My Blog 2021
3/1/21
Hope you all had a good Christmas under the circumstances, and we wish you a happy new year, hopefully better than last.
We seemed to have worked all over Christmas, on boxing day I did 15 hours, 4 hours packing parcels. 7 hours cleaning detectors and 4 hours answering emails and explaining to people who bought sets of covers why the detector was not included!
Most of the Christmas was similar and over 200 sets of covers went out, then it all started to go pear shaped, I have 2 rolls of Neoprene material trapped in Germany so we are running out of a lot of covers, I pay £1000.00 postage to get them here in 4 days, they have been in Germany for a month with no sign of moving.
Then I start to get the normal foreign ebay negative feedbacks coming in because the covers they ordered on the 21st of December did not arrive before Christmas day! They are given an estimated time of delivery by ebay which is very generous and is never going to happen but they take this as gospel and you cannot reason with them, so it’s back to ebay to get the feedback removed, 5 hours and 8 phone calls later, today a write off, I managed to get one of the negative feedbacks removed, talk about banging you head against the wall.
So, I decided to remove 3000 ebay European listings , these are listings that are translated into French/Spanish/German/Italian/ I cannot cope with any more of this, sorry to all those awesome European customers out there that do not cause me grief but in future anything going overseas will have to be tracked, this is ebay’s obsession not mine, and for the time being you will have to buy any covers you want either from our UK ebay site (tracked) or off this website either tracked or not. The problem with tracked is that it is more expensive, so someone buying a Deus cover at £9.95 will have to pay £9.00 postage or similar, not too bad if you are paying £9.00 postage on a set of CTX covers priced at £50.00. but if are reading this you will probably be buying off our website anyway
Plus of course we have the added time-consuming task of filling in customs forms because we are no longer in Europe, not my choice.
We have closed ebay down for a couple of weeks to try to catch up a bit, eBay is the most time-consuming sales platform we use.
We have a load of detectors and coils etc to sort out and to put up for sale as well as trying to stock take all the covers, a lot of which will have to be taken off sale until the material arrives.
Postage options /Prices will also be changed on ebay , our website will not change.
A great start to the new year.
17/1/21
Back again !
Just had a couple of weeks to catch up again just working off the website with ebay closed down, Ebay up and running again now with me not having caught up, still 20 detectors to clean up and about 15 coils, as well as about 40 sets of headphones.
I am getting a lot of stuff in at the moment, people packing up detecting due to all sort of reasons, people reducing their detector collection ,people selling surplus detectors, part ex's, all sorts of reasons, i currently have over 50 detectors here and over 100 coils.
When a detector comes in i have to test it , clean it , photograph it, edit the photos and list it on my website, some of the older or well used detectors can take half an hour or more to clean, some detectors have never ever been cleaned so there is a lot of ground in mud, so you can write off an hour quite easily with each detector that comes in, somedays i can have up to 10 detectors coming in , hence the backlog, not enough hours in the day!
I have been out detecting for a couple of hours today, on our own land as i did last Sunday as mentioned before we have two horse paddocks one is about 1.5 acres the other 2,5 acres, the 2.5 acre ridge and furrow field i have been detecting on during lock downs throughout the year, this is a field on the extreme edge of the village . if you wandered across it you would not bother again, if you have read my blog before you will know i am detecting the field inch by inch, i am now nearly half way across it and have found near 120 finds and have dug up another 120 bits of non ferrous scrap , it just shows how much stuff there is under the ground, try it yourself, even on a piece of totally worked out land take it nice a slow and see what you have missed, you can never clear a field! .
3/2/2021
Not a lot to report at the moment as we are all locked down, i have learned tonight that we can actually detect if we can walk or cycle to our site , it's on private land (with permission of course) and we are on our own or with someone from our bubble , that works for me, hopefully it will for you?
Detectors are flying out at the moment, a lot of newbie's starting up and detectorists trying to give themselves a lift in these strange time's.
I did not know before now how may nutters there are out there, i speak to some very odd people on a daily basis, ranging from 'there is no virus its all made up, to 'i'll travel to you from London to pick the detector up' (considering i do next day delivery for free) probably cost them over £100 by train and a day of their life wasted just so they can get their detector a few hours early?? also none essential travel and me supplying non essential items a few people wanting to visit me for a demo?? there are a lot of people who just do not get it.
20/2/21
Not a lot happening at the moment, i have only been detecting for about 6 hours this year so far on our own land, it's either too cold too wet too much snow or no time, things will hopefully change soon.
At least i have somewhere to detect, ever if i cant get at it! Hopefully this Sunday, i hope.
I hope some of you are getting out, walking range we are told. most of my land is 20 miles away, but i do have enough to keep me going locally.
Meanwhile Coiltek seem to bringing some coils out for the Equinox, 3 to be precise , hmm not too excited by this, Coiltek coils in my experience are exactly the same as the Minelab coils only a different colour, but no doubt i will buy one, just in case, then after one day it will be on my website for sale again, if it was Detech or Nel then i would be very happy.
