i thought it may be
The coil is attached using a bolt that screws in to the coil lug like on the Goldmonster.
The control box is attached to the middle stem as opposed to the upper stem
The camlocks are similar to the Explorer/Etrac
The bottom stem seems to be the same has on the Equinox??
On the test bed it impressed me, tried it today in all modes , but now i need to try it with the iron bias set at low to see what difference it makes before putting the results on line tomorrow
2/2/20
Results of the Vanquish now available
Tested the Vanquish on the lower iron bias settings yesterday the signals did come though a bit better but i would have dug them anyway.
The Vanquish matched the Equinox on all my test bed signals except 2 very hard iron tests and the 16'' Cartwheel penny test, it was also not great on my 18'' hoard, i feel i am missing something ?
Been out today on a stubble field, over 50 non ferrous finds made. the Equinox and Vanquish gave identical results
when i got home after a bit of thought i realised what was happening.
The Vanquish in my opinion is a simplified Equinox, programs and options wise, there is only a difference in performance if iron is involved somewhere on the deeper targets this is because of the preset iron bias on the Vanquish, if you were able to change it to zero like you can on the Equinox ,it would perform totally like an Equinox,
It does exactly the same as an Equinox used on field 2 with the iron bias set high, but of course you don't get the other settings and programs to play with.
My opinion!
7/2/20
The Vanquish covers will be going up for sale tomorrow with a bit of luck.
Then my Vanquish will be going up for sale as an 'ex demo' once i have taken a load of photos of the cover sets.
The Vanquish is very nice to use and must be best all round detector out there for the money, but no point in me keeping it when i have the Equinox, I wish Minelab could make a 8'' coil like the one with the Vanquish for it though.
16/2/20
Sunday again, another detecting day, another storm
Only been out three times this year due to illnesses and extreme weather conditions.
like most places in the UK ,the ground is just too wet
We decided to knock today on the head (again) and to hopefully go out next week if things get better.
But conditions seemed to improve and about 10 am i decided to go out (solo) for a couple of hours , or at least until it started to rain again.
I had a ride around , most farms were under water, i needed to detect on an bank side so i would not be in a mud bath, i went for a site we have detected on for about 15 years, it's produced a lot of Roman finds and the odd Saxon , Celtic and medieval finds.
I chose the Equinox , Field 2 , 11'' coil (as normal) and off i went.
3 times in the last 20 odd years of detecting i have gone home with zero finds and all three times it's been on this site.
After 2 hours i had found two nails , Storm Dennis started again , the wind got up and rain came down, deep joy, home time, looks like today was going to be the only time ever i was going home with out even digging one non ferrous piece of metal up, not even a cartridge case, this was a stat i did not want so i headed for the woodland on the way back to the car, it's been battered for years but surely there will be just just one cartridge case left?
Then it happened, i got a very dodgy signal, sounded different from every direction, but it's coming out whatever, 4'' down, a chain link,? a bronze statue? no glasses so in my bag it went.
Pics below, i have seen most things that can be found but not seen one of these before? Mount , Terret, spring to mind?
Any ideas
19/02/20
Thank you everyone for your emails 95% of which said it is a Celtic Bucket Mount, so that's good enough for me!
26/2/20
I had an email today giving me an update about the new C-Scope detector due for release soon, i was shocked to hear they had managed to incorporate the CS1220 into the workings, hope they have improved it, although it was one of the biggest sellers ever , it was dire, for those of you who who don't remember them they were non motion and grunted when you got a ferrous signal and the meter needle swung to he left and you got a squeak when you had an non ferrous signal and the needle swung to the right, if your target was below 6'' or whatever it grunted anyway but you would not dig it because you would presume it was iron.
99% of detectors do this to a greater or lesser extent, we once found a Hoard of Hammered coins, we had at the time Minelab Explorer 11's , once we had dug all the signals up that gave a positive signal, we then started to dig up the nulls on the threshold, when we use one of the Minelabs that run a threshold, CTX/Explorer/E-Trac etc., and the threshold dips then we presume it is passing over iron it's also nulling over something because it's out of range, we must have dug up around 30 hammered coins by just digging threshold nulls but you could not do this normally , it would be a nightmare, but where you are on to a hoard it's worth doing.
The Deus is one of the whose for this and misidentifies a lot of deep signals, the only detector i have found that discriminates and give you a correct reading at it's maximum depth is the Equinox.
13/3/20
Just noticed it's Friday the 13th, deep joy
Having just had 6 long months of Winter rain, leaving everywhere like a swamp , Farmers must be having a nightmare, can't plant anything, Cows and other stock cannot be put out ,what's next ? yes it's Coronavirus! a modern day plague, not much we can do , all sport postponed, Concerts cancelled, at least we can still detect, or can we?
A lot of Detectorists only go out with clubs or similar groups, is this advisable, if you are someone who is high risk , is it worth it?
Do Farmers want you knocking on their door on a Sunday morning? you may be infecting them, or not, who knows?
I like many others will be alright, i have loads of 'help yourself'' and 'text a farmer ' land.
