Chase Goldman

Here's my musings on the players: In addition to the African and Middle Eastern prospecting market, Minelab is also supported by it's Military mine detector business that also drives technical innovation both from a capability standpoint, ruggedness, and perhaps manufacturability cost. Codan, of course has its other areas including tactical radios. Bottom line, they have a robust engineering infrastructure and income that sustains their ability to continue to innovate PI as well as IB for hobbyists. I think it is VERY interesting that they have apparently decided they they don't have release a new IB hobbyist detector at the 3 year point following the introduction fo the Equinox. They probably realize the market was saturated with Equinox and while the CTX is due for a facelift - it is not economically a "must have" nor advantageous for Minelab to release a higher end IB with Multi IQ as a CTX replacement. In fact, timing may be everything here. They probably have their follow on to the Equinox/CTX in development and it probably ready to launch early in 2022, in response to Nokta's next offering. This will likely be a tactical launch as a way to take the wind out of a new Nokta MF release similar to the timing of the Equinox release within months following the AT Max release. (And Vanquish releasing around the same time as Simplex - though I think Minelab had very little idea what Apex was going to be otherwise they would not have given Vanquish such an retro Ace vibe). Garrett has their commercial security detector business but that really has nothing to do with field metal detecting or innovating. For hobby detecting, they are merely driven by a competitor (Minelab and to a lesser extent, Nokta, FT is not innovating at all right now beyond the highly niche AQ Impulse and even that seems to be on shaky ground). The Whites acquisition appears to be mainly defensive in nature (get the IP and trade secret stuff off the market). Maybe it will help inform and refine their Multfrequency efforts but I am not expecting "Whites by Garrett" legacy detectors to be showing up at all. I am looking forward to Nokta's next advanced release (hopefully, a MF variant of the Nokta that looks like a Simplex but behaves like an Apex or (preferably) an Equinox). Frankly, obviously the ML total technology is superior to anything else out there, but I find Nokta's approach to providing useful bells and whistles and less processed AM and target audio is refreshing. Kind of filling the vacuum left by the regression of FT. I am also looking forward to where Garrett takes their Apex tech into their higher end offerings. Also curious as to just what Garrett will do with the Whites IP, if anything. Regarding XP - I have no idea where they are going, frankly. They have not really innovated past the Deus platform and are falling behind, or at least losing the perception war to the likes of Equinox, because their core detection technology is starting to look very dated despite the wireless platform and its feather weight ergonomics. People are still buying Deus and discovering its value in thick iron which is bringing some unhunt-able sites back to life and it is popular with older detectorists that have trouble swinging the more traditionally weighted detectors and might otherwise have to hang it up. It also makes a great back woods backpacking detector. The Deus is still my number one detector, but that is really a function of the type of detecting I personally do - relic hunting in hot soil and lots of iron about. If I was primarily a beach hunter, then the Deus would drop way down the list unless I was sticking to the dry sand. Same for coin shooting - it would be Equinox as Equinox is the most versatile detector I own and it is not going anywhere. The Tarsacci is emerging as an interesting relic hunting tool in hot dirt and I can see some significant advantages to it versus both Deus and Equinox in specific situations. Bottom line is that ML continues to be the leader in hobbyist detector innovation, with Nokta really trying, but being held back by ML's ability to throw a larger number of engineering and manufacturing resources at a problem than Nokta. Nokta, however, is still listening more intently to its customer base - especially when it comes to the fact that serious hobbyists really value having a choice of accessory coils. Anyway, those are my random thoughts.

So am I. If it says its def ferrous, its def ferrous. If it says its def non-ferrous, it is def non-ferrous (i.e., it doesn't get fooled at depth with consistently up or down averaged TIDs). I am working on better understanding what it is telling me on iffy targets, one way hits etc. See this video. Settings matter with the Excal (pinpoint, Auto sense, or manual sense and setting). Depth limit with the Excal flat-on with the 15" appeared to be about 10", so edge on result is not surprising especially with the 15" attack which will have less sensitivity to targets with a small cross section, than a smaller Excal coil. Pretty impressive when you think about it as the Tarsacci is only running an 8" wide coil. I've picked up nickels at >> 12 inches with the Equinox and the stock coil in wet saturated sand. So all 3 detectors will get decent depth in wet sand.

What's the "air" button for? Nevermind - I found the manual online. It is a prompt to trigger the start of the ground balance sequence by telling the detector the coil is off the ground and in the air and ready to be moved towards the ground for the GB setting.

Great saves, Andy.