25/2/21
We will be continuing our 'first week of every month closed ' starting tomorrow at 12.30 pm tomorrow (Friday 26th February) we will be available by phone and Email/Text during this period , Website and Ebay will be closed.
Looks like we will be able to travel soon to go detecting , most people will not have land to go on locally so may have not been detecting for 6 months or more, so they will be raring to go.
During the pandemic loads more people have taken up detecting, how long they last is anyone's guess, a lot will fall by the wayside due to lack of finds or the inability to get rich in their first week, 4 weeks ago i had 72 detectors in stock , i now have 12
16/3/21
Back again, well what's happening at the moment? I have been going
detecting every week either on our fields or on Fields behind our house (100 acres ) i have permission on, i have been finding quite a few bits, nothing earth shattering , but enough to keep me interested, i had a nice find last Sunday , the best Pilgrims Ampulla i have ever found (i have only ever found 4 before) this was in a random field in the middle of nowhere, like most of my finds i suppose.
In another couple of weeks we can travel again to detect, but i would think that a lot of Detectorists are already doing that,
Over the last few months i have spoke to loads of nutters, and have been accused several times of been brain washed by the Government, because '' everyone knows there is no virus '' and similar, all because i have not agreed for someone to travel 200 miles to pick up a Detector from me when i have offered next day free delivery . God help us !
Sending detectors to Europe is a bit of a problem at the moment mainly due to 'Brexit' most parcels would take about 5 days and now its looking at 5 weeks , Think Eurovision Song Contest and you will get the idea!
So due to the amount of grief i am getting i might be stopping deliveries to Europe for the foreseeable, until something has been sorted out.
Example, i recently sent a detector to Italy, it failed to arrive within 7 days so the guy put a claim in with Paypal, The parcels tracking tells me it as not moved for a month, so we are running out of time the Guy from Italy will have to push for a claim in the next day or so because he only has a month to do so, I presume Paypal will probably refund him, meaning i lose £200. i cannot claim because the tracking is still active and the detector is not lost, eventually he will get the detector and the Money and i will lose £200.
Then i will phone Paypal and they will tell me to get in touch with the buyer and he will send me the money back !! what Planet are they on.
I have had to add postage costs to my Ebay listings , they are taking 13.5% off me plus they expect me to send items 'free postage' by the time you have sold something and sent it off there is nothing left profit wise.
If i charge postage ebay even take 13.5% of that and the VATman 20%.
So I'm sure in the near future ebay will not be part of my plans
All the stuff on our website is still free postage.
20/3/21
I was told about the latest Equinox upgrade the other day , no idea why i had not heard about it before, shows how out of touch i am !
So i upgraded mine , it apparently quietens it down at bit , interference wise, hope that works , mine has nearly gone over the hedge several times because of EMI problems also we get a 4khz option for deep items, i 'll give it a go tomorrow, i have tried it on my test bed and my findings were it gives a better signal on my 100 coin buried hoard at a 18'' and a much better signal from my 16'' Cartwheel penny, , otherwise it did not pick up anything else on my test bed, so you could not use it for normal detecting, most bizarre thing is it gave me an awesome signal on my Goldchain buried at 2'' , a number 37, on all other freqs i get a 1 (normally coke) that does no make any sense at all.
23/4/21
Back again !
I've been back to normal detecting in the last few weeks after the last lock down, every Sunday, but have only been going out for about 4 to 5 hours, after that i have had enough and the thought of something else i need to be doing at home lures me away , so many things to do so little time.
Plus not having the awesome sites i had in the past the enthusiasm is not what it was before, but i keep going back to the old sites with different detectors and hoping that i find something that has been missed before .
So what's the latest Detector to try, it's the very long awaited C-Scope EVO 6000 !
Got one the other day to try out and to get covers made for it, so it will be sent off on Monday and hopefully i will have covers for sale by next weekend with a bit of luck.
Anyway what of the detector, is it any good? was it worth the wait ?
So as you know i sell second-hand (pre owned if you like ) detectors, so when i opened the box and saw the detector i thought, ' im never going to get in to one of my boxes .
Odd shape a bit like a Fisher F75 only bigger, the control box was a lot bigger than i thought it would be, i was hoping one of my other covers would fit it but it's three times the size of an Equinox/Simplex, that's just looking at it from a second hand dealers point of view.
Back to the detector, menu seems fairly normal , controls set set out well and logical, no need to read the manual, all going well so far , got it on the test bed , put it in 'Inland mode' (as opposed to beach or all metal) whacked the sensitivity up and off we went, , 40 targets on my test bed, it picked up 2 ?
So i must be missing something no one can make a detector this bad, surely? I spent a few hours on my test bed wondering what i was missing.