The next few weeks/months are all unknown at the moment , I'm sure there will be loads of twists and turns
The knock on effect on nearly all business's is going to be horrendous , i cannot see it bothering us too much , but i would hate to own an Hotel/Shop/Restaurant/Pub or similar
23/3/20
Strange times we are in at the moment, lock down just announced tonight, that puts an end to 99% of detecting for a while, so unless you have your own land or a fantastic arrangement with a Farmer then it's a temporary break (we hope) but I'm sure most of you will have bigger problems than detecting to worry about at the moment.
We have about 4 acres of ridge and furrow that we bought last year to run the Horses on i have started to do that inch by inch, should last a year or so ! this is probably my favourite sort of detecting, gridding a (small) field out or indeed an hot spot area and slowly going over it using markers to make sure you don't miss anything, it's amazing how many things you finds in an area you think you have emptied , i find this way of detecting easier when i am on my own, i soon lose the plot if i am wandering around aimlessly.
Not sure really if we are allowed to detect or not at the moment, if it's on your own land and you are a distance away from anyone else , cant see the problem, but is that 'staying at home' can you go on farmland you have permission on , which is private land, maybe not, because you are leaving home in a car or whatever and it's not a necessary journey, but surely you are less likely. to cause a problem than if you were walking your dog in London, is Detecting classed as 'exercising? Everything is up in the air at the moment, so we are probably better putting our detectors away at the moment and not to try bend the 'Lock down rules' it's been under the ground for hundred's or Thousand's of years it will still be there in the next few months , lets just make sure we are.
Normally most Detectorists will stop detecting now because all the fields are under crop or the grass is too high this is when sales drop until August but sales have taken a huge dive so we have decided to open from Friday to Monday only for the next few weeks so the website and ebay have been closed in between but if you want something in between then just give us a ring.
Stay safe!
7/4/20
We have two small fields, one 2.5 Acres and one 1.5 Acres, they are both ridge and furrow but the smaller one has been ploughed out a bit, the larger one has large ridge and furrow on it, this is the one i started my project on.
A week ago last Sunday i decided where to start, i went down the bottom corner of the field with my marker pegs (a Golf ball on the end of a plastic rod)
When you have been detecting for a few years and you walk on a field you normally have a gut feeling where to go. that could explain why we normally find the best stuff on the first outing, then the second time we go on the same field it's a disappointment.
The bottom end of the field i thought a good starting point, it was the area i would never expect to find much, but that's the project and it all has to be done. i was not wrong, and in the 1st stretch (5 yards by 40 yards) i found a buckle C1720 and Musket ball ,along with several bits of Silver paper a pair of tin snips, and an horse shoe.
Then my probe packed up (flat battery) i don't know how we managed before probes but that seems 100 years ago, but i struggled on, 5 mins later my Equinox handle snapped off,
day over, this must be the 5th Equinox that's packed up on me , all with different problems, the Equinox i am using at the moment is made up of bits of scrap, back home and some strong glue and it's good until the next bit falls off, the Equinox is my favourite detector but i can see the day when they are out of warranty , and there are going to be a lot of scrap ones out there!
Just for the record i do have a very nice Equinox as well, (dare not use it) i just tend to use the scrap one!
So on to last Sunday , i started where i left off the previous week, i can of course go detecting when i like , but it's the only bit of normality i have at the moment so i have always gone on a Sunday so that's what i will continue to do, every other day of the week is the same at the moment as you will know, no idea what day it is most of the time, i have loads to do , and under different circumstances would be enjoying the lock down, the only thing i am missing is Football.
I really feel for the people out there that do not have the space and options that we are lucky enough to have, been trapped in the house for weeks on end and having no garden and little to do must be a nightmare.
Anyway back to Sunday, the first 5 yards x 25 yards produced a spoon (why do Equinox's love spoons) several bit's of silver paper and 6 aluminium rivets, i was just getting close to the gate hole which separates the 2 fields, might be a good place to end the session and to head back home for something to eat (100 yard trip) another few yards, i then got a deep signal and a foot down in the subsoil was a Medieval Spindle Whorl , that's more like it, next signal was very dodgy and out popped a 1942 Sixpence with a large piece of iron down the same hole, things were looking up!
I then got yet another spoon in the gate hole, just needed to finish the strip i was doing then i would finish, last sweep of the coil gave me a nice high conductive signal, might be a coin, it was a a 1940 Halfpenny, i swept the coil over the hole again and got another signal, this time a Penny, followed by another penny, 45 mins later i had 21 Coins including 4 Sixpences and a Shilling , 3 Threepenny bits , the rest were Pennies and Halfpennies all between 1914 and 1948, not a bad morning after all, also dug up loads of iron in the same area.
12/4/20
Sunday again and off to do a bit on my project, i am at the moment in a gate way between two fields, loads of stuff seems to have been dumped there which is the norm for gate way's, i will have to come back here when i am in the right frame of mind, need to be in 'concentrate ' mode to sort the signals out, could be detecting in 10 sq yards for 10 hours or more to get results, i did however find a pewter draw knob c1750 , i also found two more Pennies from last weeks 'hoard' i had missed, besides that two buttons
Just been on ebay to look at detectors, Christ, the prices are terrifying !
28/4/20
Spent the last couple of Sundays on our smaller field , so far found several buttons a Pewter spoon handle a musket ball and an Horse harness buckle.
I have started at the bottom of the field and have done about 15 yards by 50 yards so far.
