Steve Herschbach

Thanks to donations by Sven1, these two catalogs cover the bulk of the most popular Compass models. I'll add the X70, X80, and X200 separately. Thanks Sven! Compass 1982 Full Line Catalog Contents: Coin Magnum Relic Magnum 7 Magnum 420 Magnum 320 Magnum 240 Judge 6 Judge 2 Automatic Compass 94B Compass 77B Coin Hustler II Coin Hustler I Pipe Seeker 5 Price List Compass 1991 Full Line Catalog Contents: X100 Challenger XP Pro Plus XP Pro Scanner XP 350 Scanner Coin Scanner Gold Scanner Gold Scanner Pro Liberty 150 Liberty 50 Coin Hustler Two Box Locator P.S. 5 North American Gold Dredge

And it’s tripled for users of canned settings. Very few people really understood the timings on the 5000 and earlier models, and it did not help that they were designed over time, and sometimes had names that mislead people. Even worse is the idea that no one timing gets it all, so multiple passes with multiple timings are the order of the day. GPZ 7000 was a move in the other direction, and the 6000 reduces settings further. Some think this is a bad thing, but the larger number of more casual types will actually do better with fewer controls, not worse. Minelab GPX 6000 control summary Initiates Bluetooth® pairing for headphones (long press for at least 2.5 seconds). Cycles through the backlight settings - High, medium, low and off Power On/Off - Restores factory settings (press and hold from off for at least 7 seconds). Adjusts the sensitivity level. Toggles between Difficult and Normal Ground Type. Toggles between the Threshold On / Off settings (long press for at least 2.5 seconds). Initiates Noise Cancel process. When a Double‑D coil is connected, toggles between the Double‑D Modes, EMI Cancel and Conductive Ground Cancel, (long press for at least 2.5 seconds). Adjusts the audio Volume Level. Press and hold Quick‑Trak Ground Balance to conduct a Ground Balancing operation.

It's a complicated mess, best explained by following this thread on the subject on another website. If I read correctly the Russians split into to camps, each supplying different areas? The old dealers were canceled? So I think this site is it now.... X Coil Website

Some Garrett mono coils are not really mono coils, but have both a transmit and receive coil. From https://garrett.com/sites/default/files/2020-01/searchcoil_tech_sheet.pdf Not sure if it applies to Infinium and ATX or not.

First big price increase in some time. Shop your favorite dealer or Keene now to get what you can before websites catch up to the increase.

The metal box design is actually great from a practical perspective. Certainly easier to make. But they were also very well balanced, easy control access, and did not roll over when set down. New is not always better, and the risk with plastic is you end up with toys. But I am a forward thinking marketing type, and it is obvious to anyone that electronics get smaller and more powerful. Whites was trying to hold back a tide that is unstoppable. Yeah, that 20 something with the cell phone wants a detector that looks like a mailbox. Not. Apex is really sweet, just a tight little detector package. Garrett obviously has seen the light finally. Just like it is inevitable that someday a wireless coil will be made that works well with a cell phone interface. There are some things you just know are going to happen, and while first efforts are dull, if XP is not working towards that future, somebody else is. Faster Bluetooth and more silicone in the phone will be enough someday to get something decent. May not be cutting edge, but could eat up the kids and entry level markets easy enough.

