Steve Herschbach

22 hours ago, Minero said:

Have you tested Minelab Xterra Pro?

If anyone has comments on the Quest vs Minelab please post in the comparison forum, not here.

OK, quickie 2024 update done, but will fine tune it as I think about it more over the week. The landscape changed a lot with the Nokta Gold Kruzer being reduced in price to $549. I mean seriously, 61 kHz, full target id, fully submersible, comes with two coils - that is pretty hard to beat as a VLF nugget hunter for the price. I'm sure Minelab still dominates the game with the Gold Monster but at $999 and only one coil now it's getting pricey as a VLF option.

PI pretty much boils down to what you get for the money. If I had to make a living with a nugget detector I'd be using a GPZ 7000. But at $8999 now it is a very expensive option for a lot of people. The GPX 6000 out of the box does better on the tinier gold than the 7000 but lacks it's punch on the weightier gold. Still, big nuggets are rare and so for many people the GPX 6000 at $2500 less ($6499) is the best value. And finally you have the Garrett Axiom, which in a nutshell offers 90% of the performance of a GPX 6000 for 60% of the price at $3995. Despite rumors of it being discontinued the GPX 5000 is still available for about the same price as the Axiom, and although I think the Axiom has the edge on tiny gold, the 5000 is still a great value for hunting larger nuggets at depth when paired with larger coils. If big gold at depth is the name of the game, if I could not afford a GPZ 7000 I'd be looking at the GPX 5000 as the alternative over both the 6000 and Axiom.

That's a lot of hard patient work but the reward is obvious. I'm a little horrified seeing the fine gold scattered around the scale though.  Anyway, good on you John, you certainly earned it!

I'm an Alaskan living in Nevada. Looks like maybe time to update my old nugget guide........

On 1/11/2024 at 6:22 PM, Knomad said:

No comment Steve.?

Not really. But since you asked….. from my perspective VLF is maxing out with a plethora of excellent devices available. Obviously Garrett needs to have something comparable if they want to stay relevant. But at this point the industry is in a race to the bottom as regards the price performance ratio. Nokta Legend $549? Deus 2 for $1200 or as low as $700? The Garrett AT Max is $749 so unless they are really going to drop prices I’d posit a multi at $800 or more. At that level it would have to be a rough match for these other machines at least or may as well not bother. I’d be more than willing to consider something packaged like the Apex but containing Legend/Deus 2/Manticore type performance. Can Garrett pull it off? Are their engineers up to the task? I guess time will tell.

I honestly have no insider knowledge on any of it as my interests lie more in the PI world and so my attention is elsewhere in 2024. I’m rooting for Garrett and wish them the best on it as I’d like to see at least one U.S. stay relevant in this industry. That will be difficult as competition is fierce now and margins under pressure as companies try to squeeze more blood from what business remains in the metal detecting industry. My thought is that we are now slightly past “peak detecting” with ever depleting finds being a reality for most of us. I would not want to be a metal detector manufacturer at this point in time, as the glory days are probably in the rear view mirror. Not a very rosy outlook for manufacturers, but actually good news for buyers. Prices were getting nothing but higher as Minelab dominated everything for 20 years, but now the tide has turned and even Minelab is churning out high value propositions like the X-Terra Pro. We should be seeing top notch performance at relative bargain prices from here on out.

2 hours ago, Melbeta said:

Steve, you said deleted for not being active. What is the term limits that determine active vs inactive? Oh, I am also a gun collector, is there a division in your forum for gun lovers???

Melbeta

The terms are simple and as I noted you already satisfied it by making one post. Inactive means people who join and never post once. Not just inactive - never active. No, there is no discussion on these forums about anything that is not strictly metal detecting and gold prospecting. That means most especially anything that has even the remotest smell of political disagreement around it and I would put guns in that category. All available forums are listed on the main forum home page.

As far as your books go, unless you think that you are going to be selling them for the big bucks there is little to fear from anyone copying or printing them. Kind of the whole point of writing stuff is to have people read it, so no reason in keeping it to yourself, unless you think you are going to publish and sell them.

Yeah, I’ve found a little gold over the years. 