The context of the site/theater of war usually helps determine when it was lost. BTW - If you find a button with a “service branch” letter that is post 1854 vintage, that typically designates an officer’s button. Also, early in the war, Cavalry Officers often also used Eagle “R” (Rifleman) buttons until the Eagle “C” (Cavalry) became commonplace during the CW. Finally, according to some references, even though the Dragoon units were subsumed into the Cavalry, Eagle D buttons (as well as the other branch buttons, I, A, R, and C) continued to be worn by officers until conversion to the Great Seal style Army uniform button in 1902. FWIW.

Looks nice but wish it was D vice T handle.

Not sure if the GPX 6000 is simply rewiring the DD to "cancel" in its default DD EMI cancel mode, but going to cancel with an 11" DD Commander on my GPX 4800 transformed an un-huntable field next to a noisy power transformer feeding a small farmhouse into an EMI free zone. The result was one of my best finds ever and despite the decrease in sensitivity/depth, I was able to pull this Civil War US Cavalry item from about a foot down. So if you have used cancel on your existing GPX, I suspect the 6000 will be as effective as that (just with some loss in sensitivity and off-center pinpointing). If cancel did not help in your situation, not sure how the 6000 version will fare for your difficult EMI sites.

Great find!

There is no equivalent Commander coil presently and ML does not provide the specs of the current Commander coils on their website for some reason - at least I can't find them (big help there, ML). But the Coiltek GPX compatible 14" DD wieghs in at 910 g (not sure if that includes the cover).

I suspect there are multiple combo detector/coil packages - Probably a deep seeker package with the 11"/17" Mono Loops and a difficult sites package - with the 11" mono and the 14" DD. The pic below definitely shows a 2 monoloop combo pack exists, too.

It doesn't really say anything without the context of the conditions, machine setup, and coils used. Too many variables to even make it possible to verify an apples to apples comparison. I have a similar issue with their GPX Mono/DD coil chart - which is similarly somewhat ambiguous. I am sure it is "true" in whatever context ML used to do the comparison, I just don't know how "impressed" I should be without the corresponding technical background information. I do think that ML is not releasing a dog here. It looks great and there must be something about the underlying enabling technology (GeoSense-PI), that is, pardon the pun, groundbreaking for PI. So can't wait to find out more. Thanks for posting.

Rick - I have a Tarsacci and Equinox - As primarily a dry land relic hunter, I do not use either in water situations, but I have used both in driving rain storm situations for hours at a time without issue. As Steve said - Dimitar advertises the Tarsacci as IP 68 rated - that means every part of the machine can handle a static pressure head of 1.5 meters of water applied for 30 minutes at a time (approximately 3 psi applied for 30 minutes straight). If the control head and battery compartment are just under the surface of the water, the static head is minimal and the you are just left with the dynamic pressure forces associated with swinging the detector in the water and whatever current and wave action is acting on the detector. It should do just fine neck deep wading for hours. It is hard to compare it to the Equinox spec which just says 10 feet (again probably static head) with no time specified - supposedly that means it can indefinitely withstand hydrosatic pressure (static and/or dynamic) of ~ 4.5 psi so the stated specs are a little apples and oranges. But we all know (including you first hand) that some unknown percentage Equinoxes are failing even after just being dunked in the water once or twice (we also know that others have had no problems whatsoever with hundreds of hours in the water). So it seems ML is pressing their luck on their watertight design and simply acknowledging a small percentage will fail and they are just standing behind their warranty rather than drawing attention to the issue that might open them up to having to field a recall/fix. So far, other than the hassle of having to turn in the detector to get the control head replaced, no one is really complaining that ML has not honored their warranty. We'll see what happens now that the first batch of Equinox warranties are expiring. So I would say that the MDT specified watertightness is just telling it like it is, hard to tell whether it is more or less watertight from a design standpoint than Equinox. Dimitar designed, tested and guranteed it to operate per the IP 68 spec which seems to be an appropriate spec for a wading (non-diving) detector. FWIW - The warranty is 18 mos for MDT. Minelab's is 36 mos. I do not have any information on how quickly Tarsacci can turn around a broken MDT for warranty repair. The US ML repair center usually has a pretty good turnaround time - but then again, they are usually just wholesale replacing a control head or coil once they confirm a defect via troubleshooting. HTH

Not a surprising outcome. If you are still interested in a VLF machine with discrimination for nugget hunting, there are a number of superior choices to Apex and resources on this site for researching them.

I agree. But I think all this marketing flash promotion bull is totally lost on guys who shake the dust off their clothes at the end of a long day in the sun, and they just want the facts without all the glitter. Transfer some of that production value money from Marketing to Engineering R&D or at least listen to some of our rants, especially when it comes to having a wider selection of available accessory coils.

