Is Garrett About To Release A New Gold Prospecting Pi?

[Aureous]

I anticipate it being a decent prospecting PI with ATX ancestry. Probably on a par with late model GP or early GPX performance I reckon. At a (hopefully) low price of under $3K, it should still sell well.

[Geotech]

On 7/22/2022 at 1:48 PM, Jonathan Porter said:

To break into the African market it needs to outperform whatever is performing right now which is the GPZ7000 or it needs to be very cheap and also have some performance, but needs to be more sensitive than the GM1000 VLF.

JP is right. The TDI-SL was specifically designed as a $1000 detector for the African market. Lightweight, cheap, and ran on AA's but fell a bit short in sensitivity. When we pitched it to various people in Africa the only question we ever heard was, "Does it go as deep as Minelab?" It did not, so we then sent a bunch of free detectors to Africa in the hope that some people would find gold and it would kick-start sales. Never happened.

[Steve Herschbach]

The problem with the TDI-SL is that in moderate to low mineral ground you’d be better off with an MXT. What was needed was a pumped up TDI, not a watered down version. You’ve got to at least be in the ballpark with Minelab, and the SL was never remotely close.

But yeah, for a large class of users, you either top the best Minelab is offering, or they simply continue to use what they already have. Nobody serious is going to downgrade. There is a large number of more casual users out there however who might consider different options. People who might be looking more at the SDC 2300, for instance, than the GPZ 7000. 

Come on Carl, time to get that Impulse Gold to market!! Way too soon for the Nokta probably, but surely Fisher can get something done by now. I’m way more interested in a Fisher/Garrett/Nokta runoff than anything else at the moment.

[phrunt]

The T2 and Gold Bug Pro obviously had a big uptake in Africa, the T2 in particular wasn't a stellar gold prospecting machine so First Texas made their way into that market effectively without selling the best detectors available, now they both seem largely replaced there by the Gold Monster.

My logic is there are likely tens of thousands of people over there swinging the Gold Monster, we have most likely all seen the photos of hundreds of people holding Gold Monsters squished into a small area all running them side by side and no doubt why Nokta released their Gold Monster clone trying to get in on that market.

If a detector like the Garrett PI came out, wasn't anywhere near the price of the high end Minelabs and at a stretch these Gold Monster users could afford to upgrade to it and it gave better results on deeper gold than the Gold Monster why wouldn't a few percent of them upgrade or have the PI/VLF combo we all like to have.  It doesn't take a large percentage of people to buy one and have results to start the momentum.

As for the TDI, one companies failure doesn't mean all companies will fail, how did the other Whites detectors go there? Were their VLF's popular in Africa?

Maybe I'm just more of an optimist, and see a large market just waiting for another option especially if the price makes it more viable for the VLF owners which I'm sure would be the largest category of detector owners.

I do own a GPX 5000 that spent its life in Africa, it was a traded in for a GPX 6000, a lot of that was going on prior to the 6000 release, although once the 6000 came out the supply of detectors being traded in dried up and the guy importing them from his dealer mate in Africa stopped importing them.  It gave a few of us in NZ access to cheap GPX's though, JW and I both got one.

This was mine, photo taken by the African dealer prior to shipping it to NZ, it was the last one imported.  I got it checked out and put in a new housing by Minelab NZ once it arrived.  A lot of African prospectors lease their machines from detector dealers too, they don't actually own them as they can't afford to own them, probably trade the lease fee for nuggets even.  You're kidding yourself if you think large numbers of these African prospectors buy a GPZ 7000, small numbers can afford to yes, others lease, a majority can not even afford a metal detector at all, or at a stretch a VLF.  A small number is still a large number when there are so many of them though, in Mauritania where my detector come from there was said to be 16,000 "legal" small scale miners / detector users and an estimated 4000 illegal ones on top of that, and that's one small part of Africa.  Mauritania is only a small African country with only 4.65 million people.  Other counties with a lot of metal detecting prospectors like Ghana (31 million) and Sudan (43 million) have much larger populations, it doesn't take that many percent of their prospectors to buy the Garrett to make it successful.

The other interesting thing in Africa, especially in the area my GPX came from is the side hustle the miners have, finding ancient coins and artifacts and selling them overseas on Facebook.  You can read about it here.

[RoobyRoobyRoo]

40 minutes ago, oneguy said:

My 6 worked great in between air traffic and possibly some other emi type issues. 

..... and as Jason will attest, "between air traffic" when you're in the flight path between Vegas and the Grand Canyon means you have about two hours... between 1 and 3 am... LOL (tour heli's and the flight path for Vegas airport which is PUMPIN)

[phrunt]

How is the ATX for EMI? It seems the one El Nino is using was doing great for EMI and he seemed to be testing it out in an urban area, the sensitivity he was getting with it was outstanding.  By the looks of it the ATX is a solid base to build this new PI on and if they have improved areas where it was lacking then it's sounding promising.

Australians are lucky, especially Western Australian prospectors as they're so far from sources of EMI it really doesn't matter much to them, the odd thunderstorm and just background EMI nowhere near the levels of people that hunt nearer to urban areas or large population areas.  I suspect that Africa is similar, hard to know. 

By the sounds of it the EMI in the USA is pretty bad, unfortunately for me the areas I like to detect are high EMI mainly from power lines more than anything else so I don't enjoy using my 6000 at them when I can run the 7000 and not care at all about EMI, the same reason I didn't overly enjoy my 4500.  The one interesting thing is one of the spot I go to regularly is really close to an international airport, and planes are on their decent for landing and taking off flying over me all of the time often every 10 to 15 minutes at very low levels when they pass and the planes cause me no major EMI problems with the 6000 or any other detector.

[GotAU?]

Question-  I havent noticed an issue, but could it be an aircraft’s transponder frequency (1090 MHz) that is causing the perceived aircraft-caused interference some are having on their 6000’s? I’d think that Garrett would have taken note of this issue as well.

[jasong]

Seems logical this machine is an ATX derivative, but who knows, could be a VLF for all we know. 

I remember getting excited about a new ML detector just to find out it was the Vanquish, so... 

Yeah I'm not sure what it is exactly that causes the EMI. It's definitely certain frequencies though, whatever it is. I had 2 Blackhawk choppers buzz me at what felt like 50ft one day in Gold Basin. Close enough I could see the gunners hanging out the door waving and laughing at me as I stumbled and fell in confusion. I could hear them coming on my GPZ before I heard/felt them in the air...stopped to fiddle with my machine and then bam, Blackhawks. 

[RoobyRoobyRoo]

9 minutes ago, GotAU? said:

Question-  I havent noticed an issue, but could it be an aircraft’s transponder frequency (1090 MHz) that is causing the perceived aircraft-caused interference some are having on their 6000’s? I imagine and hope Garrett took note of this issue as well.

I run an SDRPlay Duo here in the Gold Basin/Lost Basin area for ADSB reception and the 1090 signal isn't that incredibly strong to overwhelm the front end by itself, I think it's a combination of factors. I still get the interference when the military helo's go over as well and they have their ADSB shut off (and I can see they're not on via the software I use).

[phrunt]

The reason I'm confident it's a PI is the coil size, looks to be 11", unlikely to sell a VLF prospecting machine with an 11" as stock.  Also their most powerful gold prospecting detector ever made (By Garrett) is unlikely to be a VLF when they have the ATX on their books.