Rick K - First Member

Good post Steve.

Some news over on Findmall. Andy Sabisch just posted some details straight from XP on the new machine. It's one freq only - not 3, has no wireless headphone capability - gold optimized only. Link deleted since Findmall Forum update broke all old links

Sorry for the non detecting post, but I wanted to share my pics from last night's moonrise and this Morning's moonset - Gold Canyon AZ - where there is no gold notice the raptor in the rock to the right.

I hear you - the problem is that it's not really Depar's detector. It's XP's. The price is special for "artisanal miners" - mainly in Africa. It's a huge market - much bigger than the rest of the gold detector world market put together. At the same time, the individual buyers are poor. Price competition is fierce. XP has chosen Deper - the biggest metal detector distributor in the region - to market this Deus variant. No way that they will turn it loose at this price in the "first world". here's a neat story about a French guy with a Deus in Africa http://www.xpmetaldetectors.com/blog-detection/en/finds/gold-prospecting-in-africa-with-the-xp-deus-v3/

It says that they ship worldwide, but when you click on "do you ship to my country, you get the list of the countries they ship to.

Why now? Why is ML suing now? It's not smart to let a competitor eat up your market like Deus has in Europe if you have a good case of patent infringement in your hip pocket. Here's my theory (I almost always have a theory - some of them occasionally turn out to be correct! Lol) With ML announcing in their annual report in August that they would be introducing a new entry-level gold detector in the coming year, the word from their Africa/Asia distributor - Deper, that they would be getting the new XP gold machine - the DPR 600 - and at a stunningly low price - must have been a heck of a shock. This is especially true if the ML machine turns out to be a VLF (as I heard from a usually reliable source). I suspect that the timing of that news and the lawsuit are more than a coincidence.

Half price Deus with high freq coil. Africa is a BIG but highly competitive market.

Well, that likely explains the lawsuit. This is a nail in Minelab's coffin for ever selling a VLF in Africa. Depar is Minelab's agent also!

Steve who? lovely - thanks

Coiltek on board - what about Whites?

He has a good sized chunk of skin missing under his chin on the right hand side - skin cancer maybe? in any event, looks like hard work. The plus is that he won't miss coins, rings, etc - unlike the russian hadget which would get nothing but chains and maybe bracelets.

Don't know aboit the orange one, but I hear that this one works pretty good! Wish I had had something like that as a kid. Keith Southern just called it a "digital compadre". I had a Trsoro Amigo and it's closer to that - 20 years or so down the road.

Announced it today – three tones graphic screen under $100

Used to find flint flakes and ostrich shell fragments in saudi - not to mention clear quartz pebbles that way in the flat - plant free desert pavements in Saudi Arabia.

Is such a thing possible? I think we still have a ways to go to get the optimum gold nugget detector. Why is it that 2 or even 3 detectors might be needed if you want to succeed? Well, you need discrimination on a lot of sites due to ferrous trash - as of today, that means you need a VLF. Unless you have a GPZ, you probably need both a GPX and an SDC to cover the spectrum of tiny shallow to deep large nuggets. VLF's can discriminate but mineralization kills their depth in many areas. GPX machines can do most of it, but don't discriminate (much) and force the operator to choose between several very different set-ups (Each with its own set of trade-offs) depending on conditions of ground and likely targets. SDC kills on small gold and is easy to use but can't discriminate and is depth limited. Even the GPZ, for all it's depth and versitility is not easy to master and costs many ounces of gold. Can a new technical approach give us a detector which deals with all these issues at once? What would this miracle detector have to do? Ease of use - It would have to be "turn on and go". Mineralization - it would have to deal,with the most highly mineralized ground - without use of adjustment and without danger of "tuning out" small targets. Sensitivity - It would have to have sensitivity to small gold at least equal to the best current VLF detectors. Depth - it doesn't have to equal the GPZ or even GPX in raw depth, but it would have to deliver more depth than the SDC - and equal the depth of the best VLF's - and do so in any ground. Will those of us who are over 60 ever see such a "Wunderwaffe"? ---- I have my hopes. What would you pay for such a machine?

If you are into the exotic... 1979 Range Rover

How about a link?