I went in to the 'Extras menu' and changed the Speed to 3 , it then came alive and i was getting a George 111 Halfpenny at 13'' and a 5 pence at 12 '', most recent top end detectors do the same, i then went into the tones menu and increased the tone from 3 to 36
to be continued
Out detecting today and took the Equinox /Deus and EVO, the idea was to take the Equinox out and find a few signals, mark them, then go over with the other two to see how the signals compared, each marking stick was had information on it describing the signal and Id number.
The field I chose was not the best but I tried to get a variety of signals, the soil was not that deep but I chose the signals on conductivity values
To cut a long sorry short, all the signals the Equinox found were also found by the Deus and the EVO, the very low conductive signals were much better on the Equinox than the other two, because that’s what the Equinox does.
One of the signals of note was a a very dodgy signal i got with the Equinox and EVO
but I would have never have dug it with the Deus, (and I’ll dig anything!) it was an small iron rod with a small brass ring around it.
I then went out with the EVO on an adjoining 1 Acre field that had been used as a Caravan site, this had been battered several times before and I had found a lot of coins , last time I went on it I got one coin with the Equinox and it had not been bothered with since.
1st signal was a 20 pence, 6'' down very clear, not sure how that had been missed !
The EVO seemed unstable and was giving a lot of 'one way signals' so i reduced the sensitivity to nearly half, this seemed to claim it down a lot, i continued to detect and found another 8 coins that had been missed all within 7'' of the surface. I was using the EVO on Inland mode , Sweep speed 3 and i was playing about with my tones, but that's for another day!
Thought I'd try it in 'Non motion mode' one pace forward and it nearly blew my head off and a 99 appeared on the screen so i moved away presuming it was probably a big piece of iron or it was some sort of ground interference, i went back to dig it to see what was causing this massive signal and to my surprise there down the hole was a Victorian Halfpenny, surly this was not responsible for the signal i was getting so i went over the hole again and 99 reappeared on the screen and another 3 '' down was a 1920 Silver shilling !
I have not used a non motion detector much before (except the 1220 and that was dire although most people thought it was great) but i do like the idea of it , i carried on detecting making adjustments and changing things as i went , i then went though a spell of about half an hour of zero signals, i could not understand why it had gone from loads of signals to none, Then i had a thought, i bet it had defaulted back to Sweep Speed 5 while i was scrolling though the settings, and it had , so back to sweep speed 3 and instantly as if someone had flicked a switch signals appeared again, within 30 seconds i had found a Silver sixpence, several coins later in motion and non motion mode i decided to head off home, found two more Sixpences on the way back to my car, both cupro nickel , these normally are very low conductive finds , no problem with either, one was found in non motion and one was found in motion, i was just thinking to myself i had not dug any iron with it at all and the last signal of the day in non motion mode there at the bottom of the hole was a iron bolt while extracting it i saw a something green also down the hole and there was a Victorian penny, went in with my probe and found another 2 nails.
When i get a new/different detector i always take it to somewhere where i know there will be signals, otherwise you will not learn anything about it
I will be taking it out next Sunday to a totally worked out Roman Pasture site where i normally get one signal every 3 hours (if im lucky) I need to do a lot more with the EVO on the test bed , not really touched it yet.
it could do with a bit more Volume as far as am concerned, and of course the 'Speed settings' need sorting out so it is usable in factory settings , it's a bit unstable so does it need re tuning to make it more user friendly or would that kill it ? it seems to me to be a detector that pushes the boundaries , i believe there is an upgrade soon to sort a couple of problems out., it's quirky and is very different to anything else out there as indeed is the Equinox, in a different way.
Most detectors are very similar but i am always interested when one appears that offers something different, it opens up worked out sites again.
The Non Motion mode on the EVO from what i have seen from it will be very interesting.
More to come
My EVO went off yesterday to have covers made for it so i will not get it back until Friday,
5/5/21
Went out on Sunday , took the EVO, Deus and Equinox with me, decided to have a go on the field i found my Roman pan on years ago, this field as you can imagine has been battered , it's about 8 acres , Explorer's /E-Tracs/CTX's and GPX 500's, 4 of us have spent a lot of time on this field over a 15 year period, it's not been touched for a couple of years.
4 became one (me) so off i went on Sunday thinking if i got a non ferrous signal it would be a miracle, but i know if i have an Equinox on this sort off field i am always going to get signals.
Started off with the Deus, with 11'' X35 coil attached, i got 12 non ferrous signals with it, in an hour best being a decorated Medieval buckle plate, amazing how these had been missed.
After lunch the EVO came out, no idea what is happening with this detector, it just seems to have it's own agenda. so it ended up back in the car
Next out the Equinox , you know exactly what you are going to get with this and straight away the .22 shells and Bullets and of course the deep pewter buttons were popping out ! in an hour i got about 12 non ferrous targets the same as the Deus
The interesting thing is that all the Equinox signals were very low conductivity 90% of which the Deus would not have picked up,
And all the Deus signals were medium or high conductivity.
I then put a Coiltek 10'' x 5'' coil (i had just acquired) on the Equinox and went poking about under the dry stone walls in a field that had been even more battered than the previous field.
