What's happening with the Blisstool, pretty quite?

Should be a few users out there now.

Still waiting for mine...told me after june 8th...ahhhhhh......well will have the new minelab next week.....

Yeah Barry, you also said you were going to send Tom one test.....

What's up?

Hey Aaron - I never said that.
We are on backorder and every one that has been ordered is already spoken for.

Daniel Tn is one of the first to get his - he has posted here and sent me great email feedback.

Looks like Aaron has been eating his spinach lately! ;-)

I'm sure the reports will be coming in soon and Daniel gave us a nice taste of what might be to come.

Albert

I am waiting on mine also. I guaranty that my wait will be worth it. Cant wait to get back on some of my hard hunted CW camps. Mark

I finished up my 2nd hunt with it yesterday and am waiting on the rain to get out of here so I might can go today.

I will say this machine has a bit of a learning curve to it...in which I am still am very much in. The machine is from Bulgaria and the manual for it is in English, but the translation is a bit tough to understand. For those of us in the US that have them, everything we're learning we are having to do it via communicating with one another as we progress. We are building a foundation for learning this machine though and I think Carter and Barry are working on a better manual for it in English. There are certain controls on this machine that are site specific...that's one of the great thing about the machine...you're not stuck with having to just deal with the way the factory sets the machine. You can control it...thus this Disc Depth knob is what fasinates me the most.

The machine is only capable of discriminating iron to small pieces of foil/aluminum. It has 3 levels of discimination, and the Disc Depth control is one that I am working with learning. In bad soil, machines will start reading non ferrous items AS ferrous items.....thus why most VLFs must be ran in all metal mode to get the deeper non ferrous items that are being read as iron...and requiring a lot of hours on the machine to be able to learn what is actually real iron and what is non ferrous being disguised as iron on the meter. This is where it gets really fun with this machine...somehow their engineers have figured out how to control this AND STILL LET YOU DISCRIMINATE IRON. This is done via the Disc Depth control. You can actually go to a site, and by a little playing, you can determine how severely mineralized the ground is, and set your Disc Depth to unlock those deeper non ferrous items that have always read as iron...while still being able to discriminate out iron itself. This is for sure not a control you are going to set once and forget about it, unless all your sites have the same soil content.

In yesterday's hunt we were at my bullet hill site. I went with a friend of mine that has a T2. The T2 is one of our best units for handling the bad soil...IF utilized in its motion all metal mode. Thus all targets read as iron on the meter but you can still hear the audio and determine from that, whether it might actually be iron or deeper non ferrous item. With the quick processor of the T2, most of the time you can tell iron by a short target profile of small iron or a double blip if you hit the nail from end to end. Both of us are very familiar with the T2 and thus we would use the T2 to locate most of the targets, marking the ones we felt were a likely chance of bullets, and then checking out the Blisstool on them.

In the early going of it, I had the Disc Depth control set up like they did in Culpeper, VA....and that particular setting worked great in my test garden as well....VERY capable of getting my deepest targets in there with smooth clear audio. But down at my bullet site, I was noticing I could get the bullets pretty easy that were 0-7 inches....but the deeper ones were breaking up as iron. This was a little disappointing at first...until we got a signal that we were nearly 100% sure was a deeper bullet on the T2. The Blisstool was totally breaking up on it, just like the signal was saying it was iron. Before we dug it, I decided to play around and remembered the video from Culpeper. In the video, there is a target that turns out to be a deep roundball. Carter has the Blisstool and Don Dodson was saying he felt it was a deep bullet. Carter ran the Bliss over the spot and you hear the iron sputter sound...and he adjusts the Disc Depth control. He had been running it around 9....and backed it off to 7.5 and BOOM...smooth signal from the Bliss over the target. Well I remembered that...and decided to play with Disc Depth. I lowered my setting of 7.5 to around 5 or 6 and the signal we had, became VERY clear and repeatable. We dug it and out rolled a minie ball that came from around 12 inches.

My fear was that by lowering the Disc Depth control to 5 or 6...that I was now going to be digging a lot of iron, because my understanding of it was that the setting controlled the depth in which the detector could disriminate. Well that's evidently not the entire case....because after hunting with the machine at this setting, I didn't dig ANY signals that were iron. It still sputtered on iron and if it gave a smooth repeatable signal, you could bet your dollar it was a non ferrous items. Once I started playing with this, deeper bullets began popping up. In all, we found 11 bullets that we were able to test, and I videoed a great portion of it. There were several cases after I lowered Disc Depth that my buddy said he had an iffy signal he wanted me to check, that may be extremely deep bullets...and I would run the Bliss over it and even by lowering the Disc Depth more, I couldn't get them to come in clear. Then when he would dig them, 100% of the time they were small horseshoe nails or square nail bits.

It is a very neat machine. Worth the wait for them! My understanding on the wait, is that these machines aren't manufacturered on an assembly where 10,000 are made in a day. They are assembled, and each one is individually tuned and calibrated to their standards. As a matter of fact, each COIL is calibrated to a specific machine. So you can't just swap coils out on it...if you decide you want the 15 inch coil, you have to give them the serial number of your machine and they will send you a coil calibrated for your machine. So it does take time. The demand for them in the US market is rather big and I was lucky I was one of the firsts in line to get one. There is a waiting list for them.

The only negative thing I can say about the machine right now....is something that can probably be addressed and fixed pretty easily. The control knobs turn a bit easier than what I like. A rubber o ring or two would help a lot. I have a bad habit of propping the machine up against my leg when I go to get my camera out to video a signal, and I noticed when it was propped against my leg with me moving around, that sometimes I would bump the back panel knobs and move them. It is similar to how the Tejon was when they first came out, and folks were putting the o rings under the knobs and fixing the problem. That's the only negative I can say about it thus far. It is balanced perfect...swings easy...goes deep when set right, and is finding relics for me and we are learning more about it with every hunt, to unlock its little nuggets.

Great report Daniel i think just what everyone was waiting for, looking forward to your videos. THANKS!

Very good info Daniel. Great example of knowing an existing machine ( the T2 ) and how it hits/sounds on deeper targets, and using the Bliss to listen to the same in ground target and adjusting based on info you derived from another user to come up with audio that would be a dig signal.

I went to the Minelab dinner in Atlantic City and was sitting with a hunter who got a Biisstool but did not get a chance to use it yet. He was explaining some of the features and the Disc Depth as well as how the ground balance works. I like units with manual ground balance. He said the manual stated that when beach hunting, ground balance in dry sand and then you can hunt into the wet without having to re-ground balance. He wants to use the Bliss on the beach, so i am interested to see how that works and his results.

I think it's going to be a little while before the Bliss starts to 'kick in' with hunters and I am sure there will be lots of great info out there on how to run it in different environments ( at least as a starting point).

Keep on posting your results Daniel as I am very interested in hearing how this unit is working in the field.

"Hey Aaron - I never said that.
We are on backorder and every one that has been ordered is already spoken for."

Barry,

Well then are you?
Your getting free promo here, it's the least you could do...when you have a machine to spare.

Keith and I are just average joes and been sending Tom our new machines for the benefit/education of this forum.

Thanks

Aaron



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2012 02:35PM by Aaron.

Hi Aaron:

"your getting free promotion here, it's the least you could do"

I thought this was an "open" forum.
It appears that respected users are starting to make real world commentary about the machine.

"when you have a machine to spare"

Yes - possibly when I do have one to spare. However, that will be based on an agreement with Tom as to his timing for the testing and for the return of the machine.

"Keith and I are just average joes and been sending Tom our new machines for the benefit/education of this forum."

OK - that's mighty neighborly of you two. Thanks.