But the ground on the field is very hard, no rain for several weeks has not helped, the field is joining the old farmhouse which dates to at least the 17th century.
As i work my way to the top of the field i know it will be a big test , there have been loads of bonfires over the last few years, possibly over the last few hundred years , who knows?
Also there were several old outbuildings at the top of the field, all of which have disappeared over the last 20 years, now the area has grassed over leaving just a dry area with bits of glass and pottery sticking up out of the ground from various periods of time.
This is the sort of area i would normally run a mile from but i will now tackle it head on because it's part of my project, and it's all going to be done!
Hopefully we will all be able to get back in the fields again soon, i have spoke to a lot of people lately who have permissions within walking distance and with recent consent from the Farmer and are nowhere near anyone , let alone 2 meters, but they still are not sure about if they should detect or not, i personally cannot see a problem with that, you are on private land, exercising, with the landowners permission, you have not got in the car and made an unnecessary journey; people are still cycling 10 a breast along the roads and Horse ridding, surely being on your own in a middle of a field is fine?
17/5/20
Looks like we are back out detecting again!
Pity the ground is rock hard , the fields have crops in them and the grass is too high!
But i'm sure you found somewhere to go.
I just carried on detecting on our fields as i have for the last 8 weeks, not much to show for the last few weeks only the odd halfpenny and a few buttons.
Hope you got some joy on your first outings for what seems like months.
Most of my permissions are on AONB land, loads of tourists and footpaths, these are areas i think i will avoid for a while until the 'out of lock down' novelty wears off for most people and things get more back to normal.
Almost unannounced a new Garrett seems to have been released, hopefully i will have one soon to give my opinion on!
11/6/20
I'm still alive!
Been a few weeks , but not much happening, business wise sales seem to be back to normal, people seem to be finding somewhere to detect, I've had two half hearted outings, but aim to get back in the swing of it this weekend.
I have one of the new Garretts on order but it will be the end of July /beginning of August, not heard anything about the new C-Scope as yet.
Spoke to a lot of people lately who seem to be selling their Vanquishes because they don't get on with them, i think they are great, but each to his/her own.
Loads of Simplex's also up for sale, totally overrated, but great for the money, they seem to be coming down in price.
This is one of my pet hates, great for the new buyer, but not so great for the Detectorist who bought his/her detector a week or so ago , I'm talking about the dealer who decides to reduce the price of a detector by a £100 or more to make a fiver profit, if you bought your detector from elsewhere and paid top price then you have just lost a couple of hundred pounds on your resale value, i have to have my wits about me all the time to make sure i don't offer someone too much for their detector, i do cock it up from time to time.
Recent example was some dealers giving away a £200 , 15'' coil with the Equinox, everyone' equinox suddenly drops at least £100 in value
26/6/20
This is a Metal detecting related blog, but i am having to keep away from it at the moment because of desire to rant about the complete moronic b********s out there who don't give a toss about anything but themselves, look at them on the Beach in Bournemouth, what part of anyone's brain thinks that's OK , even without a current pandemic i would say why on earth would you want to go on a beach so crowded ?
Having been dealing in retail for 40 years, i know there are a lot of K**bheads out there but there more than i thought.
I have loads of examples, but the one that got me the most was a guy from London phoned me last week and after a discussion on detectors he decided he was going to jump on a train and nip up to me to part ex his for one i had, when i mentioned it was not going to happen because we were in the middle of a lockdown, he told me there was no virus and it was all made up by the powers that be, and he had not followed any of the Lockdown rules, i put the phone down on him.
I could go on for hours, but back to detecting!
I keep on getting emails from C-scope telling me about their new EVO 6000 , but nothing ever appears, so i phoned Martin Bass at C-Scope and asked the question, when? Apparently due to the Virus situation parts have become difficult to get so it will be released later this year, i have always been a big C-scope fan so i await with interest.
On the negative side i am informed that Whites may be folding, very sad, but you have to move with the times to survive and you cannot say they have ever done that, they perceived with the Concentric coil for years , over recent years they have replaced it it with far superior wide scan coil, The Whites MX Sports is an excellent detector but too heavy and unbalanced,
How many Whites Detectors do you see at Rallies and Club outings? i can only only guess, not been to either for 20 years!
1/7/20
Strange time of year for detecting, this year even more so. I'm not going to knock on any Farmers doors and freak them out, so i will only go on 'help your self farms' , i decided to have a go in a River last Sunday, it's an area where there as always been Swimmers, and recently 100's of people barbecuing /Picnicking and spreading litter everywhere in vast amounts, It was raining so should be clear , wrong, loads of people about, jumping in the River from the Bridge, so back to plan b, the field on the other side of the River as been battered by everybody for years, no one bothers anymore, so seems like a challenge to me!
Most people detect in the same way, so on worked out sites you just do something different, use an odd detector or detect very slowly or both, i went for the both option, using the Equinox and detecting very slowly . i wandered across the field picking up pewter buttons from good depths a good indication that there would be more missed items on the field, Equinox's love Pewter buttons, next hole i dug the soil had changed to black and there was pottery down the hole, i presumed that there had been a house there at some time or a load of rubble from elsewhere in the village had been dumped there, either way there ought to be some finds among it, after 90 mins i had 12 buttons, some were massive copper ones, 6 Georgian coppers, 5 spoons (parts of) a couple of nice lead weights, looks like the field was not too worked out after all!