I got several more non ferrous targets , the size of some of them were minute at depths you would not think possible for something so small. but non of them were anything to excite me.
I spent another hour with the EVO when i got home on the test bed, it worked great last week, but it was on a Caravan site, it just will not work if you increase the sensitivity, so great in the first 5'' , i have got some great performances out of it on the test bed but it does not do it twice, there seems to be multiple problems will it way beyond me.
I have a few new ones here but never put them up for sale, pointless as i knew they would come back, also i have had covers made for them , but again i have not put them up up for sale as i guessed that the EVO would be recalled at some stage, and it was this week, lets hope C-Scope get it sorted, there was defiantly something in the EVO that was different.
18/6/21
Back again, bit delayed , funny time of the year , Business wise always slower this time of year, loads to say but no time to say it ! due to other interests /hobbies taking over, i spend less time on a computer this time of year due to more daylight hours.
I have just bought a Coiltek 15'' Coil for my Equinox , just to see if it's any better than the Minelab 15'' x 13'' Coil,
I tried it last night and it seemed O.K , about the same as the 11'' standard coil as i thought it would be, great if you need ground coverage but i want depth.
26/6/21
I am creating a new test bed soon , so if you have any ideas of what i should place under the ground email me with ideas
smdetectors@hotmail.com
28/6/21
Please note we will be closed from Friday the 2nd of July until Monday the 12th of July
I am contactable by Text and Email throughout this period
The Web shop and ebay with reopen on Friday the 9th of July but items purchased will not be sent until Monday the 12th
I have about 30 detectors here that need cleaning and putting up for sale , loads of coils and bits and pieces to sort out , so need a week to catch up again!
13/7/21
Well the week off did not go to plan, it started well then everything seemed to go pear shaped, some of the Detectors i had to clean were a nightmare, probably never been cleaned from new, normally a detector will take about 20 mins to half an hour to clean, some of the ones i had took over 2 hours, then they were so well used i would only be getting my money back.
Then i did my back in, so did not get a lot more done, so i still have a pile off detectors here to sort out. had a few more in today and more due tomorrow, i have to find a way to catch up, will probably be shutting ebay down every other day is the way to go. who knows?
We went away a few weeks ago, to Anglesey to continue our walk around the Island, nearly done it now then next the North Wales coast.
We stayed at Red Wharf Bay, massive expanse of sand, when on Holiday i normally get a couple of hours to detect in the evening, i used the Equinox for the first couple of days. i like to get beyond Decimal coinage on a Beach it means i have found something that other detectorists have missed for the last 40 years, 1st night several fishing weights and a 1948 Sixpence, the Sixpence gave me a readout of 2 on the screen, no one in their right mind would dig that on a beach.
2nd night i went on the mud flats, that was an experience! I could not walk without sinking in the mud to the top of my wellie, then I had to try to get my foot out and move another step forward, I found a car battery at about 18’’ and a pedal of a bike at a foot, hmm back to the sand again..
3rd night wandered around the beach without much joy, trying to find an hotspot.
4th and 5th night got back late to the cottage so did not manage to get out
6th and last night I took the Minelab GPX 5000 out, wandered around for and hour or more without a signal, this was hard work, they I hit an area where a river runs across the beach, signals everywhere, Fishing weights, 10 early decimal coins, ring pulls etc, problem was I then needed the Equinox, everything was 2’’ down and blowing my head off with the GPX , total overkill!
Typical last night and I hit the hotspot, it happens every Holiday, time to go home, I have made a metal note for next time we are in the area !
24/7/21
Off out tomorrow (Sunday) i only have about 100 acres of land that has been Ploughed out of about 30.000 , so its a bit of a novelty when the corn gets cut, which it did this week, this 100 acres has produced a lot of nice finds, no idea why, it's in the middle of nowhere , but stuff from bronze age to present day has been found, over 30 Silver coins have been found from Roman to date, but as you can imagine it's been battered over the last 10 years so now it's hard to get a signal.
The thing i like about stubble is that it does not matter what i use , detector wise, so i take a few out to play with, tomorrow its going to be two Equinox's with the 11'' standard coil and 10'' x 5'' Coiltek coil, the Deus with 9'' and 11'' X35 coil and the Deeptech Vista Smart pro + with 11'' coil.
We'll see what happens tomorrow!
25/7/21
Well i started with the Equinox with 11'' coil only had a couple of signals in the 1st hour, stubble very stiff, so i changed to my other Equinox fitted with the 10'' x 5'' Coiltek Coil, i have never really liked Coiltek coils nor have i liked elliptical coils but for some reason i have bonded with this coil, it's very lightweight and was great in the stubble, i got a few signals before lunch, best being a .22 bullet , the Coiltek coil is noticeably more sensitive than the standard Minelab 11'' coil, i did not think that was possible.
