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Is There Something Special About The Garrett 24k Ground Balance?


phrunt

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Minelab has owned the gold market so long now that if you ignore all other brands it does not hurt you. Can an argument be made that the 24K is competitive with the Monster? Sure. But the U.S. manufacturers long ago ceded the field to Minelab, and getting that lost market back is all but impossible at this point. Minelab has a plethora of models that offer an upgrade path. Garrett, or anyone else, basically nothing. If a person wants to be a dealer selling nugget detectors they can sell Minelab and ignore the rest, and basically give up nothing. That being the case, Minelab right now almost completely owns the distribution market in places like Africa, whereas Garrett has little to no dealers at all. If a dealer is doing well selling Monsters, (and they actually are Simon, best seller at my old Alaska dealership), then what real incentive is there to switch horses? Because the 24K is better? Maybe, but if you are selling detectors splitting hairs over stuff like that does not put food on the table. You just go with what people want, and people want Minelabs.

A huge issue also is Garrett product being overpriced in Oz. If it was me, I’d eat some margin to invest in some price equalization measures to offset the shipping costs and import fees. If Garrett wants to make headway they may need to buy a little market share.

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I've no doubt the Monster is a good seller around the world, especially in Africa.  I was a bit surprised by it being a good seller in Australia as its the butt of a lot of jokes from many Aussies on social media that use PI's, they act like its a kids toy due to not handling the ground very well.   I guess it's like anything the squeaky wheel gets the oil, and the happy users have little to complain about so you never hear from them.

Garrett need to find a way to lower their pricing in Australasia, there has to be some link in the chain that is adding a significant amount to the cost that can be reduced.  It's currently hindering them from being competitive.   Now is probably the worst time to try and reduce the price of a product though as International shipping is extremely expensive, even bulk containers the costs have increased significantly.   Often in cases like this for certain countries you just can't make the profit you can in others while you work out the kinks.

The 24k has made it to the Australian market now, it's $1449 AUD with 44 in stock at the Garrett dealer, the recommended retail for the GM seems to be $1399 AUD but almost all dealers are selling it for around $1100 AUD.   So the 24k ended up coming in around the RRP for the GM which would be reasonable, but almost nobody sells it for that price.  Given the GM comes with two coils the 24k will struggle to sell at that price.  The 24k still has still not made it into NZ but unless the price can be adjusted there is not much point doing so as we generally pay more than Australia for everything being a smaller market with higher shipping costs so it'll be even more expensive by the time it hits here. If the GM and 24k were the same price and the GM had two coils, I'd still personally pick the 24k, it's the significant price difference that's making it hard to take off.

It's a shame Minelab owns the market to such a degree people think of them and nobody else, making it difficult for even a better detector to break through as its the end users that end up missing out in the end in a situation like this.  I guess for Garrett they need to break into the US prospecting market with it before worrying about the rest of the world, if they can start to gain some traction there it'd help if they do decide to try and grow. 

They could also start by doing the obvious which I'm sure has been pointed out to them many times and that is working on a more modern light weight PI using their ATX as a starting point.  If they sold that at the right price point it would give them a decent boost into the prospecting detector market.  Sometimes it's not all about high profit, they need to get it in at the right price, not make a whole lot on it if that's going to cause it to be overpriced as they're trying to gain momentum, at least development costs shouldn't be too high, the electronics is already there.  The high profit comes further down the line once they're established in the market, look at Minelab's astronomical profit on their gold detectors, well deserved of course.

Someone is going to take over the lower end prospecting PI market soon, at the moment it's a slot that is open for the taking, and some are biting at it's heels, first to the post will likely be the one to reap the rewards.  Garrett have an opportunity and a head start.

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22 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

But who at Garrett (or who among their supported field crews) is a true native gold detectorist?

Well, I should have dug a bit deeper.  On the Garrett webpage for the 24K there are a handful of videos by none other than @Steve Herschbachhimself.  I just clicked on one and watched a minute or so and not surprisingly (i.e. representative of the 'actor') the information is of high quality.

38 minutes ago, phrunt said:

I guess for Garrett they need to break into the US prospecting market with it before worrying about the rest of the world, if they can start to gain some traction there it'd help if they do decide to try and grow.

Gold Prospectors Magazine is a bimonthly hardcopy publication of the GPAA.  Garrett has a 40+ year history of posting ads on the back cover of the appropriate magazines.  Here are those from the latest two from this magazine:

Garrett-24k_ad1.thumb.jpg.31f8d463d6fbc9ff1bffaed810c7ee19.jpg

Garrett-24k_ad2.thumb.jpg.0b5b0ec7de92b09959024c34655c498f.jpg

Looks like George Wyant (aka 'King George') in the second one.  Maybe that's Steve's finger in the lower RH corner of each??  At least he photoed his index finger.  No subliminal messaging....  :biggrin:

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47 minutes ago, phrunt said:

I've no doubt the Monster is a good seller around the world, especially in Africa.  I was a bit surprised by it being a good seller in Australia as its the butt of a lot of jokes from many Aussies on social media that use PI's, they act like its a kids toy due to not handling the ground very well.

PI snobbery. A person can find gold with a VLF just fine in Oz. Maybe not to make a buck, but to just have fun and go find gold, no problem. As always the PI guys tend to leave a lot of little bits that are VLF bread and butter.

