Controls Are Dangerous, Keep Them Off Detectors

[Cal_Cobra]

7 hours ago, Geotech said:

 ...many of those complaints came from dealers who were so uncomfortable with the detector they often wouldn't try to sell it*.

You know I'm guessing a lot of the dealers were old school and this was bleeding edge to them?  Let's be honest, it really was bleeding edge if you got into the advanced settings and the COLOR analytic displays and SMF, wireless headphones eons before it was a thing. 

The VX3 had a good solution that was never carried through. It is hardware-identical to a V3i but features were pared way back. But it actually has 3 more skill "levels" that can be activated with passwords, which incrementally add more features until it becomes a full-blown V3i. The idea was to sell these as e.g. $99 upgrades people would buy when they were ready. It was never offered.

So Carl, ah, I assume this password[s] still exist, somewhere, is there godmode on these things?

But it does beg the question: If you could buy, say, an Equinox 600 today for $700 and later upgrade it to an 800 for an add'l $300 would you find that to be a distasteful business practice?

This is already highly done in the industry I work in, where additional features and/or services are enabled, typically (but not always) as a subscription.  Need IPS, sandboxing, DNS security, DLP, no problem.  SASE/SD-WAN is done this way by leading edge vendors (even bandwidth can be easily upgraded by just applying an upgrade license, no need to roll a truck or waste your valuable time stuck in a phone maze.  Super common, come on over to the 21st century buddy 🙂

 

[Cal_Cobra]

6 hours ago, phrunt said:

The iron bias setting on the Nox is well hidden, it's actually easier to find on the Vanquish, their beginners detector where you can have it on low/high.  Minelab thought it was not such an advanced feature when they applied it to the Vanquish.

To be fair, they have a 50/50 chance they'll get it right 😁  It reduces the variables the operator can fine tune to the point where it's not longer an advanced user setting.

[burlguy]

8 hours ago, Geotech said:

 

 I still don't know how the V3 ever made it out the door.

 And some of us will be eternally grateful that we got to have such a detector that still is barely rivaled 14 years later. Why the new detectors dont show multi frequency strengths during pinpointing to allow determining of potential targets leaves me stupefied.
 Silver quarters, dimes and clad quarters and dimes along with copper pennies always hit strongest on 2.5, bottle caps nearly never. When hunting trashy sites with lots of targets this really makes things easier as the iron can break up identification but, "frequency strength + VDI" is a 95% benefit. Damn them smashed crew caps thought.

Using the above scored me a 10" dime last night and every one of my coins for the last 10 years.

[GB_Amateur]

Although I missed the controversy as it occurred before I got back into detecting, wasn't there a rather no-win situation with the Fisher F75 in the first few years after its rollout?  If I recall (from stories I've read) it was noisy, possibly due to EMI, but maybe it was more than that.  So First Texas released an upgraded version with something they called Digital Shielding Technology (D.S.T.) to take care of that noise issue.  Problem solved, right?  Well, not to those who claimed this 'improvement' cost performance.  My unit (built in 2017) allows you to turn off D.S.T.  OK, surely now the problem is solved.  But I remember reading that some people claimed this retro fix still didn't take the detector back to its original performance level.  A typical case of "damned if you do; damned if you don't."  (I may have inaccurate details here.  Possibly the D.S.T. on/off capability occurred with the initial solution rather than in a subsequent step.)

I'd be curious to know if turning off the D.S.T. in the newer models really did take things back to the original.  We all learn after being here a while that just because someone claims something is true or false, and no matter how loudly, repeatedly, or authoritatively they make that claim, there's still sometimes a reasonable chance that they are fooling themselves and effectively trying to fool us in the process.

[☠ Cipher]

1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

Although I missed the controversy as it occurred before I got back into detecting, wasn't there a rather no-win situation with the Fisher F75 in the first few years after its rollout?  If I recall (from stories I've read) it was noisy, possibly due to EMI, but maybe it was more than that.  So First Texas released an upgraded version with something they called Digital Shielding Technology (D.S.T.) to take care of that noise issue.  Problem solved, right?  Well, not to those who claimed this 'improvement' cost performance.  My unit (built in 2017) allows you to turn off D.S.T.  OK, surely now the problem is solved.  But I remember reading that some people claimed this retro fix still didn't take the detector back to its original performance level.  A typical case of "damned if you do; damned if you don't."  (I may have inaccurate details here.  Possibly the D.S.T. on/off capability occurred with the initial solution rather than in a subsequent step.)

I'd be curious to know if turning off the D.S.T. in the newer models really did take things back to the original.  We all learn after being here a while that just because someone claims something is true or false, and no matter how loudly, repeatedly, or authoritatively they make that claim, there's still sometimes a reasonable chance that they are fooling themselves and effectively trying to fool us in the process.

My memory is that the non-DST mode did not turn it off, just down to a minimum level and did still cost depth to those in low EMI environments. 

[☠ Cipher]

15 hours ago, burlguy said:

 And some of us will be eternally grateful that we got to have such a detector that still is barely rivaled 14 years later. Why the new detectors dont show multi frequency strengths during pinpointing to allow determining of potential targets leaves me stupefied.
 Silver quarters, dimes and clad quarters and dimes along with copper pennies always hit strongest on 2.5, bottle caps nearly never. When hunting trashy sites with lots of targets this really makes things easier as the iron can break up identification but, "frequency strength + VDI" is a 95% benefit. Damn them smashed crew caps thought.

Using the above scored me a 10" dime last night and every one of my coins for the last 10 years.

