Minelabs New Military Contract

[DolanDave]

With Minelabs military contract to develop a new advanced prototype detector within 3 years, it would be interesting to see if they will model new civilian detectors from this?

Dave..

[AussieMatt]

http://www.niitek.com/products/handheld-dual-sensor-gpr/groundshark

Pretty sure that is the platform they are working off for that contract. You can own one now for a quoted $35,000AUD now.

[Roughwater]

Maybe this will be the science behind the future metal detection industry?  Many didn't like paying 10K for a "Z".  Bet they would pay a lot more for something like this revised for use for gold and mineral searches!

[Reno Chris]

This combined PI and GPR technology has been around for a while and probably has very little potential in nugget detecting. It works great for land mine detecting as land mines have specific, recognizable shapes, and these machines can produce an image of the target in the ground. Unfortunately, nuggets are randomly shaped, and so its not so helpful to have a rough image of the shape of the target on a screen.

[augustwest]

Good thing that one would be tough to explain to the wife! Well you see this detector only cost about 35k... 

[auminesweeper]

The trouble with mines is the only metal part in them is the cap or primer because even the firing pin and the springs are made of plastic, That is why the SDC is so hot on small gold, What ever they have planned it will be good, I see in OZ the MOD did sell off a lot of the F3's and the F4A1s and some folks have even had them converted to nugget detectors,

Aussie Matt can fill you in on that side of things as I am sure he has the Good Oil on how good they are,

john

[AU_Solitude]

2 hours ago, auminesweeper said:

The trouble with mines is the only metal part in them is the cap or primer because even the firing pin and the springs are made of plastic, That is why the SDC is so hot on small gold, What ever they have planned it will be good, I see in OZ the MOD did sell off a lot of the F3's and the F4A1s and some folks have even had them converted to nugget detectors,

Aussie Matt can fill you in on that side of things as I am sure he has the Good Oil on how good they are,

john

I had a minelab F3 Compact for a little while, operationally, it was almost identical to the SDC, the performance wasn't even close as it would not hit on gold under half a gram unless it was pressed right against the coil.

Mine detectors are built to handle extreme mineralization and interference,  however, in my experience they are not geared towards low conductor detection and this is why true gold detectors will always outperform them by leaps and bounds. Both the minelab F1A4 and F3 series detectors perform more in line with the earlier SD series.

[DolanDave]

With GPR added in with the PI, you can see the dips in the bedrock.... I think incorporated for a more civilian use, it can be pretty beneficial... Check out the coil, now that will be revolutionary...

[jasong]

Good point Dave, that would be awesome, wouldn't need high resolution for that either.

Pay part of it off by renting your time out to drywashers and find all the best structural traps and buried boulders for them! Or know where to shovel off a foot or two in big nugget patch areas yourself and redetect.

I wonder how fast/slow you have to swing though and how much ground you can cover?

Or how deep the GPR goes? Don't some of the cart mounted units go down to 10ft or deeper or am I thinking of something else? Would it be useful for looking for big lunker boulder sized meteorites? The ones that are 3+ft deep and out of metal detection range but where there is nothing else that size underground in the top 10ft or so of a dry clay lakebed and thus you can assume it might be worth digging and checking out? Or are those meteorites totally weathered away to nothing before they get that deep?