That’s a couple great posts Chase, we think much alike, and I have a similar attitude about getting too deep in the weeds. Despite all the tech, I will still lean on a good location, and getting my coil over the target. Sometimes we make it sound like metal detecting is rocket science, but my reality to this day still looks a lot like beep-dig! Lots of people really question and obsess over updates. But my training from prototype testing basically says “update good, load ASAP” and get on with it. The only question usually then is how to improve on that update... not on how to go backwards. If an update comes out, I wait just a couple days, then I load it up, learn it, and move on. People sometimes forget the engineers actually are genuinely trying to make our lives better, and a lot of work goes into an update to make the detector better. They’d never release an update, unless they really believed it made the machine better at what it does. I work with these people, and I do trust that they are a million times smarter than I when it comes to this stuff. That trust tends to make me more comfortable just grabbing the latest updates I guess, as it really surprised me that anyone would feel differently about them. No detector is ever truly 100% done, and this ability to keep tweaking and tuning after release is one of the best things to ever happen in the industry. Twenty years ago, the only way to get any update was buy the next model, because that’s where all updates went In this industry, for a long time, the first genuine new model was often a finished prototype, and it was always the follow up model that was best tuned and tweaked. I saw this for ages with a Minelab in particular and still do. You can bet second generation Multi-IQ is to die for. Equinox just proved it has potential, and now the real work begins. Same with GPZ 7000. Just proving ZVT works. The next gen will be what we were really waiting for. That’s still the pattern but updates help smooth the process, and keep the first time efforts a little safer for purchasers. I feel way more comfortable getting something hot off the press if I know it can be updated. Knowing what I know now, I’ll not get another detector unless it can be updated. The cutting edge is too complex, and the chances of new machines getting to market and needing updates just too great. If the machine does not have an update facility, they won’t even be trying, and in fact are more prone to play down faults. A company with a good update facility has less to fear from a major bug, that would have the other company doing a recall. Lotta blah blah blah to say I always thought original FE was deficient, and F2 is just what it should have been all along. That’s the power of being able to update.

And give it a good scrape on a streak plate. Still bugs me. If I was looking at it with eyeballs it would probably come to me, but the photo obscures just enough that it is not clicking for me.

When I started detecting the metal rods went all the way to the coil, with metal bolts. I remember when plastic isolator rods were touted as an advance in technology, and a plastic coil bolt was going to add an extra inch!

Something tells me Garrett is aware.

Thanks. I ask because pump size determines GPM which is often limited by the water supply. Especially if recirculating the water. So my favorite highbanker by far over the years has been the good old Keene 173 model with 6.5HP pump, which gets you up the hill.... what highbankers were really designed for. But I've used something as small as this, a 1.5" dredge sluice converted to a 100% recirculating supermini highbanker recovery sluice. I have created some nice little recirculating systems, both gas powered, and electric, using Gold Buddy systems as the base unit, then modifying as needed.

Any size or budget constraints? Like how big a pump are you thinking?

Yes, there are many dark semi metallic minerals that can look like this. It is maddeningly familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it. This chromite is close, but still not it. There are some hints of color to the black that hint copper ore like bornite, but that does not quite fit for me also, not colorful enough. It needs a closeup and very sharp photo, that would show the actual crystal habit or form, to narrow this down.

That would be crazy.... and that would be in line with why White’s is no more. Thanks for the tidbits Carl. Hopefully Garrett has a better idea of what to do with White’s tech than White’s themselves did. Carl may remember a conversation he and I had years ago. Carl and company were instrumental in bringing the V3i to market. I made a pitch to Carl that while V3i was revolutionary, it missed the mark in one way. My thought was V3i, but stripped into the lightest detector possible, with only the controls actually required for day to day operation. The absolute fact is Whites had an Equinox type design way before Minelab, but stood pat on big box instead of going to the next very obvious step of miniaturizing it. Obvious to me at least, and others listened when White’s did not. And it took Nokta/Makro to make my high frequency MXT. At least the waterproof TDI finally made it Carl, but too little, too late. They were so close though it seems to pulling off a turnaround. The 24K and TDI Beachhunter were both moves in the right direction, and 24K, the last real machine from Whites, is best of class. Maybe without the pandemic, but that was the final blow. It’s too bad, because Whites really was advancing the tech in serious ways more than the other U.S. manufacturers. V3i is a box full of stunning first ideas, none of which reached full fruition at White’s. Seems to be the way of American manufacturers with second generation owners though. Something gets lost in translation from founder, to next in line.

Wow, have a DFX still, and never ran across or at least remembered this one. Talk about a rare feature!

I generally hunt with mask and snorkel, and hunt out to 6 foot depths. However, I think the sweet zone is out to waist depth, and finds fade out as you go out father. They are out there, they just get more scattered the father out you go. This all assumes there is a bottom to the sand. If its just deep sand out there, stuff sinks too far and it can get real sparse, nothing but recent drops at best.