After a bite to eat i decided to give the Deeptech a go in some of the iron infested areas, (or not) as i had forgotten my headphones to use with the Deeptech i only had my Deus and Equinox wireless ones, maybe not a good idea using it anyway as the field is full of coke, the equinox ignores it and i can easily identify it with the Deus, i used the Deus all afternoon with the X35 9'' coil, got about 20 signals none of which were anything only bits of lead and aluminium.
So ended up digging 27 non ferrous targets and the best was a .22 bullet, that's how it goes sometimes, I'm surprised i dug so much, next time it maybe 20 non ferrous dug and 20 finds!
1/8/21
On my own again today, same stubble field as last week , hoping for different results, remembered my headphones this week so i thought id start with the Deeptech Vista Smart, gave it an hour , got quite a few signals with it and only found 3 pieces of Coke and Zero iron, next the Equinox came out for a couple of hours, nothing too exciting turned up but at least i got a few buttons a lot more than last week, last half hour out came the Deus , 1st signal a William 111,Sixpence, time to go home!
I need to try the Vista on a worked out site with no Coke to see if it does something that others don't.
8/8/21
Forecast not great today , thunder storms and heavy rain forecast , but i thought id give it a go on a field about 2 miles away, again it's a field long abandoned because no one can get a signal on it, but it's been very prolific over the years.
My idea was to use all three detectors , Equinox with 10 x 5 Coiltek fitted, Deus with 9'' X35 Coil and Vista with 11'' coil (because i don't have a smaller coil at the moment) rape stubble so a bit of a different challenge, i don't mind rape stubble because i do not have a big sweep so can bob in and out of the stalks.
Each detector would be used from one end of the field to the other and non ferrous targets counted (if any)
First up the Equinox , got on the field and switched it on, had the normal 10 mins of trying to connect the headphones, in the meantime the heavens opened , great , at least the Equinox is waterproof, I'm not !
20 yds and the headphones packed up, battery flat, so back to the car to get my cable so i could hard wire them, forgot the cable, i did not have anything in my bag to get it up and running again, then in my glove box i found some Deus back phones, these are rubbish on the Equinox , but better than nothing, so back on the field again, still raining, i had to turn the volume up and wack the threshold up to max so i could hear something, but on walking from one side to the other (about 1 mile) taking about 1 and a half hours i had 22 non ferrous targets, not bad for a worked out field, back to the car for a sandwich then it was the Deus's turn, i was getting a bit wet now as the waterproofs had nearly given up, i had got about half way across the field when the storms to end all storms kicked in, i was soaked within a few mins, home time, Deus had found two non ferrous , best finds of the day were a few pewter buttons.
Just discovered today (Thursday ) i left my spade at the side of the road, went back but of course it had gone, ordered another (£40.00) not a great day out.
16/8/21
Loads of detectors coming and going at the moment, including 5 or 6 Equinoxs a week, most of which never go up for sale because someone will phone me on a daily basis after one, or they are sold before i get them, they are been sold to me because people say they are too good !!!!
I know what they mean, i tend to use mine mainly on worked out sites (most of my permissions !)
This Sunday i went back to my very worked out stubble field i got rained off on last week, the Deus and Equinox were given an equal amount of time on the field, the Deus found me more although i felt more confident with the Equinox , it gave me loads more information and i realised how much iron and coke there was on the field, but on disturbed land it's very hit and miss and a great leveller, it does not really matter which detector you use..
over all i dug 25 targets and two Pistol balls and a squashed thimble was the result.
22/8/21
Well I think I finally got stubble out of my system for another year, as I have mentioned before I only have about 150 acres of ploughed/stubble to go at (the rest is all Pasture) , but every year when it comes around I feel I need to go on it I have been detecting on it now for a few weeks without an awful lot of joy, I tend to use this time of year to experiment with detectors because that it's not that crucial it’s all very hit and miss, so I tend to take a few detectors out with me on a Sunday and play about with them if I find something it’s a bonus, on Friday I acquired a Nokta Anfibio I have never actually tried one in the field , it came in with a Nel tornado coil as well, possibly my favourite coil they really change the performance of a detector, i tested it on my test bed , and yes it's one of the deepest detectors out there deeper certainly deeper than my equinox ideal for my worked out pasture land
So it's going to be joining my Deeptech smart for when I get back on pasture again which will probably be next week!
Thought I’d try the Anfibio first for an hour with the Tornado coil on, it’s a bit top heavy I don’t like the Anfibio's stem at all really I’m sure it could have been designed better it just seems just seems too chunky and heavy and unbalanced to me but having a 13'' x 12“ Tornado coil on the end of it did not help, I was bashing through the stubble, I went from one side of the field to the other probably about half a mile dug seven targets three of which were Coke cans the best target i dug was something that resembled a Medieval horse Harness pendant but you have to have a good imagination, next up was to use all four detectors I had taken with me for an hour each in an area which was full of iron and has given up some good finds in the past , pottery all over the ground from all periods of time and I think there must have been a building at some stage,
On there first of all was the Anfibio with it 11 inch coil on it's a lot better balanced and a lot lighter as you would expect but when I get back on my pasture again it will have a tornado coil on.