7/7/20
I am still testing Detectors and putting the results up for all to see on the Website, slowed down a bit now because i have to wait until i get one in stock that i have yet to test, had three such detectors in this week, the Nexus Credo, Quest Q20 and the Deeptech Vista Smart +
The Quest performed in the way i expected, very average results for a budget detector.
The Deeptech ,,,, most top end detectors are excellent for findings items next to iron, above and below iron, but you have to tune your ears to pick the signals out in the most iron infested areas, the Deeptech's are in a different league , as soon as i take one on my test bed it's obviously a lot better than anything i have ever tested nothing else is even close ,they just pick out the target with a nice clear signal as if there is no iron there, depth is very good, build quality a bit suspect, but you have a very iron infested site then this is as good as it gets!
The Nexus Credo , not sure without checking if i have tested one or not?
I know a lot of people who use various Nexus detectors with success , they are no doubt one of if not the deepest seekers out there......... but every time i try to test one i cannot get it to work for me, i seem to have some metal blockage , i cannot tell if i have a signal or not, no idea what is happening, i cannot for the life of me fathom out what is going on , so the test gets abandoned, maybe if i really pushed it i could get it, i am told it's all about ground balance? sorry life's too short.
8/7/20
Talking about getting on with detectors (or not) how many of us have bought a new detector , tried it and hated it or cannot possibly get on with it, so off it goes on e-bay or wherever we take a loss and move on to the next detector that we think is going to be the next winner. I get phone calls all the time asking me to buy detectors that are only a week old, used once , cannot get on with it, what will you give me?
Difficult really giving a price for a 'used once ' detector , technically it's second-hand so when i sell it it's got to be a good saving on a new one otherwise the customer will just buy a new one, i have to allow for VAT etc. and of course a small profit. Also i don't want the customer to lose a fortune , been there, done that!
When i started detecting i got through about 40 detectors in the first 18 months, for whatever reason i could not get on with any of them, i settled on two in the end, Whites XLT and a C-Scope 5mxp, these i kept and used for many years, adding a C-Scope 2MX.
It's mostly about the audio and what you tune into, i like nice clear , positive tones, that's one of the reasons i use Minelabs nowadays apart of course from their superior discrimination and depth..
Most detectors i think have horrible audio, but to someone else they might sound great, depends on your ears and how your brain processes signals
it will take you a couple of years to be 95% confident with your chosen detector, but you have to like it in the first place.
16/8/20
Back again!
This time of year i tend to detect in strange places , woods , rivers etc., with very mixed results , mainly because the ground is too hard or the Grass too long ,now the corn is cut on the only 6 arable fields we have permission on we have stubble to go at! the other 99.9% of our permissions are Pasture, luckily these 6 fields, do produce a few finds, although 2 of them have been battered for 40 years by everyone and his dog and the other 4 fields have been just battered by us for 5 years, the first year they were left in stubble from August until March, we spent weeks on them , mainly because they seemed for some unknown reason to have finds on them from every period of history, every time a coin was found it was Silver with very few copper coins coming up, then the following few years not a lot was found , we had done it to death with every detector we had, and finished it off with GPX 5000's .
So last week myself and Bev , who has been detecting with me for about a year now, although 6 months of that was missing due to Corvid 19 ,She has never found a hammered , She has only been detecting for about 18 months, she uses an Equinox , probably because i do and i sold it to her! She has been struggling with it and does not seem to be able to distinguish between signals, so i gave her my ORX to use last Sunday, what a difference She was all over the field digging non ferrous targets, normally She never moves more than than 20 yards all day!
Just goes to show everyone is difference and what one person gets on with another doesn't.
During the morning a got a nice John Penny only my second Hammered of the year, both John's , then after a bite to eat we were going to try a different field, Bev got a signal a few feet from the cars and there it was a Charles 1 Half Groat!! She could not believe it (nor me) her very 1st Hammered !
So into the second field we go, always been a bit dead except in the top corner where i have found about 4 Elizabeth hammered, so having the advantage of being on this field before i headed for the top corner and there it was waiting for me a Elizabeth Three pence 1582, Bev headed down the edge of the field, after a while i headed across to her to see how she was doing and 'bang', my third hammered of the day, this is a very rare event around here, Henry 111 Long Cross penny.
After another hour or two of not a lot we decided to call it a day, last signal of the day Bev got a James 1 Half Groat, so 5 Hammered , very special day around here. So the ORX was a big hit with her, hopefully after some thought she may lose her Equinox and get one, we shall see.
Forgot to mention i was using a Deus today, i have just added another to my armoury, My love /Hate for the Deus continues!
20/8/20
On my own this Sunday (due to hols),i decided to go on the stubble field we finished on last week, must have been the thoughts of the 5 Hammered we found on there that persuaded me !
I started with the Deus with the 9'' X 35 coil , this is my favourite coil on the Deus and ORX . I got my first signal after about 50 yards, typical Deus ,should i dig it or not signal , Number 99 on the ID , which means 'No idea' , most detectorists would ignore this sort of signal presuming it was iron, i was curious , so after about 12'' i was hitting the subsoil, must be old i thought, expecting iron i dug down a few more inches and there it was my 1st Palstave Bronze age axe head!
