Rick K - First Member

Not to beat a dead horse but if you check a $10,000 Detector as airline luggage you better be very very sure of your insurance coverage - the airline's liability is VERY limited.

Just what I was talking about!

I was "in" at $1600 or so for a new TDI and I had a lot of fun learning about PI detectors and what they couldn't and could do. I got about $800 when I sold it, so my lessons were expensive. I was "in" again to the tune of just under $3000 when I got a "smoking deal" on a SDC2300, not sure how much that experience will end up costing me – kind of depends on when I sell it and what I can get for it. There's no way on earth however that I will spend $10,000 or even $8000 for a metal detector. I can take my wife on a really nice vacation in Italy for that money and remember it for the rest of my life with much more enjoyment looking back than I would have looking back on all the holes I dug over a foot deep and hard caliche looking for a pipefitting. But that's just me. I have found 300,000-year-old stone tools made by Homo Erectus in the Saudi desert - opened a sealed tomb in Arabia – only to find out that it was the 4000 year old ritual burial of a goat! So I guess finding a gold nugget or two would be nice. For real money you need to find a lunar or Martian meteorite – they sell for thousands of dollars – A GRAM!!! For finding these all you need is an endless expanse of light colored flat ground and then spend a few hundred hours staring your eyeballs out looking for dark things that aren't rusty tin cans or camel turds. Thought I had one once – sent it off to Washington University in St. Louis - they were really interested in looking at it since it greatly resembled a previously identified lunar meteorite found a site about 5 miles from where I found mine – but unfortunately it was just a rock. No I think I'll pass on the $10,000 detector and pin my hopes on my hero Dave Johnson and the boys at First Texas – waiting for their super gold detector. I doubt it will go as deep in highly mineralized ground as the GPZ – but frankly I'm not interested in digging two foot holes - no matter what's down there. There are easier ways to make money and easier ways to make great memories. To each his own and I really do look forward to hearing about all the great finds that folks make with their new mega detectors and certainly don't begrudge them making the commitment financially and otherwise to get the right tool, the right knowledge and do the hard sweat to find the gold!

Metal detecting and more particularly Gold nuggett hunting – it's different than other hobbies. You don't ask some guy riding around on the Harley or driving a quad or a bass boat how soon he plans to break even on his investment. They look at you like you were nuts – what a silly question – this isn't about money it's about having fun! Ou hobby is different. Treasure hunting is about treasure and discovering treasure is about the thrill but it's also about the money. A $10,000 metal detector is criticized on the grounds of how many ounces of gold you would have to find to pay for it. The satisfaction of owning the pinnacle of gold detecting technology – or the pure pleasure of hunting for and finding an elusive target – seem to mean less to us than they do to the golf club, quad offroader, bass boat crowd. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing – but it is a noticeable thing. I believe to some degree it's also a reaction against the fact that metal detector prices have long been based on the hope that the buyer has of financial gain and therefore - his willingness to pay a premium for a rather straightforward electronic gadget. It is the kind of tax on hope.

Happy Birthday and thanks for the practical confirmation of the bottom line of all this detecting business. "A detector in the closet finds nothing." Your GP 3000 found it easily, but that nugget at that depth would likely be found by any gold detector and probably by a $49 Bounty Hunter. We get so wrapped up in the gear that sometimes we need reminding that knowing where to go and actually getting there is 90% of the deal! Thanks

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.