Anfibio -1 non ferrous target
Deeptech Vista (11'') 3
Equinox -1(10'' x 5'' ) 3
Deus -(9'') 1
That's 8 signals in 4 hours, not great, but that's what detecting on worked out sites is like.
One interesting thing i found whist using the Anfibio is that seems to drag targets in , you can be 12'' away from the target and still get it, i found the pinpoint button very handy on it. I used it on 'deep mode' because using it in any other way makes it seems to make it a very average detector. using it on Deep mode causes it to chatter a lot made whose by using it in stubble , but i can live with it on my pasture if it finds things that other have missed.
I found the Anfibio quite boring and uninspiring, but i can live with that if it does the business !
These are my 1st impressions and i have not looked at the manual yet.
I made the mistake on Sunday morning of looking on youtube , just to get a few ideas about settings e,t,c, (don't know why i haven't leaned by now),looking at the first and only Video i could cope with, the guy on the Video (30 mins long) was talking us though how to use the Anfibio, He's getting a signal and saying 'that's a deep one'' and i'm thinking no it isn't you've missed it , it's 6'' in front of you !! , then he finds it and declares it's a deep one, it must be small , no it's not it's shallow aggghh, i can tell that and I've never used one before! then the find comes out of the ground at 2'' , the next 10 mins is a discussion about what it might be, ''for god's sake it's a bottle top'' i find myself yelling at my ipad (as the finder carefully cleans it), if you have watched any youtube detecting video's you will know what i mean!
1/9/21
Went out on Sunday and spent over an hour driving around to see what was available, mostly the grass was too high and the ground too hard, i went on a remote bank side eventually with the Anfibio /Equinox and Deus, this bank side is in the middle of nowhere but nice finds have appeared in the area so you never know!
I didn't expect to find anything , so i thought I'd try all the detectors along the length of the bank side about 400 yds long and back again, just to see if any of them excelled .
1st was the Nokta Anfibio, there and back 4 signals, this detector is great on my test bed but very noisy and boring to use, i could live with it if the noise meant something, like it was iron or minerals it was picking up, but no it's just noisy, i turned the sensitivity down which made it a bit quieter, but of course that knocks the performance back so there is no point in using it on my sites , it will be on my website for sale later this week. Excellent Detector just not for me.
Next i used my Equinox, got 3 signals quite quickly so i thought this was the way to go ! but having walked there and back that was the total , 3 signals, i was running the Equinox flat out, in all metal, in Field 2 , if you have ever done that you will know how much noise you get from all the iron and minerals in the ground, this was silent, all i could hear was the threshold purring away in the background, no Coke and hardly any iron in the area (no finds either!)
Lastly the Deus with my supersonic Pasture settings, awesome, i was getting signals everywhere i went with it, mainly very corroded cartridge cases, a few bits of lead and Horse harness buckle C1950 (my only find) 12 non ferrous signals in all, only one of the 12 signals was an obvious signal all the other 11 signals were the sort of signal no on one in their right mind would dig, but when you are on a very clean site with Zero coke and little iron you can pick these signals out, no ID or a false ID on the readout (use your ears !) just goes to show what we are walking over, no one would ever dig these signals on a normal field.
5/9/21
Back on stubble again this week, just waiting for the ground to get a little softer and the grass to get shorter before i can get on my Pasture fields, so I'm playing about on stubble fields in the meantime, don't care what detectors i use because it's very hit and miss on disturbed ground and you can probably find something with any detector.
So to make things more interesting i tend to do a bit of testing /comparison stuff and i might i find something along the way if I’m lucky
Today i just took the Deus and Equinox out with me, both had 10'' x 5'‘ Coils fitted, the Field is about 10 Acres and i am going to do a circuit of it with both detectors , this field has a quite a few signals on it , mainly buttons but all sorts have come off it, not been on it this year since it's been ploughed.
First off is the Deus, 31khz is the chosen freq, it took 1 and a half hours to go around the field, ended up with a William 111 Shilling/ 11 Buttons a Shoe clasp and a fragment of a pewter spoon total amount of non-ferrous metal dug 24, percentage of finds from non ferrous metal dug 58%
All the targets i dug were in the first 5''
Next the Equinox , i guessed that i would be digging deeper and was correct , most of the targets were deeper than what i was getting with the Deus, also i thought most of the targets would be junk, and this was also correct.
I dug 15 non-ferrous targets and only one was something, half a button!
So 6.6% of what i dug was a find
That is hell of a difference, thought it might be a bit closer, normally in a year 33% of the non-ferrous items i dig up are finds, the percentages have dropped since i started using he Equinox
Equinox's seem to love to find pieces of non-descript non-ferrous metals, there is one piece of this field that is full of button's, the Deus was finding them with every sweep the equinox managed to find zero only a few pieces of non- descript lead turned up in the area. What is happening here? is it the sweep speed? is it just an amazing amount of bad luck, it’s easy to see how finds can be missed.
