Omega 8500 Deep 0

I finally found me a 4-pin Cleansweep coil that is reported to be a good one. Now I need to find another Lobo Supertraq to run it on. Of course, to do that I have to figure out how to fund it. Do I sell a detector? Do I trade for it? Do I just pull the funds out of savings? Sell some gold? Buy new? Buy used? You guys know the drill.

So I’m looking at my little detector collection and trying to decide who goes and who stays. I’m eyeballing the Omega 8500 and the Golden MicroMax. I’m thinking either one of those could fund the Lobo ST I need. The problem is the 8500 has already found me an 18k gold bracelet the last time I used it back in August and I’m not quite sure I want to let it go yet. But again the Golden Micromax has also found me a good bit of gold in the past, too.

So I’m wavering on it. Does it stay or does it go?

I grab the 8500 and do what I always do when trying to make a decision, I start looking at the instrument’s effectiveness and efficiency at doing what I do with them. I do some bench testing and for some reason get stuck on the 8500’s proportional audio. The 8500 is highly modulated and really fades away. So I grab a bunch of headphones and start switching them in and out. The ProStars do a good job, but I recently acquired a set of QZ99. I noticed the response cleans up a little more. Hmmm. I run through my coils with the 8500 and QZ99 and I’m liking what I’m hearing.

Efficiency requires that I cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. The biggest issue I had with the F5 was it was very unforgiving with sweep speed. You sweep too fast and you can be eyeballing a target but not getting a report. The 8500 in Deep 0 doesn’t have this issue. In Deep 0 you can sweep as fast as you want and you still get a report. Might be a rice crispy pop or crackle depending on distance but you still get a report. I liked what I was hearing with the NEL sharpshooter in 3 tone mode in Deep 0 with the QZ99 headphones. So off to the hunt.

I mainly hunt for gold jewelry. Sometimes I do some dedicated old coin hunting but it primary gold I’m looking for. That means my sought after sites are playgrounds, schools, parks and athletic fields. I don’t care about the age. I only care about the usage. It is totally different than hunting old coins. When hunting old coins I might stay in the same 20 x 20 foot area for several hours trying to coax something out. When hunting gold, its all about increasing the amount of ground covered.

Anyway my first location with the 8500 is a woodchip school playground. I’m in 3 tone mode, Deep 0, Disc at 34 and Max sensitivity. The 8500 is running stable and I’m sweeping fast. Rise crispy cereal bowl. Cracks, fizzles and pops. Some high tones some medium, ocassionally low tones due to the disc setting. Every one of those tiny pops, and crackles and fizzys were targets. Shallow and deep. Loud or faint. Wasn’t missing anything. I’m I down below the floor. Wood chippers would know what I mean when I say I’m down below the floor. The wood chips compress into a layer like particle board. Many foil targets and coins were down there. I’m whipping that coil and its still reporting these targets, and correctly identifying them. No gold there but I’m impressed with the number and size and depth of the targets I’m hitting with speed I’m sweeping. If I’d passed over gold I would have heard it. .

Next stop is the turf around the basketball court. Super trashed out. Here I decided to change the audio and just see if I could pull any high tone out of the garbage. The high tone stands out and I get some shallow dimes and quarters but the noise floor is still too much for the modulated audio in turf. As the high tone modulates it loses the definitive sound. So I change the volume of the segments. I turn the audio off for all the segments except for the high tones. So now the display still shows all target responses but I only hear high conductors. That opened a whole new layer of responses I could react to. Deeper coins that didn’t stand out clearly before were now audible. Still all clad here but I was getting 4 and 5 inch coins in the middle of that trash. Some of the iron would wrap and tink but you could see it on the display. I think if there had been deeper coins there I would have heard them.

I ran out of time but plan on going back this Sunday morning and just tune the audio to the high foil and nickel range and see what I can pull out from that turf trash at the basketball court. Maybe there is something good hiding there. I’ve got a lot of trashed turf enclosed basketball courts Deep 0 will really help with.

Anyway, the conclusion of all this is that I’ve developed a liking for the 8500 and it’s proportional audio in Deep 0. Don’t hear much about it so I figured I’d share.

HH
Mike

I found the 8500 tones are so thin and tinny that you have to run the unmodulated d5 tones so they clearly report and then use disc or volume offset to make the areas you want to hear stand out. Kind of limits you with such a full featured detector. Which is a shame because with the emi filtering of deep 2 and 3 it can be very quiet and deep

Headphone selection helps with that, Craig. The Whites ProStars are 50 ohm phones and they give some body to the audio. They help a whole lot in fact. However, the Koss QZ99 are 60 ohm phones and they don't give the same body to the audio but I liked the response of the QZ99 with the proportional audio better. Funny what your ear likes.

