Rick K - First Member

Again, ifyiu have homeowner's or renters insurance, younshould check the coverage. You may need to "list" a $10k detector in order to have full replacement value coverage on it.

Don't put anything you can't afford to lose in checked baggage.

With $10,000 detectors now available, the owners better take a look at their insurance. Auto insurance, for example, usually doesn't cover theft of items from inside the car. Theft losses from your car or anywhere else away from your home may be covered under your homeowners or renters insurance. You need to check your policy however - there may be specific limits or exclusions which apply to this. Especially valuable items – like a $10,000 metal detector may not be fully covered - there are often per item limits or per category limits which set the maximum amount of coverage to equal some percentage of the value of your house. Having one or two very expensive metal detectors swiped from your vehicle or from your home could leave you with a large uninsured loss. If you're in doubt check with your insurance agent.

Funny you should point out the what I should have – Chris is really standing out there calmly clearly saying what he has observed. Right after I posted what I wrote I realized that I should've called out Chris as well. I think it was Shakespeare who talk about "the slings and arrows of outrageeous fortune" – but he never had to stand against the boomerangs! Well done Chris I liked to you when I met you last year and my respect for you grows daily.

Steve - I continue to be stunned by your calm and thoughtful approach to this whole business. If there's anything more likely than treasure hunting (outside politics and religion) to agitate the weak minded - I don't know what it is. (For the record, when it comes to weak minded enthusiasts - count me IN.) But you just keep at it, out in the field, at your keyboard, hard work - prospecting and hard work writing - and the result is good sense and careful observation served up in plain clear language. Thanks.

In case anybody wondered about airplanes, the watt/hour rating being below 100w/h you can hand carry the detector with battery as well as up to 4 spare batteries. You can check in the detector with battery, but you CANNOT put spare batteries in youe checked baggage. http://www.britishairways.com/cms/global/pdfs/lithium_battery.pdf

How many freezer loads of fish do you have to catch to justify that boat? A GPZ bought for the MAP of $10k will re-sell in two years for about $7k (my estimate). That means you have to find about 2 1/4 oz of gold to pay for it (unless you have to borrow the price of the GPZ, in which case you have to add interest costs). Easy for some to find that much in two years, highly unlikely for many. If you have a producing claim or large patch with proven occurrence of deep gold, it's probably the best tool for you and it costs a lot less than a bulldozer!

If you read through the CTX forum on Findmall, you will find enough folks with warranty repairs to make you queasy about buying a new ML product with no warranty. My new SDC required replacement - it was done quickly and free under warranty - I would have been up you know what creek if I had no warranty. What this price will do is make a lot of folks shop out of state in order to dodge the Sales tax. 5 - 8% of $10k is a lot of money.

I should check the price in Dubai while I'm over her!

Well at least Minelab won't have every owner of the GPX 5000 screaming at them, not to mention all the folks who bought an SDC 2300. A $10,000 minimum advertised price pretty well protects the resale value of previous Minelab machines.

Amybody remember the old Timex watch motto -"Takes a licking and keeps on ticking"? Maybe FT should buy the rights of it for the Gold Bug. Also from Mike Scott's Facebook post from Bukina Faso. Also, anybody who doubts the power of brands in the world check out his shirt "Chelsea Football Club" British Primier league - big around the world (except here of course). Our footballs have pointy ends.

In the interest of full disclosure – I also noticed the large diameter white coils in the picture and how none of the detectors they are attached to are showing in the picture – guess they weren't made by FT. After all it's a product promotion shot. I know from some communications I've had with people in the industry that FT is pretty proud of the effort they have made to reach out and really communicate with the real customers - these poor African folks were trying to make a living finding gold and have to borrow money from loan sharks to buy what - are for them - incredibly expensive devices in order to locate the gold - which their friends with the picks and shovels will dig all around to find any other gold existing at the location. This is the real big bucks market for gold detectors and right now VLF machines are selling like hotcakes. I know nothing about the geology- how much mineralization the place is killing the depths of VLF machines - but I'm quite sure that any company who marketed a lightweight robust PI detector at a good price would sell all of them they could make.

Notice how many guys in the back row with picks! Mike Scott of Fisher in Bukina Faso meeting with the customers who buy most of their gold detectors. These are the customers First Texas' upcoming PI detector are aimed at and you can be sure it won't cost $7000 or $8000 and won't use a Lithium ion battery unless it comes with a solar charger.

Wilkommen inn das festung Herschbach!! That's as far as my fake/drunk German will take me. Steve has built a fortress of sanity and civility where we can gather safe from stray boomerangs and the like. I like it - now bring on the frenzy and let the waves lap harmlessly against our walls. Meanwhile in the real world, Mike Scott of FT is off to Africa again (see Fisher Facebook page). It's ironic but the slim, affordable gold detectors we all want will probably emerge because of the "job to be done" in Africa. Maybe the first example of the needs of the poor driving innovation to benefit the (comparatively) rich. Fun times ahead, prepare your BS detectors and some may need tinfoil hats to deflect the mind-expanding rays.

Great thread. Here in the UAE there are a lot of ancient sand dunes buried under new ones, along comes a road cut and the cross bedded layers are revealed. No gold of course, excep on the Bedouin ladies' wrists.

