Nexus Standard MP V2 On The River

After months and months of debating in my head if I should take one of my Nexus machines down to the river, I finally decided that it was the right thing to do. What's the point in having these detectors if I'm not going to use them on all terrain. Not only that but I was starting to really miss swinging them, due to my fields being waterlogged. I wouldn't be detecting them any time soon so it made sense to incorporate both my MP V2 and Credo DDM into my foreshore hunts.

The reason I opted to use the V2 was for the very simple fact that it has an iron reject mode and due to the amount of iron littered all over the river I wanted to be able to mute as much of it out as possible. The iron reject mode allows me to do this, it works in a very similar way to the 'silent 'search' on the Tesoro detectors but there's a little more noise, especially on the river because you're dealing with really large iron. Non-ferrous targets will give a clear tone and the RGB meter will go red, iron will clip displaying very little on the RGB meter apart from the occasional blue. Masked targets I'll explain further in this blog.

On my first trip I decided to use the 11.5 SS coil, this is a high frequency concentric coil that operates at 24 KHZ, it's designed for use in heavy iron. I use this coil when separation and unmasking is the priority, these coils aren't designed for depth. Let us remember that you can't go deep in the iron so using a deep seeking coil is a total waste of time. The 11.5 coil might sound big for a terrain with so many mixed targets close together but these sized coils actually excel on these types of environment.  

Due to the nature of the foreshore you do have really really large lumpy and flat iron and depending where you have the 'disc' set. The V2 might/will give a non-ferrous response but these types of signals are very obvious because, firstly they sound huge and secondly you can raise the coil high off the ground and still hit on them clearly, even with the Threshold at zero. 

The more you hunt in 'large iron' the more obvious large flat iron becomes, it's really not a problem, I do actually plan to dig a lot of it out at some stage. I run my disc on the edge, meaning it's set for unmasking as efficiently as possible, with it set like this you will have to be prepared to dig some iron. This personally doesn't bother me because I know when it comes to small non-ferrous targets, I won't be missing any with my disc set at this level. Like all metal detectors, it's swings and roundabouts, there's always a trade off.

The MP V2 is a very deep machine so it has to be tuned down for the river, most signals are within the first few inches. I keep my sensitivity at 0 and suppress the threshold at 0 as well, running the V2 like this will still give you more than enough depth. There's no point in running the unit 'hot' because it will start to pick up the 'ground', the point here is to have the machine running as smooth as possible. Another approach that I use is to swing the coil further off the ground, this really helps the overall stability and contributes to avoiding the deeper iron.

The ground balancing of the detector isn't too much of a problem and it really only needs to be reviewed when you move over a surface that's wildly different. For example, rocks to mud or mud to sand, for the machine to operate at its best you still need to stick with the basic rules, which is a steady and level swing technique combined with not swinging the coil too close to the ground. What needs to be understood here is, the foreshore isn't level so you can only keep the coil as level to the ground as possible but the V2 copes with this just fine when using iron reject mode.

Areas where you have large pertruding rocks, I will turn the threshold up because I'm having to swing further away from the ground. A raised threshold allows the machine to detect those targets that are further away from the coil. When I can get the coil close to the ground I turn the threshold back to 0, with the threshold turned up and swinging the coil high the machine will still detect really small items. One thing that needs to be understood with Nexus is - you're not going to have a quiet hunt. What I mean by this is, due to minimal filtering the machine will fire off on hot rocks, creating inverted phase signals. This can be confusing at first but the most important point here is to just dig the two way signals.

Nowadays with digital detectors and their huge amount of filters, people have been conditioned to want silence, silence = stability ... right? wrong, silence means a shitload of filters which in turn negatively effects performance. If you want a silent hunt on conditions like the foreshore then don't use Nexus once you've mastered what the V2 is communicating to you, you'll find it performs brilliantly on wet foreshore terrain with a high iron content. BUT ..  it's nothing like a digital detector, so you have to reset your mind in this regard. I wrote a blog about peoples desire for silence when they swing, it can be found here Silence Isn't Golden 

An important point to cover is masked targets, due to the sheer amount of signals and mixed metals littered on the bank of the river. You're going to come across masked targets, it's important to understand what to look & listen for in this regard. The V2 will respond to masked targets in the same way it does in the fields, you'll get a mix of both red and blue on the RGB meter and the audio will be a mix of clipping but you'll find that a "slight" non-ferrous "RED" target response will break through. It's tricky to explain, there are a few examples of masked targets in the river videos that I've posted to my YouTube channel when using the MP V2 on the river.

To conclude, the MP V2 handles the river terrain very well, but it will be a louder experience due to the fact the machine has very little filtering. This doesn't mean the unit is unstable, it's just the way Nexus operates, remember you are wanting to dig the signals that hit two ways, everything else is to be ignored. You can have a quieter hunting experience if you raise the disc but in doing so you risk missing smaller targets in close proximity to iron. Because a lot of what I'm looking for are small items I run my disc at the "sweet spot" where unmasking small targets is effective. You will dig more iron due to this but that's just the way that it is, no metal detector is magic. Regular Nexus users will know what to expect when running their machines on foreshore type terrain, new users might initially find it a little overwhelming.