If i had marked all the signals i got with the Deus then gone over them with the Equinox i would have got them, and visa versa , but when you know its there its different,
On a test bed I can see what detectors are capable of, I know what is under the ground and I can make the detector find it, if of course it has the ability to find it, but in the field it’s a different ball game.
If I had gone on this field for the first time with the Deus I would have thought, ‘’this is all right plenty of finds, I’ll come back again’’ , but if I had gone on with the Equinox I would probably never have bothered again.
There are loads of fields I have been on in the past that I have written off ,then gone back with a different detector years later , and it’s been an awesome field
So this why we can keep on going back to the same field with a different detector. Same detector, different settings, different sweep speed, whatever, and get different results
24/9/21
Back again !
Just back from a week on the Gower Peninsula , only got a few hours detecting in (as normal) does not help when it goes dark at about 7.30, after a days walking there is not a lot of time left before dark We were staying only a few yards from the beach , it does not seem to have been detected on much as i found quite a few Fishing weights, i also found a two pence a pre decimal halfpenny and Three penny bit ,1944 .
I also found a couple of buttons C1750 and of course loads of ring pulls and bit of Aluminium
I was using my equinox on the wet sand and Deus on the dry.
I then had an hour on the coastal path, no one had detected on the stretch i went on, you can tell because there are plenty on high conductive signals and these are normally gone because your normal detectorist will have ignored the low conductive signals and just dug the high so you are normally left with silver paper and ring pulls, the high conductive signals i was digging were only bottle tops and bullets and one half pence, but i cannot ever remember digging any high conductive signals on a coastal path , ever. I'm sure if we had stayed for another couple of weeks i would have started to crack into the older stuff, but now back to normality.
10/10/21
Not much going on at the moment, went out today for the 1st time since returning from Hols, due to one thing and another cropping up over the last few weeks, took a friend to a very worked out Roman site, he got a Georgian halfpenny !!! no idea how that had been missed over the years and also a 4th Century Bronze, i found an iron knife blade, it's always interesting when you place someone different on a site that as been battered, to see what they find, different settings/Sweep speed and going into it with a open mind and with no knowledge of the hot spots will always come into play, i went on the site today and immediately defaulted to where i had found things before, could not stop myself!
I used the Deus and Equinox today and although the Deus found more non ferrous items, the Equinox was nicer to use as it gave me more info, all the non ferrous items i dug with the Deus came though as iron
I think i have got this site out of my system for another year.
I cannot end this blog entry without mentioning the contribution that DHL /UKMail Couriers have made to my week, a couple of weeks ago we decided to try the ''cheaper than Parcelforce'' service we were offered, made sense, half the price! easy booking, parcels picked up on time, great !! but they forgot to tell me they were not very good at delivering , they lost parcels, , the tracking was totally useless , no one actually scanned the parcels, they claimed they were delivered when they were not , the company was not contactable only by email, no phone ,and it would take 4 days to reply, parcels i was told were signed for when they were not, they failed to take any notice of any request and just did their own thing, leaving me with very annoyed customers and not having any idea where their parcel was, and no one to contact.
I cannot even begin to describe the problems i had with one parcel last week, you just could not make it up.
If anyone from UK Mail would like to dispute these comments then please contact me and explain to me why i am wrong! and why a lot their drivers are totally useless!
So back to Parcelforce where i have not had that much hassle in 20 years !
Regarding covers, we have decided to discontinue the Neoprene covers we sell, these are our biggest sellers but due to the cost of shipping from China (over £1000 for a couple of rolls ) it is not longer worth it, having lost 40% of our sales due to Brexit (overseas)., there are quite a few Neoprene covers in stock at the moment but when they have gone they have gone, so if you have a particular fetish for Neoprene covers then get buying now.
We have run out of Camo Neoprene, but will still be producing the smaller covers (Deus/Equinox e.t.c) out of off cuts
Still a good quantity of black Neoprene left
Eventually, remaining will be Camo or Black Cordura
26/10/21
Update on the covers , we will be packing up selling covers in the near future and i have someone lined up to take over. and we will hopefully see the return of the Neoprene.
In the meantime we will be selling the covers we currently have in stock until we have none left, many have been discounted.
We will then be concentrating on Detectors /Coils etc.
this is to free up more time.
We went on a new field on Sunday, behind a Church in a Village i have permission in, never managed to get on this field before due to the fact the grass has always been too long, but Sheep on it now so off we go !
The Field is about 1 acre and was as you would expect full of iron, i have never dug so many pieces my life, loads of iron buckles/Horseshoes and pieces of flat iron all giving a very good signal on my Deus, it was much later in the day when i realised i was using my deep pasture settings with not a lot of discrimination ! so with a couple of tweaks i was back to mainly just non ferrous signals, i dug 8 coins, best find of the day was a William 111 Sixpence (love token) a few buttons/thimble and similar, Kevin (yes another one) who was detecting with me got his best coin total ever (20) , i think my best was 70, but that was on a 1960's camp site years ago !
