XP DEUS 2 Discrimination Explained

Anybody who has never tried an XP Deus will struggle at first with the incomprehensible user manual, the alien detector jargon, and the complex controls. However, it remains one of the top two best metal detectors on earth at the moment. 

I decided to take a deep dive into the advanced discrimination features and break down what they really mean, and how important they are.

IAR Discrimination

Iron Amplitude Rejection. Amplitude is just referring to the range or distance of the iron from your coil. 

A low setting will only reject shallow iron targets, whereas a deeper setting rejects both shallow and deep iron targets.

XP Goes on to warn you that gold nuggets and relics buried more deeply in highly mineralized ground can have a similar signal to iron, so it’s better to leave IAR off. 

This is absurd because XP is admitting their feature is obsolete. 

IAR can only be used in GOLD FIELD mode or RELIC FIELD mode. 

Gold nuggets are almost always found in extremely high iron mineralization, so as per XP’s instructions–IAR should “not” be used here. 

So why create IAR?! 

XP is a very popular brand amongst relic hunters as well. We can assume many relics are found in more moderately mineralized ground where IAR could be used to help reject some of the iron. However, Relic hunters usually love iron, as many rare relics are made of iron. 

I also have concerns that IAR will mask good targets if it is used in a heavily iron contaminated relic site. 

Other modes of iron discrimination like BCaps and Silencer should also be avoided if the detectorist doesn’t want to lose valuable depth or risk signals being masked by the discrimination features. 

There are much more valuable features on the XP Deus that can help a user decide whether to dig or not without sacrificing depth.

Full Tones

If you haven’t experimented with the different tone features on your XP Deus 2, it is important that you start now.

Full Tones could be compared to “Region All Tones” on the Minelab Manticore, where each tone segment gradually increases in pitch, creating a unique harmonic signature to each target you run across. 

In contrast, Full Tones assigns targets different frequencies of pitch. Pitch being the highness or lowness of a sound. 

Because Full Tones is based on a targets conductivity, it has a unique way in which it converts targets into harmonic sounds, with lots of important information for the users ears. 

Compared to simple “bell” tones, that we use as beginners, or when we are just getting started with a new detector program, Full Tones is like seeing with your ears. 

To give you an example: 

If you were just using a simple single tone (2–tones, 3-tones, 4-tones etc.), an iron false just sounds like a single note–one frequency of sound–not harmonic. As the detectors processor became more familiar with the iron and you turned around the target you may hear a singular low frequency sound coming in. The classic iron grunt. 

The problem arises here that the detectorist is getting fed information that sounds like there are actually two objects there when it is fact one. 

In contrast, when you switch to Full Tones, instead of hearing two separate tones, you will hear one distorted harmonic tone representing the iron object that graduates in pitch frequency. 

This should alert any semi-experienced detectorist that the object they are investigating is iron, and can be ignored. However without the auditory information of Full Tones any detectorist might get fooled and have to dig iron false signals. 

Pitch 

Pitch is a mode that does not take into account the conductivity of targets, whether they are aluminum, gold, lead, copper, brass, silver, etc.. Instead, Pitch gives off sounds that vary in both volume and frequency. 

For instance, a small deep target will give a low weak pitch/ sound, and a large or shallow target will give off a high pitch/sound. However, these tones are modifiable in the expert menu, and you could make deep targets sound high with shallow targets sounding low.

Interestingly, wherever you set your discrimination threshold (I recommend 10); below that you will hear iron tones (IF you set the pitch to be a low iron tone). Supposedly regardless of what frequency/pitch you set your discrimination at, if you are in Pitch mode, the closer the target is to your coil the lower the sound/pitch it will omit. 

There are many great uses for Pitch mode, however, my favorite is hunting in my hunted out sites. If I know I have pounded a site, and I only want to get deep targets; I set my pitch so that deep targets sound off with a high-pitched tone, and shallow targets sound off with a low-pitched tone. 

This way if I hear a high pitched tone, it stops me in my tracks. This is similar to the way we cherry-pick silver listening for high-tones. However, in this case we are simply striving for maximum depth on repeatable targets.