I have no idea why but nearly every time i find a Bronze age item it's with a Deus, and i don't use them that much, just some sort of weird coincidence.
When you find something like that with your 1st signal you might as well go home because you know the rest of the day is going to take a nose dive, so i perceived , alternating between the Deus and Equinox, i picked up a few buttons, a blank copper coin that could have been Roman but was shot.
What was very noticeable was the fact i was digging deeper with the Equinox ever time i swapped from one detector to another, not quite sure why because they are both similar on depth on my test bed, i then did a couple of strips across the length of the field with the Deus and went back across the same strip with the Equinox, both times with overlapping sweeps, both time i found targets that the Deus had missed, all the missed targets were odd shaped pieces of lead, most detectors seem to find nice round or equal shaped objects , the Equinox seems to find all the odd Shaped objects 90% of which are nothing in particular.
looks like we have lost 30% of our arable land this week, it's all been ploughed and sown before i could Even get anywhere near it !
13/9/20
Just back from a week’s Holiday today, did a bit of beach detecting, that will come later, for now, it's about what was waiting for me when i got home.
I had a phone call just before we went away to say that my Garrett Apex was good to go, but it was due to arrive here after we had gone,
So today when we got back after i had done loads of other catch up stuff i managed to unwrap it, looks alright to me, nicely made. lightweight, i like the control box, but could be a pig to make a cover for (not my job !) Elliptical coils I do not like, they seem to stunt the performance of any detector they are attached to.
Anyway, it took me about 5 mins to suss out the menu and another 10 mins to find out how to connect the wireless headphones, sign of the times, you no longer get a manual, just an A4 sheet in 30 different languages and the rest on a website somewhere.
Anyway on to performance, i took it over my test bed, embarrassing is the only word i can think of, i have seen the 'non-committal’ field tests in the mags , now i know why!
The Searcher field test I totally agree with, it mentions the low tone for various good targets, most of which would be ignored by most detectorists, I have also discovered that if a good target is near to iron then it gives you a very low target ID number and a low tone, again most people would not dig.
There are not a lot of settings to go through, but I spent probably 90 mins on my test bed trying to get some sort of performance out of it, was there something I was missing? I left it for 24 hours and today had another go, went though the various freq options as well as multi Freq, there was no way I was going to get any joy out of this and after another half an hour decided to give up.
It’s below average detector that will find you nice round chucky items in the first 7’’inches, as long as there is no iron anywhere near it,
It does not do cut quarters and similar low conductive items, unless they are on the surface and there is no iron about, the tones/tone breaks are probably more suited to the US market,
I have not looked on youtube yet to see what the ‘experts’ on the videos are telling us, can’t wait see someone who as been given a freebie make this look good!
Not used a Garrett Ace 250 for a while but I’m sure it’s better than this
Just to make sure i am not going mad or have a dodgy one I contacted several people today who know their stuff and they all agree with me, I have also been offered 3 ‘used once’ Apex’s but refused them, I buy anything , but I don’t want any Apex’s thank you.
Way over priced relating to performance, were Garrett thinking it might compete with the Minelab Vanquish? Nowhere near on Performance, and it’s more money, with one less coil! It’s defiantly better build quality, but personally I would like something that’s works as opposed to something that looks good, but each to his/her own.
15/9/20
I spent a couple of hours tonight with the Apex before it gets sent off for it's cover fitting, i did a full test with it with a view to adding it to my test pages
Cant speak for how good the Multi Freq option is on the Beach but it seems to be fairly useless on land , it picks up coke (not a problem if you can identify it) but most of the good stuff we wish to dig gives the same signal and readout this is the main problem with the Apex as well as it's lack of depth, but it is half decent and usable if you use it on 20khz as it does not pick up coke , so if it beeps dig it up! 20khz is twice as good as any other freq, the Multi freq is by far the whose way to use the Apex. bit weird really being as that's it's selling point and no doubt the reason we pay £500.00 for it !
if we had a Ace 250 working on 20 Khz at £200 cheaper i reckon would be the same, but what do i know, i tell just tell it as i see it !
16/9/20
The new C-Scope EVO 6000 should be available in the first two weeks of October, i will have new ones available soon (i hope) i will be taking part ex's /Swaps on them as with everything else i sell, so if you want one just give me a shout.
I do not know how good they are at the moment, spec looks interesting, i will give my thoughts as soon as i get one.
1/10/20
We are now closing for a week to do other things, the Apex covers will hopefully be up for sale next Friday the 9th of October, delay due a few tweaks that were needed.
More and more people are taking up detecting at the moment, mainly due to Corvid -19 stopping a lot of activities people would normally pursue, i have personally had a big surge in sales due to beginners buying detectors, so don't be surprised if you suddenly see loads of newbie's out there, some will pack up after 10 mins and some with be in it for the long haul especially if they have had a bit of luck on their 1st outing!
Apparently there has also been a big surge in Bee keeping!
13/10/20
No sign of the new C-Scope yet, i have also just bought a Mars Gaus MD Detector that is supposed (like all of them) to be the dogs danglers, we'll see !