Nice, I just love old hand blown glass. Each one a little work of art!

People have been swinging hybrids since Minelab combined frequency domain with time domain processing to create BBS multifrequency. Then FBS, now Multi-IQ. And Tarsacci MDT, another machine combining time domain and frequency domain processing. To a certain degree it’s all semantics and definitions more than reality. Marketing muddles things further, and more these days I just pay attention to what they do, and not which squirrel is running the treadmill inside. Whites had working prototypes of this tech, but like most things it gets to this point where “if we can fix this one little but significant problem” but when you fix that, it breaks this, and engineer whack a mole ensues. That’s probably where this is at, as they never could get it to market. Hopefully Garrett can make something of it, as it’s one of whites Crown Jewels they were holding. There is no doubt in my mind that the future belongs to sophisticated mixed processing machines, with single frequency now the realm of the rebox and relabel crowd.

That’s not what the chart shows. Each star is not a relative percentage that translates directly to a number like that.

Honestly too blurry to really tell. A sharp photo would help a lot.

I sure hear you, as another guy that was out there first with the ATX. I did well with mine for coins, gold nuggets, and of course jewelry. The largest gold nugget I've found in Nevada so far I found with the ATX. I actually had better luck than you. My first machine was flawless, but then I blew it. It was running out of warranty, so I decided to make it into a rebuild project, and bought another ATX, this time the Deepseeker package. I should have kept using the one that was working. This new unit failed on a trip to Hawaii, and this combined with all the reports from people like you, made me decide to sell it after it got repaired under warranty. So I have been trying to get something else. I looked at the TDI Beachhunter, but the Impulse AQ was close so waited. Got one of those, not ready for prime time, so sold it last fall. I'd be better off with the ATX myself, and the thought still crosses my mind, especially when a killer deal on a used one comes up. I love the circuit, have no issue with how the ATX works at all. I'd buy a light weight dry land ATX in a heartbeat for gold prospecting were it designed properly. Great guts.... held back by the hardware. Right now I'm in line for a GPX 6000, and am going to see how it does at Tahoe, as salt will not be an issue, and I can at least wade with it. The main thing is I get near saltwater so rarely it is difficult for me to get a machine just for that, but if I did, I'd have to look hard at the ATX again. It's either that or the TDI Beachunter, but that situation is currently up in the air... and under Garrett's roof! https://www.detectorprospector.com/magazine/steves-reviews/garrett-atx-pulse-induction-metal-detector/

They will outlast most owners. I have three equinox, probably older than anyone else owns, and all three batteries are going strong. I have a spare battery I scavenged from a prototype, but I don't think I'll ever need it. They are not hard to replace yourself.... but I do not think that's an issue for about the first five years at least. They get 12 hours when brand new, and over three years later, they have degraded so little I've not noticed any drop off, though there must be some. It was a big worry for people when Equinox came out, lots of long threads.... and it all turned out to be worry over nothing.

My last post on the subject of the Ltd, I swear, as I do not want to be a negative nellie. The Impulse AQ Ltd was not supposed to be a prototype, though it should be obvious to everyone now that’s exactly what it is. At the same time, people were supposed to be reporting tests and misgivings, so the machine could be improved on. People might want to review the original statements. From the AQ Launch Thread: “Fisher is offering the Impulse AQ to a select group of experienced early adopters who want to experience design and technological innovation in real-time, as it unfolds. The Impulse®-AQ Limited is not a prototype or pre-production metal detector” I’ve actually used prototypes that were more finished than this, so that statement really is kind of a joke. And again, I went into this with open eyes, so I am not complaining. Mitchel obviously thought it was a prototype, in spite of what was said. Like I say, we all should have been in this with open eyes, and I was. But I also think this was said to be nearer to completion than has actually proven to be the case. And very hard to experience design and innovation in real time, when the company involved has clammed up, and is saying almost nothing about said design innovation as it occurs. We only find out via leaks now about things like 8" coil availability. But again, my wish is for FT to be successful in all this, and that some lessons were learned by all involved. Hopefully some people will stay involved, and post now and then.