☠ Cipher

According to Dilek this Simplex line is a whole new animal.

“We have changed all the hardware, software, system box, coil , frequency and went to Bluetooth.”

I just wish the effort went into making the simplex a simplified multifrequency unit. A waterproof FBS or CZ style machine would give us more to scratch our heads over. a Simplex Multi would compete nicely with the selectable frequency X-Terra.

I could see this in some circumstances. I love podcasts and I love detecting. When I’m cherry picking for deep silver or covering a large field it would be nice to have something to listen to in between targets. 

A lot remains to be seen of the new X-Terra Pro vs. the established Simplex, but on paper and in theory $269 for a waterproof switchable frequency unit may leave Simplex in the rear view mirror. If it punches above its weight it may even compete nicely with the likes of the Anfibio. These companies seem keen to battle it out, continuing to raise the bottom of metal detectors up to what once would’ve been not that long ago considered mid to upper level performance and options. I’m sure Nokta is now wondering what consumers are thinking about where the Simplex line fits in. What say you? One thing I can say is there’s still an advantage to having a detector and coil tuned to one specific frequency, but can that overcome all the versatility of the new X-Terra? 

$269 seems like a checkmate move on the Simplex. I know for me it is. I see a new trunk detector in my future. 

22 hours ago, Capphd said:

Question. Will this shaft still fit in the XP backpack? I really like to use my 280. 

By the looks of the photo below it should fit in the 240 and 280

A couple of things that weren’t clear is whether current Simplex coils will be interchangeable with the new simplex models, and whether the green 2.4 ghz wireless headphones will work with the Simplex Lite. 

tune in tomorrow to Nokta’s FB page at 10am EST for more info 

I wouldn’t be able to resist going all in on the Manticore. I will eventually. I’ve even thought of trading my Deus II for one, but I’m holding off for tax return time. 

For me it’s the depth. It has amazing depth. That combined with proportional response helps not damage the target. 

https://www.facebook.com/MinelabMetalDetectors/?mibextid=LQQJ4d
 

2 hours ago, midalake said:

Or maybe they will complain when the sensitivity is set at 31? 

I think this is bound to happen. According to Tom D, the highest he could run the Manticore even In his mild Florida soil was around 28. That leaves 7 more levels to drive it into instability. Sounds like it might’ve been better to cap sensitivity at 30 rather than 35. On the bright side Tom also said that equinox and manticore have equivalent sensitivity at equivalent settings, that 21 on equinox is pretty close to 21 on the manticore for example. Equinox for me became unstable after 22. If manticore can run up to 28, the claims about increased depth might just pan out, particularly if they’ve made the progress in EMI and ground mitigation he’s hinting at. Those were the two areas of intense focus on this machine’s development according to Tom’s early posts about involvement with this project. Without progress in those areas extra power is for naught. But anyway, I see it coming. This machine can be overdriven in the extreme, and we are going to see lots of people doing that, then complaining about instability. For myself though, I’d rather have the option to overdrive it than to wonder if something more is being left on the table. 

4 hours ago, phrunt said:

The Legend is quite close to the Nox 800 though, our hopes are this one performs better than the Nox, which is very likely, so while on paper they may sound similar it's the performance that should be the significant difference between this and the Legend, a wait and see I know but I've got my hopes up.

The Nox for me has what I consider excellent Target ID's only beaten by the CTX, if this detector can get the CTX level of ID's I'd be happy as for me it'd make it the ultimate all rounder, at the moment I use my Nox for some things and my CTX for others, If they were now both combined into one detector then what more could I ask for.

The Legend price to performance and features does have a psychological effect on higher purchase decisions. It does cause you to stop and think “is this machine really worth $1,000 more?” From my perspective I’ve accepted that features like 2D target mapping and incremental tweaks to performance are going to cost me a premium. That and I’ve never been able to get comfortable with Nokta Makros predatory pricing strategy as I’m not convinced it’s as much designed to benefit the consumer as it is an attempt at underselling the competition out of business. I could be mistaken on that, but can’t get that idea out of my head, so I’ve chosen to ignore the Legend (though not without temptation). Even so, over the long term competitors like Minelab can only deal with Nokta Makros strategy in one of two ways. They can either lower their prices as well or innovate their way out of it. If they choose to innovate I’m going to support it because that will push the industry forward more than lower cost renditions of previous generation technologies. 

48 minutes ago, abenson said:

I realize we don't know all the specifics about the Maticore yet. But from what we do know a few things stand out to me if a person were on the fence about making a purchase between the Manticore and a similar priced recently released detector. Bluetooth audio rather that proprietary audio. Vibrate function, flash light, wider range of coil sized. Most likely less cost for accessory coils, possibly aftermarket coil availability, 2D with target trace and better EMI immunity. Any or all of those things may not matter to some. But it definitely has me thinking.