Given however that a good PI is better if you get serious about it, what better move for a dealer but to sell the Monster, and therefore Minelab, so that when the person is ready to move up, there is no brand switching? The Monster just sets the hook, and then it’s off to the races with better and more expensive machines. We’ve all been there. :smile:

Again though, where is the incentive for the dealer to push the Garrett, knowing it will probably just end up being Minelab in the end?

Yeah, unlike you Simon to come to the party not having already read up on XGB, which was on the forum here ages ago, so you see the difficulty Garrett has, when even somebody like you missed it. You can’t see what you are not looking for.

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I guess if anything this demonstrates why brand loyalty by dealers and customers may not be in the customers best interest.  It's why I prefer dealers that sell more than one brand.  If a dealer sold the 24k, and also sold the Gold Monster which would they recommend, especially in the US where pricing is similar.  I don't know much about the US market and the only dealer in the US I've purchased from is Serious Detecting but they list the 24k at $697 and the GM1000 at $899, granted the GM comes with some extras like the second coil and a cheap garden shovel.  It's a shame they're sold out of the 6" Concentric coils for the 24k as it is listed at $138,  so even with adding on a second coil with the Concentric coil the 24k comes out cheaper than the GM1000 at $817.  Garrett need to hurry and get their version of the concentric coil to market.  This is obviously just based off one dealer in the USA's pricing.  I know which option I would prefer to have.  The 24k price in the USA is very competitive.

I didn't pay all that much attention to the Whites 24k as it was too hard to get one.  If I had read too much on it I'd end up wanting one 🙂

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On 1/16/2022 at 6:39 AM, tboykin said:

It has to do with the way the XGB ground balance works. When we were designing it I paid special attention to variable ground since that’s where most detectors struggle. And also where a lot of specimen gold lives! So I came up with the idea of a ground balance that had a variable Q (similar to a parametric audio equalizer). The 24k tracks multiple ground points simultaneously and is able to open up the ground point to include a range of VDI’s instead of it being just one number. Luckily Jacob the engineer had some audio background like me and was able to make this happen.

I made a special pit at White’s to test this that was a mixture of black sand (Low ground point) and red cinder (high). I should have taken some pics of me out there in the noon sun with a shovel playing ground chef. None of the other vlfs on the market worked in that pit!

The engineers made me several dev units where I could tweak the ground balance speed and Q width. I took the machine to dozens of locations across the Western Hemisphere to make sure it was dialed in right. Might be interesting to develop that further and allow advanced users to do the same.

Even though I was only working in the industry for 3 years I’m really glad this detector kept going after I got out. Couldnt save Whites but at least there are people out there finding gold with a detector that wouldn’t have gotten made without me pushing for it. Everybody else wanted to make more MX Sport variations.

Since I’m not under NDA anymore let me know if you have any more questions.

I'm not a prospector, but I pop into the prospecting forum from time to time to admire the finds and such.  Reading this thread is quite interesting.  I'm primarily a relic hunter and some of my sites have really tough ground, I have one desert stage stop in a sea of alkali soils that cause machines fits to GB at.  I've found I have to use beach mode at some of these sites on the EQX to handle the alkali soils.

Wouldn't the XGB ground balance technology work wonders at relic sites with difficult soil conditions as well (alkali soils, red volcanic grounds like Culpepper, etc)?   Could this be incorporated into a SMF detector?

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54 minutes ago, Cal_Cobra said:

I'm not a prospector, but I pop into the prospecting forum from time to time to admire the finds and such.  Reading this thread is quite interesting.  I'm primarily a relic hunter and some of my sites have really tough ground, I have one desert stage stop in a sea of alkali soils that cause machines fits to GB at.  I've found I have to use beach mode at some of these sites on the EQX to handle the alkali soils.

Wouldn't the XGB ground balance technology work wonders at relic sites with difficult soil conditions as well (alkali soils, red volcanic grounds like Culpepper, etc)?   Could this be incorporated into a SMF detector?

Yes. Had plans for that along with some other things but I couldn’t convince White’s to pursue them. Hopefully someone will take up the reigns at Garrett! Or Minelab. Since it’s not patented it should be open for more development.

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5 minutes ago, tboykin said:

Yes. Had plans for that along with some other things but I couldn’t convince White’s to pursue them. Hopefully someone will take up the reigns at Garrett! Or Minelab. Since it’s not patented it should be open for more development.

Thanks, it's really interesting that White's certainly had the engineering power and resources to innovate, even up until the very end.   Glad you pushed them to drive the 24K to completion, and thank god they didn't eek out another MX regurgitation 🙂

@Nokta DetectorsXGB is well worth investigating 👍

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The key to the GM is simplicity and if you’re not driving the thing too hard sensitivity wise they run very quiet thanks to zero threshold. I personally prefer the EQ800 because I have more control and the discrimination is excellent especially with the 6” coil, just wish the coils weren’t webbed, they are a pain on a gold machine. The 24K sounds very interesting I have a lot of fond memories of my Whites VSat, but alas I’ve since been severely infected with PI snobbery. 😂   

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PI snobbery will go South quickly when ferrous indicators are needed to keep your mental sanity. No 6000/7000 will find any gold in some of the areas where I hunt (at times), unless you accept trash/gold ratios of >1000. Come and hunt with me at some of the old mining districts along the Yuba river and experience the PI pain.😁 Only VLF's will produce there and PI snobs (like me...) would leave empty handed when not using VLF. I neither own the Nox nor the 24k but I am seriously considering to beef up my VLF capabilities. Would like to hear comments about the 24k vs Nox vs GM, particular for gold. Is the 24k handling ground better?

GC

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