Went out on my own this week (Sunday) decided to try an area i had been on before when the ground was very dry, i presume there had been an house on there in the 18th/19c , loads of iron/Black soil/Pottery/bricks about, jumped over the gate and saw a not very well filled in hole, not surprising as this Pasture field as been battered by everyone and his dog for 40 years and it' s only about 5 acres , reason being it's the site of a DMD apparently.
I waved my Equinox over the poorly filled in hole and it was iron, no surprise there then as this 50 square yard area is full of it and where i was going to spend the entire day, i started with the Equinox because it gives me a lot of information, using it on field 2 gave me a lot of earache but i cannot use it in any other way without knowing i am missing stuff, it took me about half an hour of not getting a signal to eventually get tuned in to the area i was in, and to get my sweep speed right, once i had done that the targets kept coming one after another, several bits of iron were found down most holes as well as the non ferrous target.
After dinner i got my Deus out and continued to find non ferrous finds on this worked out /Empty field, it was a lot easier to use the Equinox in this area but i perceived and was getting loads of signals.
Ended up with 5 various copper coin's, 4 shoes buckles 10 buttons a pewter medallion and about another 10 various finds, these are not small finds and have been missed for 40 years ,not bad for an empty field ! it's all about getting your sweep sweep right, we all walkover finds all the time, i knew the finds were there on Sunday but i could not get a signal at first, everyone else in the last 40 years had missed them, i had 50 non ferrous targets out of this area during the day.
Having had a 10 year love/Hate relationship with the Deus it's turned into super love at the moment, the X35 Coil series seems to have made a big difference and the Deus seems a lot more predictable with my own settings, i have tried dozens of 'expert programs' for the Deus that people have given to me, 99% of them are a waste of time, but if it works for you go for it.
A customer told me of a program he uses that he saw on youtube, might as well try that i thought, it was Sid's pro program, what a difference that made, it made the Deus a very usable detector , great on iron rejection, deep and sensitive, and with a bit of tweaking i have turned it into an awesome deep seeking Pasture detector, still a bit to do and i will put my results for you to use if you wish on my blog shortly, i am trying to get it to work like an equinox. only better!
I have already got it detecting deeper than an Equinox using the 9'' X35 Coil and have just bought a 13'' x 11'' coil which should (i hope) give it another inch of depth. watch this space!
14/10/20
Yesterdays entry got me thinking (dangerous !)
I look at different programs i see online youtube etc. , for various detectors, i try them sometimes ,analyse them (because I'm an anorak) ,as i said before 99% of this stuff is a load of random settings ,chucked together with no purpose at all (seemingly).
I am not saying the ‘experts’ don’t know what they are doing ,but hell of a lot of people put the 'experts' settings in to their detectors without questioning them, I had a guy around here the other day selling his Equinox because it was ‘crap’ I looked at his settings and told him he would never find anything with his detector set up like that! Basically it was using the Equinox in Beach ,1 on land?? , beach 1 is not very good on the Beach never mind the land, it's probably the whose program on the Equinox
He told me all his mates used it like that, I then took him on my test bed and showed him how bad his detector settings were ''I wondered why my finds rate had gone down’' he said
Similar things happen time after time again and is one of the main reasons that people sell their detectors.
So before you decide your detector is useless , look at how you have got it set up.
Not quite sure of the purpose of the Beach on Field program, maybe it’s designed for high iron infestation, it would no doubt work there, because of its high iron bios and lack of power? but as a General search program you will seriously reduce your finds
When i buy a detector i always have a look at what settings the seller was using, and i can normally see why they were selling it.
Most people will buy a detector, not read the manual and immediately go on the Internet, find an 'experts settings' put it in to their machine and off they go! so they are totally reliant on the 'expert' knowing what he or She is doing..
I know that not everyone has a test bed or has time or the space to create one, but it's not rocket science to see what the best settings on your detector are.
Just get a signal on a field then go over it using different settings until you get the settings that get it the best, do this of course with several targets while you are out detecting, before of course digging them up, just do it now and again and narrow it down week by week, it's easy with the Equinox as you can just flick though all the programs one after the other until you find the best program then go though the various options within that program until you get it bang on, most of the settings are personal preference , Volume , tone etc. so you would just be trying, iron bios, sweep speed and the like.
After about 60 hours on my test bed and a couple of years in the field testing 1000's of targets my best performing settings for the Equinox are-
Search mode ..........Field 2 -or Park 2
Frequency.............Whatever
Sensitivity...............As high as you can get, normally 24 for me, 25 puts it on a different level if usable
G Balance...........................0
Volume -------------Whatever
Tone Vol. ..............Tone 1=1,Tone 2=25
Threshold..........4 or Whatever
Threshold pitch.......Whatever
Target/tones............Whatever
Tone pitch............Whatever
Ac/reject -9....to...2 unless you have no coke on your site them 9 to 0
Tone break.........Whatever
Recovery speed.....4 or .5
Iron bias..........0 - use your ears!
All metal ............On
If you like to run around ploughed fields without having to think then Field 1 with the same settings
Remember i am not an expert!!
You will find something whatever settings you use, but it's what you are missing is the problem.
Moving on to the Deus there are a lot of experts on line that don't seem to have a clue a, the programs they come up with do not make any sense at all and are whose then the on board preset programs , don't take my word for it , try them!