Detecting - no. Prospecting/small scale mining in the developing world - you bet. Issue is who will build it. China? India? - anywhere else and the cost escalates fast. Oh yes, and for the vertical bits of the world, you'd want vision panels at the lower front end of the doors to see the edge of the drop! The most interesting part is that you don't need a $500 million car factory with giant machine tools like presses to build it. If Ford would sell the Transit bits freely, lots of countries in the developing world could play in this market. not so sure about the front wheel drive however. Early Saabs were famous for being able to back up a steeper hill than they could go up frontwards - amd in the mid-east, I often saw trucks so overloaded that the front wheels could barely steer!

I was curious about what GPR is good for in demining and found a couple of research papers. Here's one http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.111.9077&rep=rep1&type=pdf it appears that in a combo such as the Groundshark, the objective is reducing the number of "false positives" - these are the weak part of either a pure GPR or pure metal detector tool. The GPR can "see" the presence of plastic case and explosive charge of the mine, but it might be confused with a stone or other non metallic feature. in combination, the detector would differentiate between these based on the metal content of the mine. The metal detector alone would pick up every piece of metal junk, each of which would have to be evaluated as a possible mine. The GPR's shape recognition reduces this problem. Hard to see what value it would have in nugget hunting, but relic hunting has real possibiliite, finding structures where interesting relics can be located.

Here's the CEO's email, maybe he needs a dealer in Zimbabwe! mailto:orhan@depardetector.com in any event, no matter which of the leading brands you prefer, I expect he will see you right.

Looks like the easy stuff has been done - the hard stuff is all that's left!

Wherever you buy a detector, make sure it's the real thing. Sadly, all of the major manufacturers' gold detectors have been plagued by pirate copies out of China. If you buy from an authorized dealer, you should have no problem. I think these guys out of Dubai handle African distribution for the most popular brands, including Fisher, who make the Gold Bug Pro. You might want to contact them for the details of dealers in Zimbabwe or nearby. http://www.depardetector.com

If developing kick-a** new technology metal detectors was easy, then we would have them from many manufacturers every few years. to develop a new platform from scratch, even without a new technology, costs a lot of enginerring and developmnet dollars. If I had to guess, I would estimate that it would take about 7-10 man-years of so called "non recurring engineering" or "NRE". That can easily cost $1 - $2 million. A big chunk of change for a company whose annual gross revenue might only be in the tens of millions. You have to have some idea that is really exciting in terms of future sales to get management backing for a project like that. The fact is that sometimes small teams in small companies (and all of the metal detector companies are small companies) run into roadblocks - or sometimes opportunities that can easly add a year to the project. 2016 for a new Fisher? Well, there's always next year. Dave Johnson, Carl Moreland and the rest of the team are still on the payroll and I suspect that they aren't just designing new pink cammo schemes for kids detectors. we'll see.

That's why it's a Forum. In any case, we seem to be either: A: stuck wuth variations on what we've got - or B: on the verge of real change. Discrimination for the GPZ would likely be a game changer in some goldfields, and the crew over a Geotek are pretty sure it is coming. we will likely know know by New Years Day 2018 - if we're still around! and to add, Codan has been pretty good about of telegraphing their future plans - look back at the last couple of years of reports. They laid out completely, the "superdetector" - GPZ, the SDC and the Go Find - well in advance. - of course, their stock price was falling, so future plans were relevant. on the othe hand, their stock price is pretty OK now, so maybe some surprises on the "upside" are in order?

OK, here's my take. the Minelab "tax on gold" in the form of super premium pricing for PI detectors - is threatned. They have cut prices across the board on the GPX/SDC series and even on the GPZ. The GPZ is doing well in Africa. It is truly new and groundbreaking. The GPZ platform is destined to get discrimination capability - IF THEY CAN MAKE IT WORK (and I bet they will). The multi freq. platforms (FBS/BBS) have no where else to go in the next few years - The Go-Find is a flop the x-Terra platform is a dead end. is this a harsh criticism of Minelab - no, it's My own snapshot of the industry at present. Without something really new in the price/performance area - whether for gold nugget hunting or relics, or coinshooting - we are stuck with rearranging deckchairs on that famous White Star liner. Will this new thing arise? Who knows - Who will do it? - again? i suspect however that we will see an attempt within the next 18 months - I certianly hope so.