Steve Herschbach

I’m sorry I did not know you were talking about the manufacturer. You quoted our new member specifically and so it seemed you were addressing him. I was responding to that perception on my part. Yes, of course Dimitar or his dealers should be doing videos, just like they should be updating websites or putting out manuals. Bottom line is I have long thought this is as much a hobby as a business for Dimitar, so people may as well get over it. It’s like he makes what he wants for himself, and if you want to have one also, fine. But other than that it’s obvious it’s not a big concern to him one way or the other. In this day and age of fishing for eyeballs it is surprising nobody has got one just to be the first to put out a video on it. I think that shows just how far off the mainstream radar Tarsacci really is.

No, it’s far too large. That’s my point. It’s easy to make videos, not easy to post unless you get accounts you’ve may not want to bother getting. Even some of the photos people post with new phones are really too large for use on the internet. Slow to upload and slow to see, eats up a ton of server space.

It’s already been handled. I reopened membership yesterday, limited attack by a dozen spammers this morning. Looks like it’s winding down.

So how does a person post a video if they have no YouTube or Instagram or other hosting account, and don't want to get those accounts just to post a video for someone?

The Lime Crest quarry in Sparta, New Jersey, is known for producing a variety of mineral specimens, particularly from the Franklin Marble, including unusual graphite crystals, spinel, and phlogopite. Other notable minerals found there include pyrite, pyrrhotite, molybdenite, arsenopyrite, and sphalerite. Some specimens, like chondrodite, are considered rare. Minerals found at Lime Crest Quarry: Graphite: The quarry is notable for its graphite crystals, some exhibiting unique morphologies. Spinel: Spinel specimens, especially those in a Franklin Marble matrix, are highly sought after. Phlogopite: Phlogopite mica crystals are also found in the Franklin Marble matrix. Pyrite: Pyrite is another mineral present in the quarry's specimens. Pyrrhotite: This iron sulfide mineral has also been identified. Molybdenite: Molybdenite, a molybdenum disulfide mineral, is another associated mineral. Arsenopyrite: Arsenopyrite, an iron arsenic sulfide, is also found. Sphalerite: This zinc sulfide mineral is also present. Norbergite: A rare crystal found in the quarry. Chondrodite: Yellow-orange chondrodite crystals are found with calcite and are considered rare. Tremolite: This amphibole mineral is also found. Fluorescent minerals: Microcline, fluorite, spinel, and quartz can exhibit fluorescence. Scapolite: Violet fluorescent Scapolite has also been found. Galena: Lead sulfide mineral galena has been found.

It's not charging, it's running the detector.

Eight AA serial configuration: Eight AA alkaline batteries connected in series will produce a total voltage of 12 volts (8 batteries * 1.5 volts/battery). The current capacity (measured in milliampere-hours or Ah) remains the same as a single AA battery, typically around 2.0 to 3.0 Ah. Typical rechargeable AA batteries are only going to get around 9.6 volts. However, the manual does note either alkalines or NiMh rechargeables will work. Keep in mind this thread was about replacing the internal battery and the AA Booster Pack will not replace a removed internal battery. It can only boost a depleted internal battery back to operation. Just clarifying that as these are really questions for the other thread about using the AA pack as intended.

I was experimenting with the Axiom AA Booster pack recently. One weird thing about that pack is that it does nothing, will not even charge the detector, until the Axiom internal battery is run completely dead. Then you plug in the AA Booster Pack and get another 6-8 hours run time. See the linked thread for details. I wanted to try this as nobody else seems to have, just to see how it works. Fact is you almost would never need such a thing if you top off your Axiom every night, since it runs almost two days on a charge. It was harder than I thought to run the Axiom dead. It apparently has a shutoff built in so that if no controls are adjusted every couple hours it automatically shuts off. I did actually have this happen in the field once upon a time, ran for hours not adjusting anything, detector shut off. Fired up and ran again no issues so half forgot about it, just thought it was a fluke of some sort. This is a safety feature in case you put your Axiom in the car to drive someplace else and forget to shut it off. Kind of nice actually but I never knew it was there until now. And for anyone that had a mystery shutoff while in the field, now you know why.

So I was experimenting with the Axiom AA Booster Pack. It's another story you can read at the link. I have found the Axiom to be perfectly balanced with the 11" mono coil, but nose heavy with the 13" DD coil. I was pleased to discover that the AA pack installed almost perfectly balances out the 13" DD coil. People not aware may not know that balance is more important than raw weight in a detector, so adding this small amount of weight under the arm will actually reduce you arm strain. I do not know of anyone who actually uses the AA Booster pack that comes with the more expensive deluxe Axiom dual coil package. You don't get one with the Lite package. Since mine never gets used, I am going to fill it with old bullets I have collected while detecting and use it as a counterweight for the larger coils. Enough lead should really help a lot with the 16" coils in particular.