It's as if they just make something up to keep people interested.
It seems odd to me that you spend loads of cash on the latest awesome detector then de-tune it , you might as well buy an old Tesoro in the first place!
30/10/20
Still no sign of the new C-Scope , 1st two weeks in October i was told, maybe i got the wrong year!
However my new Mars Gauss as arrived, two piece stem , would have been easy to do a three piece me thinks.
Reason i bought one is , i need to have covers made for it, and of course i need to test it out, i had my suspicions that it would be good because i have tried the Mars coils on various detectors and if you find one that works it is normally very good!
Most Detectors i can suss out within a few minutes, and get the best setting within half an hour but with a lot of the overseas detectors i do need a manual as a lot of the settings are different or have a different name, one thing that i found interesting is that it has a Temperature reading on the screen.
It is a very powerful detector and i could tell straight away over the iron tests on my test bed, it just blasted straight though the iron and got the target with no problem whatsoever, as i have said many times before it is the big coils on the best detectors that are best among iron not the small ones that are useless.
I have a George 111 halfpenny buried at 14'' , probably some iron down there somewhere? Only 3 detectors have ever got it out of the 100 plus i have tried, now it's 4
Not sure if i have found the best settings for it yet but will have another go tomorrow.
I used my Deus last Sunday with my new 'deep' settings, on a totally worked out site, i had a few previously non ferrous targets, Bev got a nice Fibula with similar settings .It's a very deep hard hitting program.
Create from the DEEP program
Disc 2.8
5 tones, whatever
Sens 95 or whatever
Freq -17khz or 25khz
Iron vol 3 or whatever
Reactivity 2
Silencer -1
Audio response 5
TX Power 3
Normal settings create from Hot program
Sens 95 or whatever
Freq 17khz
Iron vol 2 or whatever
Reactivity 2.5
Silencer -1
Audio response 5
5 Tones whatever
TX Power 2
These are what i find to be the best settings on a Deus for me.
5/11/20
On my own last Sunday, thought id go to a tourist area , we have found items from Roman all the way though to modern in this area, but nothing of age appeared today, i ignored all the signals under 50 (using the Deus) don't normally ignore any signal. , but this area is full of Silver paper, found 21 coins the oldest being George 111 Halfpennies, 4 down one hole! also 4 buttons.
Second lockdown starts today, have you seen this
Updated Statement 5th November 2020
5th November 2020
RESTRICTIONS ON DETECTING FROM 5th NOVEMBER FOR ENGLAND
We have carefully read the guidance and the complete legislation ( The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020) on the new national restrictions for England to ensure our advice to you is correct as we enter ‘Lockdown 2’ in England.
As a responsible organisation we had however also sought confirmation that detecting was still legal from the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) earlier this week. They emailed us this afternoon with their view on what is legal, and published metal detecting specific guidance this evening.
This guidance confirms our view that detecting is not prohibited during this lockdown. However we were very surprised that the DCMS has specifically excluded detecting on private land, whilst allowing detecting on public land (with permission) such as beaches, parks and other council owned land.
We do not agree with this view of the legislation.
We have challenged the DCMS about why they are excluding detecting on private land. We will update you when we know more.
More nonsense , we can detect on the Beach , where there will probably be loads of people, or we detect in the park, no we can't it was banned 40 years ago, but we can't detect on private land where we have permission and were we are nowhere near anyone else?? who thinks these rules up??
Just driven past a local lake with a fishing competition going on!
15/11/20
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that i had bought the new Mars Gauss, and i was very impressed with it on the test bed, to me at that time it was probably one to keep, not had time to try it in the field until today, i took it on one of our fields, i had been detecting this field (about 3 acres) during the last lock down, marking it out and detecting it inch by inch, had quite a few finds off it and have detected about 25% of it .
The results i get on my test bed show me what the detector is capable of, but a lot of the time it's a different ball game when you get it in a field, on a test bed you know what is under the ground and how to get a signal from it, if of course it is capable of getting it in the first place.
I have never really done a field test before as such, don't think i would ever get one published in one of the Hobby mags!
So here we go, my thoughts firstly on the build quality of the Mars.
Nice balance, well made, control box about the same size as an Equinox or Simplex, nice easy to use menu, lightweight coil (Tiger 13'' x 10'' ) I am not a fan of big coils, but this one was fine.
The stem although it was good and did the job looked as if it had been made up out of stuff that was lying around and was very random and looks very odd, finished off with a cam lock that looked as if it was stolen from a cheap Chinese detector. Considering they (Mars) make a very nice 'Deus type stem not sure why they should mount their detector on this 2 piece strange stem, i find this very odd.
Anyway on to the test, i found my initial settings i used on my test bed were far to noisy in the real world so had to drop the sensitivity and drop it from cl to an (you will only know about his if you have read the manual!) cl gives it a bit more welly, but was fairly unusable on our field and was sounding off everywhere, so i dropped it down to 'an' this stabilised it , i was using it on Lo freq (16khz ) as opposed to Hi Freq (40khz)
I detected for about 20 mins without a signal, eventually i got one , it was a very dodgy signal , one i would not normally bother with (and I'll dig anything!) it was an aluminium rivet at 1'' , there are a few on this field , the Equinox gets them without a problem.