If I ran a detector company, I'd throw anybody out of my office who came in with a new detector model unless it was guaranteed to sell tens of thousands of units a year in mass market outlets - to all those customers who use it twice and then put it in the closet Or It finds gold, sells for $1500 and will sell in the many thousands of units annually to so called "artisanal miners" in the developing world. The high end hobbiest market is pretty well saturated. Hope Whites hits a home run!

The Aussie forums are not for the faint of heart. They say stuff there that would have got you shot down in broad daylight in old San Antonio. Entertaining as heck in small doses however!

Old thread, but useful. $9000 or even $7000 detectors are a commercial dead end without $2000+ per oz gold except for a few full timers in rich countries. The Africans want a machine to tell them where to have the other 30 guys with no detector dig. The Aussies want a detector to find fist sized nuggeta at 3 feet, but then they try and dig them up LOL. Here in what the Canadians call "North America" we want a $1500 detector which is light, ignores most hot rocks, deals with moderate to bad mineralization and gets good depth with no "holes". This would also sell like hotcakes in Africa, South America and Asia. Minelab will never do it, they are fixated on high margin. Garrett could do it tomorrow, but strangely won't. Fisher might be able to do it with their new super gold detector, but who knows when. Oh well. I found about 10,000 ounces of gold on Friday here in Abu Dhabi, but the guys with the H&K submachine guns in the gold market discouraged me from prospecting.

I don't know what the operating voltage is on the Deus, but it recharges from a 5 V USB source so it is less than that.

I emailed them about this when I first heard they were going wireless and it out the Bluetooth had too much latency for metal detector use. Dilek replied that she had checked with engineering and that they had a technology which didn't have that problem – hopefully that's correct - here's the email. "Thank you Rick...just checked and I was told that by the engineers that they are aware and currently we do not have a latency issue..." Dilek -----Original Message----- From: Rick Kempf [mailto:rickkempf@yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, December 26, 2014 4:42 PM To: Dilek Gönülay Subject: Re: Comgrats on your company's fusion with Makro Thanks Dilek! I will see how much free time my masters allow me in AD first!! One thing I'd like to mention however. I noted this morning in a post that you were considering Bluetooth for wireless detector phone use. I have dealt with Bluetooth latency issues with wireless devices before and it is a serious issue. I believe that your competitors use dedicated low latency modules from TI and perhaps others to overcome this. Latency in a detector would make for very annoying delays in coil response while it is swung.

Nice one Fred. You can't buy a golden memory like that - turning it into a golden jewel means it will live on, Hopefully one of her grandchildren will wear it proudly some day and tell tthe tale of great grandad's big find!

Nice intro! Steve, I think you are on to something here. You are creating a space where those who make a living creating, distributing and selling the tools we use and are so generally fascinated by - can tell us about what THEY do. First Nokta, now an enthusiastic dealer. Perhaps it would be worth an "industry" sub forum eventually. One of the nice things about this industry is that, for the most part, the manufacturers and others in the sales and distribution chain have been respectful of their competitors. For example, just read some of the stuff Dave Johnson posted on the Tesoro subforum on the occasion of the passing away of Jack Gifford, founder of Tesoro.

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the different distribution and sales arrangements FT has both in the US and overseas. Having said that it's awfully confusing to people like us who are reasonably knowledgeable about what detectors are available here and what their various capabilities price levels etc. are. You kind of get the impression that with first Texas their primary interest is in selling detectors and designing and manufacturing that is kind of a necessary evil. They have at least two extremely capable metal detector designers and a large engineering team otherwise. It's reasonable to expect them that we will see a steady stream of true the new products developed. But as to how when and where they are marketed what they're called what labels they're sold under and very importantly what their quality control processes are for ensuring that the product at least the factory is reliable that we know nothing about in previous experience suggests will continue to be pretty confusing on the brand ID front and pretty spotty on the quality control front. A pity really.

Metal detectors, matresses and hearing aids. Three things which are overpriced, and hard to get real imformation about. Now we see some more sensible tendency in pricing and a reasonable degree of openness from a manufacturer of a metal detector. First that and now there is a new matress company which sells direct and gives you three momths to return it at their expense if you don't like it (casper matress). Now that I can't hear crap, I just await the break up of the crooked hearing aid racket! So far however that bunch is "turning a deaf ear" to my complaints ... LOL.

I think production volumes and economic ordering quantities of parts have a lot to do with it. Making changes is a lot easier at a volume of a few hundred units a year than at a volume of a few thousand units a month. As far as "thinking outside the box" goes, there have only been three major manufacturers who have made ground balancing PI detectors. Minelab was first and has a "thicket" of patents on their methods of multi sample target analysis and ground balancing. Whites used a design which pre-dated ML and used a simpler two sample GB method developed by Eric Foster. Garrett's infinium seems to operate much like the Foster system. The ATX may be different somehow, but using it, it seemed to me to be like the infinium but just improved. The difficulty in doing better than ML lies mostly in the fact that a two sample method leaves a Hole in the detection of targets which give a return at the same time constant as the ground signal. Tough to fix this and ML's patents make using their method impossible. If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on a fall 2015 release of a new gold machine from First Texas. That assumes however that whatever they are busy working on actuall works out and is at least as good as the ATX. The market where all the money is is Africa and they don't have to beat the GPX for that market, the GPX's price is already killing sales there. Pulse Induction isn't the only technology possible however and Minelab's new GPZ may not be a PI machine at all!