He Jerry,

Welcome to the forum. You don't have to upload books to maintain membership, though your contributions are welcome I am sure. Your first hello post was all you need to insure the account is not deleted later for being inactive. Just an FYI also - any pdf which can be downloaded and viewed can be printed also by whoever downloads it if they simply take the time to screenshot each page and print it. There are also many easy to obtain software options for cracking pdf files allowing them to be edited and printed. I'm not trying to scare you off, but just letting you know. Again, welcome to the forum.

The key here is that it is your responsibility to know the status of the ground you are on. Ignorance for any reason is not an excuse, otherwise lots of people would be proactively ignorant. I suspect some people throw corner posts on a hole just so they can say they did not see them. Penalties incurred can be facing charges for mineral trespass, and in Alaska at least looking down the wrong end of a 12ga shotgun. There are some people out in the bush you don’t want to get sideways of.

On the flip side, I know of people that bluff people off by basically squatting on a location and running people off telling them it is their claim, when in fact it is not. Knowledge is the only solution, and that means learning how to visit the local recording office to pull up claims information. In general online information is only good to the quarter section and often runs late, so the recording office is your best bet for staying out of uncomfortable situations. I’ll be making a visit to mine very soon.

Looks like it worked this time. For all you Deeptech fans I added a deeptech tag to the forum and marked not just this thread but all prior threads mentioning the brand, 18 threads in all at this point. Not enough yet for it's own forum but maybe someday. I add forums based purely on activity level and generally am looking for at least enough threads to fill three or four pages of a separate forum.

Tons of prior threads on the subject under clothing and footwear tag

19 hours ago, phrunt said:

I believe the detector would need to be capable of running the bigfoot design, you would be limited to making a DD coil like the Detech arrow to run on everyday detectors.

You can get a figure 8 winding to run on any detector. The problem with most is that you will have a reverse polarity front to rear - the tones will literally flip with the winding. You see it in various Bigfoot coils made for the XLT and MXT and other machines. Even with PI detectors running the old Coiltek Salt Compensation coils, which were simply figure 8 windings. Not only great on salt but very near immune to EMI and renamed later to reflect that. The White's DFX was unique in that it was built with Bigfoot in mind and so had built in compensation for the polarity change. An advanced coil builder could probably put a chip in the coil that would do the adjustment in the coil instead of in the detector.

The problem is making a VLF figure 8 is a touchy procedure and DeTech went DD just because it is easy to make them.

What are the top half dozen best YouTube channels for good solid information on metal detecting for gold? I'm not looking for a comprehensive list - just the opposite. What do people consider to be the best of the best? The one or two you'd watch if you could watch nothing else? Thanks.

That's been said but it was never true of any Tesoro I owned. I would say that any detector that performs better by being improperly ground balanced is defective or was not engineered properly. It flies in the face of what a ground balance control is meant to do and how it functions.

There is no reason why a pdf upload should not work so you might want to try again George.

Interesting detector.

8 hours ago, Prospector Matt said:

Hi there, has anyone tried the 16” mono? I was looking to buy one if its worth it for added depth

I have the 16" mono and DD both and really don't use either of them, as they ruin the superb ergonomics my making the machine nose heavy. If I was on ground I was pretty sure had a 1 ounce or larger gold nugget I'd run them, but for smaller gold the gain is negligible to none depending on the ground. The DD in particular is quite heavy, but the mono you can run without the coil cover and it's actually lighter at 766g than the 13" DD with cover at 906g, so there is that.

16 DD Coil 948g SC 188g = 1136g (2.504 lbs)

16 Mono 766g SC 188g = 954g (2.103 lbs)

13 DD 750g SC 156g = 906g (1.997 lbs)

13 Mono 598g SC 156g = 754g (1.662 lbs)

11 DD 518g SC 74g = 592g (1.305 lbs)

11 Mono 424g SC 74g = 498g (1.098 lbs)

Coil Bolt + Two Rubber Washers = 10g (0.022 lbs)

Garrett Axiom 16”, 13”, and 11” search coils, both DD and mono

Every one of your photos is too close to the camera and so out of focus that there is no point in posting them. Look at the images before posting to make sure they are sharp or don't bother. Thanks.

11 hours ago, RiverRat said:

I'm just curious at this point how the Impulse AQ does at depth and whether it can detect small nuggets like my GB 2 without having to switch it to fine gold.