All those features have me very exited. Just what is known so far and Minelab’s proven track record has me convinced this machine will have a place in my arsenal, and possibly, hopefully on the top shelf. These combined features are exactly what we’ve been asking for, for many years. I’m more excited about this than I was the Deus 2. I’m surprised more people aren’t as excited as I am. 

10 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

They said 50% increase over “traditional detectors.” That could mean a $149 Bounty Hunter detector. You guys really need to wise up to marketing tricks. 

Either way, Mark Laurie has also definitely stated that it is pushing more power than the Equinox as well. I just don’t expect that to make a significant difference whether it’s 5% or 50% because of the inverse 6th power law, unless they’ve also made significant strides in EMI and ground mitigation. 

In terms of the 50% increase in power, I don’t read into that as resulting in a truly substantial, rather than minor or incremental, increase in depth over equinox. In the words of Dave Johnson “Getting extra depth out of a VLF, multifrequency, or PI machine is very difficult, because these machines follow an inverse 6th power law relationship between signal voltage and depth. If everything else is maintained equal, doubling the depth requires 64 times as much signal. If this is done by increasing transmitter power, doubling depth requires 4,096 times as much battery drain. That’s the basic reason why depth increases come so slowly in this industry.” We also have to consider that some of that extra power will be sucked up by the new dynamic screen. That aside, from what I’ve seen so far this looks like what I’ve been hoping for from Minelab. I’m all in and can’t wait to get my hands on it. Glad I saved my pennies. 

Very sharp looking machine 

and Steve doing a demo

Garrett Axiom Quick Facts, Owner's Manual, Etc.

17 hours ago, jmaryt said:

tom! you can talk a 'snake" back into it's hole!  ehe! heh !he! 
 

(h.h!)
j.t.

If this wasn’t meant to be personally offensive, it was a poor choice of words. 

17 hours ago, Tom_in_CA said:

Cipher, the title of your post is : "Why I Tend Not To Post My Finds "    But what you are talking about, would only happen if you paraded cool historic finds in front of purist archie types.   And only then-so, if you're telling where you found the stuff.  What you are talking about does not happen on md'ing forums like this.

 

Many of us post our show & tell on md'ing forums ALL THE TIME.   And no one gets in touch with us saying : "You should donate that, blah blah"  

 

So I think what you meant is, that you don't do your show & tell to purist museum archie type people.  Right ?

 

And actually, most museums these days do not even say those things.  They are OVERWHELMED with donations, from sincere well-meaning citizens.   And unless you had something phenomenal (George Washington's personal wrist-watch), no one is going to be saying those things.   About the only people that would say those things, are purist archies.  And those types are NOT hanging out on md'ing forums !    🤣

 

So:  Post away !  Let's see you're bragging rights  🧐

I was careful to say that it hasn’t happened here on this forum, though I have not posted much here either. When it happens, it is local social media pages. I sure didn’t mean to imply it happens to everyone all the time. I’m not sure what the point of your post is other than to take the long way around calling me a liar. A rare occurrence it may be, but it has happened to me. I have a track record here, and I’m not known for wild dirt fishing tales or exaggeration. It’s just not even the kind of person I am. I’ll leave it at that. 

It is, and in the end everything will find its place. We just don’t like anything that reflects poorly on us or our hobby. Those of us who stick with this are good people who provide valuable services to the public. We rescue history, we put recyclable metals back in circulation, we clean up bodies of water, parks and playgrounds where someone could step on something and children could stumble into dangerous items. Where we can, we return valuable property back to their owners when we could just as well keep them. There’s an integrity within us that gets more joy out of reuniting someone with something they lost. There are some bad apples out there for sure, but they tend not to frequent metal detecting forums and lose interest in a hobby that requires attributes they don’t have. 

Ideally I would love to share all my finds. In 10 years I’ve found a lot of nice things, and even some rare and valuable things. Inevitably once I post rare and valuable historical items I come under local pressure to donate them with the argument that “history belongs to us all.” There’s a part of me that agrees with that statement. There’s another part of me that thinks history belongs to those who seek it. I put in the work to seek it out and retrieve it, and I should be able to be the one to share it until I choose to pass it on how I see fit. We share our finds in part to share history with others in our own way. We become attached to those items and proudly display them. The last thing many of us want are entities laying claim to our finds, guilt tripping us or suggesting that it now belongs to everyone, and keeping it is somehow wrong. Yet this has happened to me enough times (never here) that I feel burned for sharing anything. I just wonder if any of you have had the same experience. It’s a kind of catch 22 where both arguments have merit. Regardless, I follow the law. There’s no crime here in holding on a valuable historical find. If it answers some kind of important question or fills in an important gap, then I’d err more on the side that it belongs to everyone. Either way we should have some time to enjoy the spoils. That’s my thought for the day.

