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Future Of PI Detectors


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Over on the Geotec Forum, somebody (probably not a native speaker of English) posted a long rant on how all the folks over there were wasting their time trying to experiment with pulse induction detectors, that the future was with induction balance machines (or complex machines with IB coils such as the GPZ).  Eric Foster (who is generally acknowledged as being the pioneer of bringing the PI concept out of the physics lab and into field use) tossed the BS flag.  See below.

Here is Erics input.

After 50 years in PI there is no way I am goes to stop. PI is everywhere, airport security, underwater wreck hunting, gas and oil pipeline detection, tramp metal detection in mines and quarries, the best military and humanitarian mine detectors are PI. 

From what I see on this forum, there is a lot of very valuable and novel development work in PI being done by enthusiasts, outside of the largely secretive manufacturing establishments. Long may it continue.

There is plenty of room on this forum for all technologies, so there is no basis to feel threatened. Maybe Funfinder just had a bad dream in which he was encircled by PI detectorists displaying all their finds. Even the Grim Reaper has swapped his scythe for a PI detector smile.gif

Eric.

 

Having said that - are conventional PI detectors for nugget hunting in the same position as the Super Constellation or DC-7 - perfect piston driven airliners but a concept not capable of further development? ML's newest detector is a complex sort of hybrid and it uses IB searchcoils.

Here is the link - the discussion runs to two pages now and is pretty interesting - including Carl Moreland (Carl NC) chiming in for more work on BFO's!

http://www.geotech1.com/forums/showthread.php?23511-Stop-building-PI-detectors!

 

 

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Interesting read, note the fellow who was "against" PIs, suggested perhaps we should be using coils that have no windings like Satellite dishes. Thinking outside the box, interesting.

On a lighter side the post that suggested Treasure hunters were a different race, food for thought, my Treasurer agrees...........

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Part of the problem in these sorts of debates is that the guys who do the electronic design have very limited experience in the field actually finding gold or other treasure. So their perspectives can be very different from those operators who actually use the machines on the market.

The fact that the original poster says that PI detectors "have no useful ground balance" - leads me to believe he knows little about them. The comment about using a radar dish is even more silly as PI detectors do not use radar. There are detectors made for land mine detection which are combo PI and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), but the two are separate circuits, and the PI parts of those detectors do no employ radar, only the GPR part of the detector. The design makes sense for land mine detection, but no sense for prospecting.

Part of the problem of Geotech is that there are guys on there who are highly knowledgeable and others who don't know squat, but make out like they are geniuses with decades of experience. The reader must sort out who is the genuine expert and who is a phony.

 

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45 minutes ago, Reno Chris said:

Part of the problem of Geotech is that there are guys on there who are highly knowledgeable and others who don't know squat, but make out like they are geniuses with decades of experience. The reader must sort out who is the genuine expert and who is a phony.

I think you can safely replace the word 'Geotech' with 'internet' and everything else you say is 100% valid, IMO.  Unfortunately there isn't a 'driver's test' required before allowing someone to use it.  And we're seeing the results at an alarming level.

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I would love to read that forum but it says Gmail is on a "banned" provider list when registering. I tried a couple other emails a while back with the same result.

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Yep, Geotech ain't much different than the rest of the internet, but it is interesting. Lots of good ideas pop up from time to time, very few ever get developed into something usable. A lot of the guys don't have the complete know-how, or don't have the time, to get it to the end.

This feeds back into MD's "kickstarter" thread, where the kind of people needed to turn a metal detector idea into a metal detector are people who have done it before and know all the nuances and gotchas of what it takes to get to the end. The people who say they can do it are plentiful, the people who can do it are exceptionally rare.

As for Funfinder's thread, I think his frustration is that people on Geotech have been build plain ol' PI detectors for, what, 16 years now? And there doesn't seem to be much forward progress in what they've done. I would agree with that. I think he'd like to see more VLF and multifrequency developments. But, compared to PI, those are really hard for DIY folks, so most of them stick with simple PI circuits. I get his frustration.

 

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14 minutes ago, jasong said:

I would love to read that forum but it says Gmail is on a "banned" provider list when registering. I tried a couple other emails a while back with the same result.

All ya have to do is read the "Can't Register?" post. It tells you why, and how.

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I did, and I emailed you directly, maybe a year and a half ago.

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One question, to obtain greater depth with the GPZ, doesn't that require more current to the coil windings? Bigger battery? I would carry 5 more pounds of weight to achieve greater depth.

On another note, it sure would be nice to achieve GPZ depth and have a display the target on the screen, Matrix scanning, basically mapping the magnetic field, like too expensive to R&D for image processing.

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