The AQ is completely useless in the goldfields, almost stunningly so given how well it works at the beach. I thought it might work in the fairly moderate salt ground in the northern Nevada gold locations, and found it banged relentlessly on hot rocks. It has no actual adjustable ground balance, the GB being preset as a crude discrimination system instead. The only way I could make it work was in black sand mode with long pulse delay and low sensitivity, which basically neutered it on gold nuggets. Long story short I'd rather use any decent VLF as being better, and any nugget PI made, even the Infinium and TDI, blow away the AQ for gold nugget hunting. The hoped for Impulse Gold to this day remains a dream unrealized that may or may not ever see the light of day. It appears Fisher simply abandoned the AQ series entirely to move on to a newer digital model, one that hopefully takes the various failures of the AQ into account. But even that has been in the works for years so who knows when and if it will be a reality.......

You already have started two threads in other locations on this subject, so please do not start any more. I went ahead and combined the other two into the one below. Thanks.

If you are getting that much gold then it seems it would be worth your while to keep at it. In any quantity you'd be making a fortune. However, I can't imagine anyone on these forums being interested based on the photos you are showing, so no point in starting any new threads about it. jasongs answer was about the best I think you will get here but if you wait maybe somebody will respond more positively.

On 1/3/2024 at 5:25 AM, iron_buzz said:

I'm sorry that you are taking what I said so personally... it was never meant to be anything other than a general criticism of offering subjective observations as actual fact, no matter who does it.   I didn't call you names, such as the one you just called me... it wasn't personal, but calling me "the high and mighty Iron Buzz" is.  What's so hard about preferencing your opinion with "IMO", anyway?

Nobody on these forums has to preface anything with IMO because everything posted is only somebodies opinion. If anyone thinks they are just stating facts - well, no. All you are doing is stating your opinion of what you think the facts are. I agree with Chase. I state my experience, the other guy states their experience, somebody else states their experience - the reader can decide for themselves what is what.

So, long story short, my style of posting is to state things as if they are facts. They are in my experience, but maybe not others. With metal detectors in particular everything depends on the ground and the targets, multiplied by operator experience. What is true for beach hunters in Florida is 100% not true for me nugget detecting in the Sierras. Different places and totally different ideas about what works and does not. The point is to take it all in and learn, not insist any one viewpoint is the "correct" one. Learn to see the big picture.

The ATX just like the Gold Monster has bump sensitivity under some conditions and settings, and in my opinion expecting it to have none is expecting too much. Like Gold Monster users, you either learn to work around it or get a different detector.

I define positive ground balance as the detector producing a slight sound when the coil goes to the ground. I define negative ground balance as the threshold going away, being suppressed, as the coil goes to the ground. There are almost no cases where a negative ground balance is going to help. In fact it can suppress the faintest signals if they occur while the coil motion is even slightly downward or ground rising under the coil. I always did a ground grab with any FT 19kHz machine, then manually bumped the balance one notch positive. This can easily be tested with any tiny target in the soil. A slight positive balance will preload the audio and often help the signal. Negative balance, just the opposite.

I have heard about machines that people claim do better with a negative ground balance, but I suspect perception is more at work than verifiable proof. In the end it's not really an ask the question sort of thing. It's go find a target in your ground (when you can) and test it both ways and see what works better for you. But me, I never, ever ground balance negative, but do very often go just a touch positive.

1 hour ago, GB_Amateur said:

I also just made a very long post in the Jewelry sub-forum.  Fortunately it went through but I was unable to use the link icon during creation.  So I think some of the gremlins are again present.

Not sure at all on that one as link icon is present and functioning as I type. Tested Here The editing icon list truncate depending on device used and orientation of that device, so a person on a phone sees far less options than a person on a widescreen device (PC or iPad held horizontally).

1 hour ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

I just tried posting my Part #2 of trip and after 2 pics loaded fine, the 3rd error-ed out.

No errors showing on this end. Photo uploads can time out for various reasons that don't have anything to do with the forum software, usually boils down to try again, or reduce image size and try again.

Main database file was corrupt. I repaired it and should work again now, but this has been happening more frequently as of late and has me concerned about data loss. Hopefully the next forum update fixes it. If we get to a version that seems stable I may stop updating the forum software as most of the so-called updates do nothing to make our lives here any better, and always run the risk of breaking something. Anyway, add to this thread if anything else seems wrong still after I make this post. Thanks.