The major UI difference between the Deus II and Legend are layered menu vs having all features available in one screen. The latter does seem to be easier to master for most people, at least from a navigational standpoint. I’m fine with either UI as long as features aren’t being compromised for lack of space to display them. The most difficult part of Deus II for me was learning to navigate to the features I want to change. 

Not having a Legend I can’t compare the two beyond that, but I’m not a person who thinks Nokta Makro can’t come close enough to Deus II performance to be a true competitor for only $635. Clearly they can from what I’m seeing and hearing even though they didn’t begin with the Deus II in mind. What made the major difference for me is the Deus’ legendary iron performance, the dive rating giving me enough depth to use my Hookah setup to the fullest, the ergonomics and aesthetic look of the machine, ability to make a Deus II Lite backup from the puck, and the consistent evolution of XP platforms. The updates never stop with XP. I also like the idea of future cell phone app integration and development for the platforms. To me those things were worth the difference. 
 

I could just own them both, but only if I were gaining something I don’t already have. So far, I haven’t seen anything I don’t already have in the Equinox and Deus II. I would just be buying it because I want to own them all just to have them. I keep a close eye on Legend nonetheless, waiting for that one feature that pushes me over the edge into purchase. 

19 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Seems like this has come up before, and Carl and Steve H. (if I remember correctly) have said the way the modern multifrequency (MF) detectors operate is not the way the White's Vision family worked.  Now could the manufacturers, in addition to their modern methods, provide a mode that mimicked the V3?  Maybe....

Hopefully those who know more about the history of MF workings will chime in.

As long as we are dealing with true simultaneous multifrequency a spectrograph should be feasible. Last we heard from Carl he had stated that the Equinox was simultaneous, rather than sequential. I’m assuming the same is true of Legend. Sequential would be trickier, but even FBS machines have a hidden menu with spectrograph. At least there are pictures of it in the wild. Minelab purportedly doesn’t agree that it’s a useful or reliable tool. But you do have me to wondering now if there isn’t something else stopping others from implementing it and what it would be. Once used, it becomes clear that it is a useful discrimination feature. And multifrequency pinpoint no motion is amazing in commingled targets.

I’m not yet a Legend user, and not sure I will be, but I own several multifrequency machines, and so I have a request for the next generation. Give us a multichannel spectrograph displaying each frequency to target reaction. It’s one thing Whites had right, and if you ask anybody what they did like about the V3i and VX3 that spectrograph tops the list. To do this you’d have to give away what frequencies are actually running simultaneously, but frankly forgoing features like this to hide this information would just be silly anyway as it is fairly easily obtained by Geotech and others. By now we know these machines aren’t using every frequency available all the time and the real magic is in the processing algorithms. Secrecy there is understandable, and still leaves plenty of room for marketing. Even if the powers that be were to insist the frequencies remain secret a spectrograph could still be utilized by simply labeling the spectral lines “high” and “low.” Anyway, that’s my two cents. I believe it’s a very useful discrimination tool, and it need not be married to complexity, nor presented in color to be effective. I wish it weren’t too late to incorporate it into Legend because it would set it over the top. I imagine it was because it wasn’t requested often enough, but it’s a fair point to ask how many people have used a $1500 V3i to know they want a spectrograph and what it does. Relatively few know what they are missing.

4 hours ago, Joe L said:

I’m not sure if there are others like me out there, but I imagine there MUST be. I am so used to my Fisher Gold Bug Pro that I wanted to give myself a challenge.  I purchased a legend. My oh my, I need to be a computer genius to operate this thing.  Now, I’m getting used to it and coming along, that’s one of the reasons why I’m parting with my Bug. I want to put all the learning into the legend.  Now as for the Deus 2, I would love to maybe have one some day, but my rocket scientist license has expired. Wow, I think you need a college class to learn that girl. I don’t even understand a lot about it when I hear you guys talk about it.

So my comparison, I believe I will be able, over a bit of time, to be comfortable with the Legend, but the Deus, I don’t think I can.

But from what I read and see, both FINE machines.  So just enjoy ‘em.   Joe

You’ll be surprised what you can learn and how quickly. Things like this always look daunting at first. But there’s a saying “how do you eat an elephant?” And the answer is “one piece at a time.” One day you’ll look back at how overwhelming it was and find it amusing. 

These kinds of bugs popping up from one update to the next is getting under my skin and the reason I haven’t updated my Deus 2 since I got it. Some issues are minor annoyances and some are major pains in the ass. Either way I want no part of it. Hopefully a nice clean update will be forthcoming as I do like some of the new features. Get it together XP. You’re a top tier manufacturer now.