Yeah most people never need it, I have not. That was not the question though. So, if you hook up the AA pack before the detector is dead, nothing happens. It does not even charge the detector. Apparently the system is set up to charge when something with more output than 8 AA batteries is used, which apparently is almost any USB charger. So I had to run the detector dead to find out. Pain in the posterior but that's another story. Once the detector is dead enough that turning it on only gets you a few seconds before it shuts off again, hooking the AA Booster up with get you back in operation. I did not run to see how long, but the manual says 6-8 hours. Presumably you could run off AA batteries forever just by swapping out batteries as they go dead, as long as you never charge the detector. Bad for internal battery by the way, but if it was bad anyway this is a possible solution. I should note the first couple times I tried the detector still went dead immediately, unplugged and plugged back in, wiggled, then it worked. Any USB power bank of sufficient output will also work apparently, but the unit must be bone dead, then power pack plugged in and detector immediately turned on. Otherwise it goes into charging mode. Something weird about all that but I have spent too much time on this already so letting it go. The booster pack is very nice in how it clips between the detector legs. I would think the right AA rechargeable batteries could substitute (the manual excerpt above says NiMh will work) for the alkalines I used, but be aware most rechargeable AA batteries put out less power than an alkaline, so look out for that. One thing I did not like is that when you have the AA pack engaged there is nothing on screen to indicate this, other than the detector keeps running with low battery warning blinking. You have to use the manual battery check indicator built into the AA Booster pack to check the AA battery level - see image below. Related thread

Well, as Spock would say, logic would dictate it would need to be equivalent or better than what 8 AA batteries puts out. That's not how USB chargers normally work. You are not hooking a water balloon up to a fire hydrant. Instead, a device is sipping from a straw to charge. It does not matter if the cup is small or large, the device decides how much to sip. See this thread for more details:

Still happy five years later. That said I don’t use it like a pry bar in the rocks. More like twist and wiggle while applying pressure until I feel the material loosening up.

Not a chance it folds, don’t worry about that. The worst case would simply be no new members. But I rather like the idea of new members by referral from existing members. Even not accounting for spam I think only like 1 in 200 new members actually participate. I assume a member referred by somebody here would not bother unless the idea was to participate. It would also allow me to go back to full membership rights when a person joins since they are vetted already.

Back early. I’ve dealt with spam for a very long time. This was a whole different thing, coordinated attack with oversight. New email addresses being created across a large and shifting number of domains. IP moving all over the world. This is not a business and so there is no business growth potential. It’s merely a service I offer that as far as revenue maybe pays my phone bill. Forums in general are dying for various reasons, and the ones focused on gold nugget detecting in particular are mostly gone or dead. This one is a holdout and one that frankly I just keep running out of the loyalty I feel to the existing members. The revenue is trivial and I would not miss it. That all said I may very well go to a closed membership, new members by referral from existing members only. That may mean an additional decline in new activity but I’m not sure I care. Main thing is it lets you all do your thing while eliminating the main headaches of the forum for me, which nearly all revolve around new members.

Looks like what I feared has occurred. It was inevitable AI would get employed to attack member registration systems to create spam. We have been under constant attack all morning. Thank you Hugh for keeping the ship upright, as I was in my way out of town. Almost off grid when I see all this as I checked in one last time. New members are being created and spam posts created literally faster than we can delete them. The only answer right now is to lock new member registrations. I was up at 4am trying to beat the heat and just wasted a lot of that early time dealing with this. Anyway, literally driving offline for a day of two, will deal with this later. Until then, no new members may register. Thanks for your patience in this. Steve Herschbach

The guy that digs it all will always find “good stuff” that people using discrimination miss. Steve’s Law of Target Depletion will always be the last word.

I can only repeat it so many times in so many ways that "faster chips" is not the answer Mitchel. Complex transmitted waveforms and advanced signal processing is giving the detectors more information to work with and so we see new models getting better discrimination at depth. But faster chips? Not really. The toy training chip I used as an example in the link I offered was too slow to be getting the job done efficiently, but commercially available chips as used in the latest detectors do not suffer from that limitation I mean you tell me. You go detecting all the time. Is your Manticore magically telling the "good" stuff from the "bad" stuff much more than has been the case for years? Just notch out all that bad stuff and only dig that good stuff? It does not matter what the little squirrel running on the wheel under the hood is doing, all that matters is the real world results you are seeing. So - I'll ask you right back. Are the guesses your detector is making becoming "more educated" or not? And by how much? Maybe somebody else will have better luck explaining it then I am having.