Nice to get back on to virgin fields (not many about now) i think i need a break from detecting on my worked out sites, i have 1000's of acres of undetected fields so i think a bit of exploring is the way forward, most will be barren, but you never know!
3/11/21
The Deus 11 seems to be the detector everyone is talking about at the moment, i will of course be ordering one , i am told they will be available maybe at the end of the year to early next year, we shall see if it does something that others don't ,soon!
Can't really see where detectors are going to get better going forward, maybe discrimination will be more accurate ?
A lot of people are selling Equinox's because they find too much??? they certainly get small, low conductive targets that other detectors do not see, but most of it is just small fragments of lead/Silver foil/bits of non-descript metal that could never be anything of interest. Most of the sales i make at the moment are people swapping between the Deus and Equinox and and then back again!
So people are going to be buying the Deus 2 , hoping that that it is better than the Equinox , that people are selling because it's too good ,ahggggghh
I ordered mine but i am a long way down the queue, so if you want to pre-order get in now.
What does it all mean to me business wise?
Most Deus fanatics will want a Deus 2, so they will be trying to off load their Deus 1 , either to me or Ebay/Facebook whatever, and most will still think it's worth more than it is, Deus 1's will decrease in value .
People will be phoning me and trying to sell anything they don't need anymore to fund their new Deus, fine by me!
Dealers selling new Deus 2's will not want part ex's ,I'm sure i will be offered loads of Deus 1's
There will be loads of Deus 1 coils for sale everywhere , so the prices will go down.
The Deus 2 buyers will fall into several camps
The buyers (like me) who just need to try the latest technology , regardless of cost
The buyers who will be selling everything they can get their hands on to finance their new toy
The buyers who will sit back cautiously and see what happens , expecting it to be a flop so they can say 'told you so'
might be something in that because probably 90% of new detectors to come out have teething problems., but i do not expect it from XP, they are in my opinion the best quality detectors on the market.
13/11/21
Went out last Sunday on another undetected field behind the Village Church , it was next to the field we went on a couple of weeks ago, so i was expecting plenty of good signals, coins buttons etc.
Thought i'd use a Minelab CTX 3030 i had just had in, a trip down memory lane! as i had used one for 3 years pre Equinox, a lot of detectorists have sold their Equinox's and gone back to the CTX, any CTX's i get in normally sell straight away,
I used the CTX for two hours and found a couple of George 111 Half pennies and 4 buttons, very few signals, and the ones i got were very very quite, this field had to have more signals on it , i just felt i was was walking over targets so i changed to my Deus, signals everywhere! but i was digging a lot of iron, the field seemed full of it. (i remembered later i did not have much discrim on it !)
Next up the Equinox , what a difference that made, loads of non-ferrous signals , no iron being dug , target after target.
Not sure what i actually found yet because i have not had chance to clean it all up, nothing stood out, but sometimes when cleaning coins up you do get a surprise
So i am not quite sure why so many people are going back to the CTX, i ever know a couple of people who have paid near 2 grand recently for a new one??
Yes they will still find stuff, but they are twice the price of the Equinox and not as good, so are people paying a grand for the GPS?
The Deus 2 i am told will be arriving in December and will be £1399.00 , so an ideal Christmas pressy for a lucky few i'm sure!
I have recently started to put some stuff on Facebook marketplace, i am slowly reducing the ebay listings, so we'll see how that goes
4/12/21
Been out of action for a few weeks now due to an operation that as left me limited in walking. Bending and digging, not great if you detect!
Plenty of Deus’s coming in still as people prepare for the Deus 2, in two weeks I am told?
I am having a big sort out at the moment as I bring to the end our cover sales era , 100’s of proto types and second-hand covers will be going on ebay in the coming weeks
So, while I have been sorting all this out, I have a backlog of detectors to clean and to get up for sale.
E-Bay have decided to charge a bit more if the seller sells overseas, so I think I will not be doing that after the 31st of December, over 40% of our sales were overseas now it’s about 0-5%, as well as various governments in Europe screwing anyone who dares to buy from the UK, Ebay are also screwing the seller over here, so, sorry goodbye to Europe on ebay, but anyone from Europe or anywhere else in the World can still buy off the website. But of course, they will still be screwed by their own government.
I recently put a Compass coil on an ebay auction and it sold for 1 pence plus £4.00 postage, 12 months ago that would have sold for £50.00 or more because Compass fanatics from Europe would have been bidding on it, the market as changed as it does from time to time, so you have to evolve with it.
The Market is flooded with Detectors, coils and accessories at the moment, lots of items that would have fetched a sensible amount of money a few months ago are fetching very little or unsaleable.
Companies like Nokta bring a new detector out every week (nearly) and a range of coils, these become obsolete quite quickly and very difficult to sell
The Legend will be out soon, what becomes then of the Anfibio and the Kruzer? There values will drop and no one will want the coils.
The Legend looks very interesting, no idea when it will appear, I have one on order so will do a bit off a field test on it when it arrives