So it looks like it will be awhile before we actually see the GPX 6000 because it is apparently orbiting the sun somewhere in the asteroid belt right now. ML really has trouble "reading the room" as it pertains to their customer base. I guess they think detectorists are all fans of Game of Thrones (Vanquish) or Star Wars (GPX 6000). Not exactly representative of the GPX demographic I typically detect with... I mean do they really think we look at these videos and say "ooh, ahh" instead of doing eye rolls.

So it has its own dedicated toggle switch to switch between the modes? What setting do you use on the GPX itself - DD? And what happens if you reposition the the coil switch on the GPX control box to Cancel/Mono? Can it be used in noise cancel mode, too? It also talks about a mineralization mode - what's that? Very littlle information on the website itself.

So what's special about this coil and the scientific principles involved?

Good point. Though ML was close to implementing the gold modes as single frequency by default, and spectrum analysis of the Multi IQ Gold mode transmit spectrum has lead folks to make statements like it appears to be mainly dominated by 40 khz with a lower frequency mixed in just so ML could "say" it was Multi. I don't necessarily subscribe to that thinking because I think Multi-IQ is more than about just using multifrequencies (that's why iron bias is disabled in single frequency mode). My wish would be that you could select the Gold mode audio and "true" threshold as an option in the other modes.

I do also wish it had that mineralization meter you mentioned in the previous post, though. The GB "phase" reading is practcally meaningless, in the context of how ML has implemented it on Nox, to get any handle on mineralization of the ground you are swinging over. For one thing, you get different GB reference number readings depending on the mode you have selected. That's why GB is not universal on Equinox, each mode sees the ground differently so you have to balance for each mode. Having a separate mineralization readout would not change this, but knowing the degree of ground mineralization might affect the mode you choose, where you want to swing, and how you want to set up the machine. I know it probably has to infer ground mineralization in order to make auto ground tracking work, so the info is there and it would probably by a fairly accurate reading with multi IQ processing. Perhaps a feature for the Equinox 1000

Nope. It sort of has that in gold mode, but not really.

It would give you a better feel for targets in the ground. Equinox does heavy signal processing combined with the tones that have relatively little audio modulation even when no discrimination is applied. In this context, a true all metal (vs. Simply no duscrimination) enables you to see the ground better and gives you a better feel for the site target density. The 800 gold mode has a VCO like pitch audio that emulates AM to a certain extent and you can interrogate a target with pinpoint so these can be passable workarounds for what a true threshold-based AM mode brings to the table. Still, is nice to be able to dial in unprocessed AM for maximum depth and feel and also target interrogation. Also, I'm not sure you can truly have unprocessed AM with a simultaneous multi-frequency mode that requires some processing to decode the frequency differentiated target signal information, but ML could have incorporated it with the single frequency modes, at least. That being said, it is a nice to have feature/mode that would really make the Nox a more complete and universal detector, but the improvement compared to everything else the Nox can do, would only be incremental IMO. Do I wish it had it? Yes. Is it an essential feature for Nox? Not necessarily.

Despite all the technical information they are spilling, they are still saying right on their videos that no price has been revealed and won't be revealed until mid-Feb, so I think they are sending a pretty strong message that here's some great info but don't plan on buying it for another month. But I suppose everyone has their price... Definitely, not a detector that I feel I need to have shipped over today. I can wait until it rolls out per ML's plan and we hear some trustworthy reports on actual performance.

Typically, getting on a list does not necessarily require a $ commitment so its a no lose proposition in the event the release results in a slow rollout and wait times - good to be near the front of the line, there is still plenty of time for all of that information to come out before a customer actually has to put down actual cash. At least, that is the way I play it. I ONLY deal with dealers who do not charge a deposit to be on a waiting list.

Based on he videos and the description of features that have been posted, that is pretty much what people are concluding. It was apparent there was no location-based feature on board.

Huh? It has a built in loud speaker and low latency bluetooth from which you can run a loudspeaker on your person if you wish. You can actually plug a portable loudspeaker into the supplied wireless headphone's wired jack and use the phones as the BT receiver resting on your neck wired to a speaker or you can get one of the matchbox sized BT receiver/transmitters (they cost all of $25US) and plug a speaker in to that. Lots of options. Actually, I am surprised that ML didn't try to cram another non-cross-compatible Wi-Stream module down our throats. Looks like there is not going to be a WM 14 -good riddance. ML must be moving away from Wi Stream for some reason.