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What Was The First " Smart " Detector?


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10 minutes ago, Ridge Runner said:

I do believe White’s was the leader in detectors back when. I just wonder why that don’t hold true today.

Some May disagree with me on the above statement I made but the truth hurts.

I am a great lover of White’s detectors and will always have a soft spot in my heart for them.

Chuck

For me in gold, Garret was the leader, then Whites with the GM2, now ML, who next. Why? guess it narrows down to one key man.

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For me the first smart detector was the Gold Bug 2. This machine understood (and still understands) my meager skills and allows me to find gold. Its basic discrimination is straight forward, consistent and can give target insights. It is a great companion machine for my GPZ, and I can not imagine going into a gold field without it. It has withstood the test of time and aged gracefully.

 

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4 hours ago, Ridge Runner said:

I don’t care what the subject it’s all measured by opinion!

Chuck

Well smart to me is irrelevant its kind of like those smart phones they are only as smart as the idiot using them so thats why I don't have one and thats my opinion 

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Here's another vote for the White's Eagle. Being able to save programs, dead on depth measurement, and the ability to Learn to accept or reject a target had me sold, though I couldn't part with my Compass Gold Scanner Pro until the Eagle II SL 90.5 was released. 

 

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I have an Eagle Spectrum that I got in 90 or 91... Still a great machine .... versatile and programable.  Operating freq. is 6.59 so not much on the small gold but a killer sweeper when I have the Bigfoot coil on it....

Heavy old beast though.... Or am I just getting old?...:blink:

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I still have a White's Spectrum XLT  It was great in junky areas and had a wide range of target selections. I don't know if it is heavy (have not used it for a while) but I told I'm getting ....old.... I meant gold with ML and they are heavy. :biggrin:

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On 1/3/2018 at 1:27 PM, Ridge Runner said:

I do believe White’s was the leader in detectors back when. I just wonder why that don’t hold true today.

Some May disagree with me on the above statement I made but the truth hurts.

I am a great lover of White’s detectors and will always have a soft spot in my heart for them.

Chuck

I asked Whites about this very issue and the way it was explained to me from their perspective is that Minelab is a publicly traded company with vast resources. If they need more money for R + D they make a pitch and they've got it. Whites is a privately held company and can only invest in themselves out of profits they make on machines already in production, so it's a longer road to get to where they want to go. They are forced to try to play leapfrog. 

Making metal detectors seems like a tricky business. Even the best machines seem crude compared to how far other sectors of technology have come. There aren't as many people interested in metal detectors as smart phones though. Less consumers means less money for R + D, and the less R + D the slower the growth of that sector. You'd have to popularize metal detecting more to see quicker advances. But the catch 22 there is the more hunters you have now, the less there will be to find later and when finds dry up, so does interest. The more people you have detecting, the more laws are created restricting it, which also dampens interest. 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 1/2/2018 at 11:00 PM, Gerry in Idaho said:

I'd say the White's Eagle was the 1st smart detector that wow'ed me.

Now I mean smart as in digital ID with VDI readout.  I think it was mid 1980's and around $600.

I did have some meter ID machines in the 70's, but the Eagle was the 1st one that was smarter than me, hence my definition of "SMART"

That would have been my guess as well. Eagle spectrum was a great machine.

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