It does seem that the V3i not being quite as popular as it could’ve been has caused many to throw the baby out with the bath water. Multifrequency spectrograph and multifrequency pinpoint were great ideas then and great ideas now, but when this was discussed with NM for example, they were reluctant to mimic anything about the V3i because of its reputation for complexity and feature “overload.” Another reason you may not ever see these features again is because metal detecting manufacturers would then have to get honest with us about how many simultaneous frequencies they are actually using. You can’t have 3 frequency spectrograph and pinpoint on a machine running 2 frequencies at a time, for example. But boy is that multifrequency pinpoint no motion effective in commingled sites. It made up for the slow recovery of the machine overall, and was actually an amazing tool for determining where one item ends, and another begins, as well as their composition. For those who love the V3i there has been and likely will be no equal anytime soon. I plan to keep mine alive as long as possible. 

[GB_Amateur]

43 minutes ago, ☠ Cipher said:

My memory is that the DST control did not turn it off, just down to a minimum level and did still cost depth to those in low EMI environments.

Thanks for your response.  My reply here isn't meant to argue or deny what you say but rather to add a bit of background and request further clarification (from anyone).  Below is from the F75 manual, version M75MBLK Rev. 5, 110614):

In summary, the manual states: The user may choose to operate with DST or without DST.  (emphasis mine)

Thus, unless the manual writer is playing loose (and deceptively) with the word 'without', my interpretation is that DST is (completely) turned off.  Did First Texas later confirm that DST was only minimized with this alternate setting, rather than completely turned off, or is that just what some users concluded based upon their testing?

[☠ Cipher]

26 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

Thanks for your response.  My reply here isn't meant to argue or deny what you say but rather to add a bit of background and request further clarification (from anyone).  Below is from the F75 manual, version M75MBLK Rev. 5, 110614):

In summary, the manual states: The user may choose to operate with DST or without DST.  (emphasis mine)

Thus, unless the manual writer is playing loose (and deceptively) with the word 'without', my interpretation is that DST is (completely) turned off.  Did First Texas later confirm that DST was only minimized with this alternate setting, rather than completely turned off, or is that just what some users concluded based upon their testing?

Hi, admittedly my impression comes from these two posts. There are others where Tom discussed it, but I don’t remember ever seeing First Texas confirm or deny that some level of DST is always engaged. 

https://www.dankowskidetectors.com/discussions/read.php?2,77035,77037

[Cal_Cobra]

1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

Although I missed the controversy as it occurred before I got back into detecting, wasn't there a rather no-win situation with the Fisher F75 in the first few years after its rollout?  If I recall (from stories I've read) it was noisy, possibly due to EMI, but maybe it was more than that.  So First Texas released an upgraded version with something they called Digital Shielding Technology (D.S.T.) to take care of that noise issue.  Problem solved, right?  Well, not to those who claimed this 'improvement' cost performance.  My unit (built in 2017) allows you to turn off D.S.T.  OK, surely now the problem is solved.  But I remember reading that some people claimed this retro fix still didn't take the detector back to its original performance level.  A typical case of "damned if you do; damned if you don't."  (I may have inaccurate details here.  Possibly the D.S.T. on/off capability occurred with the initial solution rather than in a subsequent step.)

I'd be curious to know if turning off the D.S.T. in the newer models really did take things back to the original.  We all learn after being here a while that just because someone claims something is true or false, and no matter how loudly, repeatedly, or authoritatively they make that claim, there's still sometimes a reasonable chance that they are fooling themselves and effectively trying to fool us in the process.

The F75 was the "hot" detector for years.  I swung a F75LTD (later upgraded to LTD2 w/DST) for the better part of ten years.  It was definitely a noisy detector, and EMI could be pretty bad on it.  After upgrading it to the LTD2 (they had an upgrade program) it was a fair bit more quite.  I don't know that I would agree that the detector lost performance, that wasn't my experience.  I recall digging a bust half dollar at 10" deep at a small site that we'd all pounded to death after the LTD2 upgrade. 

Personally I think DST technology is a good direction as long as you have the ability to disable it if need be.

[phrunt]

I have a 2007 I think it is model T2 and one of the new T2 Green that appears to have DST built in, and it can't be disabled on that model being a cheaper entry level T2 without their funky new boost mode.   The reason I think the Green has DST is its far better in EMI, far better.

The original is very wild to use, EMI is terrible on it which encouraged me to do my own EMI mods to it with more shielding paint and copper tape, it did feel like it improved it a bit but nowhere near the DST models EMI stability.

I think the new models better overall, the old model does seem a bit deeper but it could be in my head, on small gold tests I did I felt it did better than the new one.  I always use my T2's in All metal or with very low disc.  If I had to choose I'd take the newer DST one, I do wish I bought the one with boost mode though as it has a way to disable DST, I'd like to turn it off sometimes in low EMI.  With my Green T2 being their entry level T2 perhaps they thought they'd keep control to a minimum to not intrude on the higher priced T2 more so than they thought turning DST off would be dangerous to turn off for the user.

Another thing that resolved a lot of my EMI problems was ditching the useless stock coil and putting on a Mars Tiger.  Big EMI difference on both models.  Same with obviously putting the little 5" on it but the Tiger is bigger than the stock coil with less EMI problems.

I like the idea of losing a lot of controls if the automated process on a detector has the capability of the detector with all the controls, take the GPX 5000 and 6000, if the 6000 could do everything automatically the 5000 can do with its hundreds of control options that'd be awesome.  The flip side is especially in the market they clearly stated they were targeting controls were a problem, they didn't want them, often didn't understand them and never used them.    Often they just write where the switches go on the detector and never change them and many GPX's in Africa are this way, they all just likely got advice where to put the switches and settings and leave them there forever off their dealer or friend.  This is a photo of my GPX 5000 I bought from a Minelab dealer that was a Tradein for a 6000 in Africa, note the markings where to leave the switches, this is the normal thing on these African GPX used units.  They don't want controls, they want ease of use.