You are so lost in the weeds I do not know how to get you out Mitchel. You do not seem to know anything about how computers work and I doubt you have done any coding. Computers simply execute instructions based on input. Every action must be tediously coded with no mistakes. The marketing stuff is just high level analogies trying to explain the complex to people who know nothing about it in terms they can understand, but it resembles line by line coding in no way at all. The article I have attached at bottom is only a simple example that will probably make you eyes glaze over very quickly. Real SMF stuff is far more complex. A marketing person might describe it as an "engine" to make it more understandable, but it is not an engine in the sense of a car engine. There are no such thing as "good" items and "bad" items to a metal detectors. There are just numbers. Every possible combination of numbers equates to multiple items, most of them what you would consider "not good" and a few you consider "good". Eliminating all "not good" items also eliminates all "good" items. AI does not have this magical capability people imagine to just look at the poor inputs and somehow change that basic fact, to see things that somehow are going unseen by the engineers and coders. If this piece of aluminum is eliminated, this particular ring and this particular pendant are also eliminated. Why? Because the underlying process based on simple alternator theory has very little information to work with and that information is badly skewed by many variables. There are no discrete good and bad items. Each one is a fuzzy range and target id boils down to probabilities and best guesses. The piece of aluminum, the ring, and the pendant are all the exact same thing as far as the metal detector is concerned. Tell me, what is the target id for a corroding zinc penny? It's a large range. Don't want to dig them? Block that range. Oh shoot, many good items fall in that range. Want to dig those, dig the pennies. Computers and AI do not change these basic issues that exist with the technology. Read this to get an inkling of what this is really all about: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Program-an-Arduino-Based-Metal-Detector/ When you are talking processors you are simply talking about devices executing code. Faster processors do not change the code, they just execute it faster. They are not smarter - only changing the code does that. Unlike the slow learning/teaching processor used in the example I linked to, commercial processors now are fast enough to execute the code faster than is needed, to the point that the coding has to account for dead time waiting for inputs. You think you are swinging the coil fast? The processor sees you as slower than a glacier. A faster processor now just means more time waiting for inputs. Faster processors are not smarter or "more powerful" as far as detecting is concerned in the way you seem to be thinking. That's a function of the basic hardware, like the coil and the circuitry driving it, and the lines of code interpreting the information coming from the coil. The trick is to not forget that the information is minimal, and so a detector is very much a blind person trying to see in the dark, with many similar things all seemingly the same when felt with gloved hands.

It does which is why I get upset when other people's viewpoints are belittled. Some people who have never found any gold at all, or struggled just to find a bit now and then, would be thrilled, and I mean seriously thrilled, with the gold that makes no meaningful difference to you. I'm sure they will jump in and participate here with people who think their desires are silly.

Yeah, we know, you only dig large nuggets, people who dig small nuggets are rubes and fools. Comic relief for “real prospectors” like you and Reg Wilson. JP was right about this forum. Pissed me off when he said it but he has a point.

Getting a tax deduction is not a 100% reimbursement - anyone who has ever deducted anything on taxes knows you only recoup that portion which amounts to the taxes, not the full cost. Whatever, you guys all win, Minelab is horrible, the price is too high, I fold my cards and leave this table.

People are already complaining about the price, so the solution is to put more in the box and charge even more? The GM1000 dual coil package went away long ago. When I complained because I favor the 10" coil, many Aussie users on this very forum informed me that they all use the 5" coil, did not care about 10" coil going away. And don't say they should put more stuff in the box for the same price - that's not how this works. Not everybody wants that stuff and would be happy paying a higher price to get it in the box. Basically, Minelab are damned if they do and damned if they don't. I'm no Minelab groupie by a long shot, but here is what I am seeing in the U.S. : 1. Minelab GPZ 7000 $9,499 2. Minelab GPX 6000 $6,999 with two coils 3. Minelab SDC 2300 $3,699 4. Garrett Axiom $1,999 with one coil (Axiom Lite) 5. Algoforce E1500 with no battery or coil $1650 (figure about $2000 at least once battery and coil added) 6. Minelab Manticore $1,799 7. Minelab Gold Monster 2000 $1799 I see a $9,499 detector at the top of the list that has been out for over a decade, and $1799 is "shocking"?

Completely new detector that happens to share similar housing, massive increase in features and capability….should be the same price? Minelab should just write off development costs, business, sales, marketing, and distribution costs? Just add up the production cost and charge $20 over that? Dealers should not have a markup? Honestly, just don’t buy it. Get a Gold Bug Pro or whatever and be happy.