Next signal very dodgy but dug it , rolled up piece of lead at 6'', then a couple of pieces of iron, one a hinge and the other a fragment of horse shoe, best signals i have had so far, then a small piece of bronze, not a great signal, 2'' down, another 2 pieces of iron again great signals.
Every signal has had all settings on the detector tried on them before being dug, i had several more signals all a bit dodgy accept the iron, it was awesome on the test bed, so i know it as the ability to finds coins at depth and among iron, so it is happy to find nice round coins but when the targets get a bit more random, shape wise it struggles, so i think my next test bed it going to revolve around odd shaped artefact's as opposed to coins. that should sort the wheat from the chaff !
The Mars is a nice detector to use, but boring,it has two tones non ferrous and ferrous, i felt i was missing items, it did not inspire me whatsoever , but for running around ploughed fields i'm sure it is as good as anything else, it seems to like Iron, but maybe with practise this could be recognised, maybe?
The menu is fairly basic and easy to navigate, don't think we will be bothering with stem covers, too much hassle for something that will not sell anyway, control box covers already done and will be up for sale soon, as will be my Mars Gauss!
3/12/20
Back out of lock down and able to detect again, although i suspect most people never stopped in the first place! We can now detect again as long as we keep to the tier structure which most people will not understand or care about, most of the rules are totally nonsensical , i cannot detect in a middle of a field on my own in the middle of nowhere but a can detect in a park with 6 people and 1000 people wandering around me asking me if i have found anything., you could of course not detect in a park anyway.
C-Scope have told me the new EVO 6000 with be on sale this week, hope it's worth the wait, seems to have been going on for over a year now..
I am now going to rant about eBay, we have nearly 4000 listings on 6 e-bays sites overall. so get our fair share of of crap, today i had negative feedback from a knob in France, he bought a Arm cup cover for a GPX 5000 off us then had a tantrum when he did not receive the strap as well, very trivial , but the strap was not included in the sale, he looked at the picture but did not read the listing, so i phoned ebay, now if you have ever phoned ebay it depends if you get one with a brain /Common sense or not, no such luck, i asked if the feedback could be removed but it could not apparently because the French guy (zero rated ) was buying what he saw on the picture not what the actual sale was for,this took half an hour, i argued with this idiot for half an hour before giving up, So if i were to buy Car seat covers i should expect the seat and the Car as well because they are n the picture ? and if i did not send the Car i could be left Negative feedback.
He did not get it , so i said i would phone again to try to get some one with a brain, i did and straight away and within a few mins ,i got someone with common sense and i got the Negative feedback removed
So if you have a problem with ebay just keep ringing you will eventually get someone with common sense and a brain.
The other day i sent a customer in Italy some replacement covers because the ones we had sent had not arrived, this was agreed on between the customer and ourselves
The next day Ebay decided to refund the buyer (£40.00) , so i now had sent out £80,00 worth of covers and ebay had decided to refund the buyer, so back on the phone again, no sorry can't do that i was told when i requested if my money could be given back, phoned three more times and gave up, i was told to email the customer and ask them to send the money back!!! , err i don't think that's going to happen, they are so naive , as if someone who has just received covers and money are going to send the money back again!
I rang e-bay the other night about something else and got an Irish guy , yesssssssssssss that is a result when phoning ebay, they are always on the same wave length, so i mentioned the problem i had the week before about the money having been refunded to the customer when i had sent the replacement covers out, no problem he said and got it me back again!
So if you are a ebayer never give up!
19/12/20
Spoke to C-Scope yesterday for around an hour, The EVO 6000 will not be available until the first quarter of next year, they have had a lot of problems moving forward due to Corvid, and they want to get it right.
Not been out for a few weeks, just too much hassle (virus wise) with most of my land being in different tires to the one we are in, and most Sunday's (My detecting day) it has been pouring down with rain, i like everyone else are totally fed up (polite version) with this year and hopefully it will get better next year, we have already cancelled our normal Christmas festivity's , with all the doom and gloom out there and pending lock downs it's not worth it
20/12/20
Got out today to a very worked out site , 3 hours , one Cartridge case, tried the Equinox on 40 khz to see if it managed to do something a little different got quite a few signals, but when i changed it back to ''Multi'' it gave me a reading of 1, normally in the Coke range , but on this site it is normally lead ore in the limestone, Got my Deus out and found the only none ferrous target of the day a pin fire 12 Bore cartridge case.
22/12/20
Orders slowing down now due to most people realising then will probably not get their purchases in time for Christmas, particularly this year.
Total chaos today as Royal mail announced that overseas post would be suspended , i had loads going out today so now i have to email people all over the World in several different languages and explain there will be an unknown delay, most of them will ignore the email and complain when they don't get their order in a couple of weeks.
I also have a couple of rolls of material stuck in the US , so i have had to start taking covers off sale because we have run out and cannot make any more until we get our delivery of Neoprene, it's a complete nightmare.
Just had about 40 detectors arrive in the last week, so will gradually be listing them on the website once they have been cleaned up and tested
We would just like to wish you and all detectortists everywhere a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, face it next year cannot be any whose (We hope)
Soon i aim to create Detecting Videos, that will be interesting as i have not done anything like that before! also i will be making another test bed