I've ordered a replacement set of muffs for my UR-30's which are 100 ohm phones. Maybe they'll get here in time for Christmas shutdown and I'll get a chance to see how those sound with it.

I looking forward to trying it out in places with deeper dirt for coin hunting and see which headphones work the best.

HH
Mike

Very interesting Mike, I enjoyed reading your post. Have not read much about the 8500. Let us know how it's going.

In a nutshell tough to beat Tesoro for gold jewelry....As far a the 8500 excellent unit but did not like the radio shack build but have to admit was sure light..as far as the Golden understand once mastered its a killer for gold jewelry but too many tones and notches for me..Your call and good luck with your personal decision.
P.S. kudos on your typing it would take me all evening to type that post...

Mike, it sounds to me like you just need to bite the bullet and find you a nice, used Lobo. I think that if you were to sell any of your machines just to purchase a Lobo, that you would hate that decision. I know that I have too many detectors but I have also sold a couple that I wish I hadn't. You KNOW how it is! Different hunting situations require different detectors. Heck, even the same property might require two different detectors!

Mike, I'll throw out another idea. I had an 8500 when they were first released. For a gold jewelry detector, Get yourself a White's DFX and a BigFoot coil. Super light weight coil with a detector with almost unlimited tone and Disc adjustment. So quiet and smooth you sometimes have to pull the pinpoint trigger to make sure it's still turned on.

Great idea, but with DFX Bigfoot coils selling for $500 and up, it gets kind of expensive. I got over $350 for the last one I sold and that was a couple of years ago

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

Yeah. I would like to have another Bigfoot for my V3 but I'm not willing to pay the price they go for now. Still undecided.

HH
Mike

I'm settling down into keeping the 8500. I hunted it a lot over the Thanksgiving break in a variety of turf locations, mostly with the 11” DD coil. It did well although there are many places where EMI limited me to staying below 70 on the Deep 1, Deep 2, and Deep 3 settings.

For jewelry hunting in the turf I turned off the audio for all segments except for foil, nickel, and tabs. Then went into All Metal and changed the VCO pitch to A4, its highest pitch. Then clicked back into Disc and selected the D1 single tone VCO tone option. The All Metal tone setting carries over to the Disc VCO setting and Pinpoint. Worked pretty good. I could focus. I could tell shallow from deep, and for signals that bounced out of my audio range I could see what they were doing on the meter display. I often switched audio modes between D1 and D5 if I wanted some more audio variance between segments.

The other thing I liked was that I could dial in one end of the audio range or the other with the Disc setting. When I wanted to dial in or expand the low range I could just adjust the Disc setting. If my trash required me to focus on the higher end of my audio range I could raise my Disc to max, notch in the foil, nickel and tab segments, then adjust the disc downward to tighten the high end and lock down the tab responses to a tighter range, or open it up into the screw cap range.

I also like the quick switch to All Metal when using the other audio modes for profiling. That is much more handy than using the dial to click out of Disc into All Metal. The only thing I didn’t like about this feature is that it would move me off my tone options and I’d have to cycle back around to them when I wanted to change. Not a big deal but I liked the quick tone cycle.

The four segment VDI displays are helpful, too. When you just see one segment display you know you have a strong target id lock. When I saw more than one I could rotate around the target and see if I could get a lock or just a reduction in segments displaying. If I couldn’t then I knew I had some weird shaped trash object or some iron falsing. Still working it out but I’ve always like this feature. Its kind of like a visual box plot where you can see the primary distribution and the outliers. Then you can work the target and see if they outliers pull in.

Anyway…….just wanted to follow up. I’ll put it all together in a more concise manner with additional details at a later date. The 8500 is feature rich and takes a bit of time.

HH
Mike

Hi Mike,

How are you likeing your v3i for jewellery.


Regards Pinpointa.

pinpointa,
To tell the truth I haven't hunted much lately with the V3. You might think the reason is stupid but its a personal thing; I don't like the graphics on side of the electronics box. Dumb right? I know.....but I'm self-conscience about it. I've been looking for a good box cover but no one makes the good ones anymore. I had a real nice faux leather weather cover for my last V3i but I included it with the sale when I sold it, thinking it would be easy to find another nice one. They wear faster than canvas but look real nice. Stupid me. The ones being sold now look like crap.

However I have decided to cover the box in black contact paper until I can buy or make a decent box cover for it because I really want to focus on hunting with the V3i for 2018. The V3 is just too awesome not to hunt with it and share what it does.

HH
Mike