Geotech

Looks legit. You can look at the sellers "sold" items and see they have sold a boatload of coins in a variety of conditions, and the selling prices reflect reality. Here is just the 1943 quarters they've sold:

1943 quarters

If they all looked exactly the same then I would suspect funny business, but they all have slight variations.

Counterfeiters mostly target high-grade or rarer coins, not mundane quarters. I own a counterfeit bust dollar and trade dollar, bought at a flea market. The seller said up-front, "These are fake."

Sometimes it's more fun not knowing ☺️

Chilean 5 pesos

1 hour ago, mh9162013 said:

And even when they are, there's the warranty voiding becoming an issue.

In the US, the Moss-Magnuson Act allows the end-user to do their own repairs, and forbids the manufacturer from voiding the warranty when they do. The exception is if the manufacturer offers to do the repair for free. In fact, the "warraty void if seal is broken" label is technically illegal under the MM Act.

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Out of curiosity Geotech, why was management so shy about leaving the 9V power ecosystem? Was it an issue of management and ownership being that stubborn?

Yes, it was simply a case of "do what they did."

3 hours ago, phrunt said:

Yours seems a common opinion on 9v batteries and I guess the manufacturer doesn't have to care about people using cheap batteries that leak all through their pinpointer as it's not a warranty claim anyway and they'll just buy a new one as they're well aware it's their own fault ?

Most brand-name batteries have a leak warranty, they will repair/replace a device damaged by leaky batteries.

3 hours ago, phrunt said:

Thanks for entering the conversation Geotech I was really hoping you would ? , do you know the reason behind management wanting 9v and what was your reason for wanting AA over 9v?  Your answer here may get a bit over my head so be gentle ?

Management was gun-shy to do anything differently than what others (Garrett, Minelab) were doing. I wanted AA because I personally don't like 9V batteries.

When I designed the TRX, management wanted 9V, I wanted 2-AA, so I designed it for both. It quickly became obvious that 2-AA was the right answer, so when I designed the F-Pulse it was 2-AA all the way. I won't design for 9V again unless a gun to the head is involved. Even AA seems to be endangered, as more & more designs are moving to rechargeable lithium, many with no dead-battery backup option. Not sure how I feel about that.

99% odds it's a fake. Looks to be cast, not struck. The goldish tint is probably what's left of the "gold" plating. Most likely some kid got it at a souvenir shop and lost it playing soccer.

7 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

If you're referring to my (not so?) subtle comment, my point wasn't that they were fiction, it's just that most 'true' treasure stories are based upon fact but the details get twisted over the years with anecdotal additions.

A few of the stories were true. Some were based on a grain of truth with a heaping helping of fluff. And quite a lot were completely fabricated, start to finish.

2 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

The entire Multi-IQ discussion published by Minelab was written by engineers...

That's disappointing to hear. I assumed it was written by marketing.

I think all of the companies have waded into the Marketing Malarkey at one time or another. White's once advertised the DFX as running 6 frequencies. Garrett once claimed the Infinium was 99 frequencies, though that one gave me a chuckle as it was clearly a tongue-in-cheek poke at Minelab. Recently, FTP marketing was wanting to make some kind of weird technical claim about the upcoming Impulse/Manta, but (hopefully) I shot that one down. If a product is good, you shouldn't have to lie about it. And if you do have to lie about a product, it means a lot of other things have gone wrong.

If you want to understand frequency content, TX current gives a much clearer picture than TX voltage.

The RX coil in a detector is almost* always used in voltage mode, so that the magnetic field induces a voltage (EMF) across the coil, not a current through it. See Faraday's Law. Mags may or may not use an RX coil in a similar manner, and may otherwise have similarities (some mags are designed in a similar way as a PI detector), but they are really different animals.

* At least I've never seen an RX coil set up in current mode, outside of stuff I've done.

3 hours ago, phrunt said:

I wouldn't say that, there are many people including myself who have no intentions of ever getting involved in social media websites like Facebook.  They're not what I would consider a go-to place for information.

I also don't pay any attention to social media, but you & I are in the minority. That's where the younguns hang out.

Probably White's, like FTP, has recognized that the majority of the action has moved from forums to social media. I think the heyday of the forum is behind us. No point in paying for vanishing returns, especially when social media is free.

56 minutes ago, Dubious said:

As for dividing the power, I had (apparently mistakenly) thought that the Equinox overcame the problem by transmitting bursts of sine waves at each frequency, each burst after the other.  That is, five time slices, one for each frequency, so each burst of sine waves could be at full power, with the sequence repeating. But maybe this "sequential" approach wouldn't give the same multi-frequency effect.

That's how BBS/FBS works. A single 3.125kHz cycle, followed by a burst of (8) 25kHz cycles. Repeat. Equinox does both frequencies at the same time, same as DFX & V3. Either way, you are dividing the TX power amongst frequencies, whether in amplitude or time.

5 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Start driving Chuck - Carl will be waiting for you along with your new Fisher CZ-3D (Multiple-Frequency transmit, Dual Frequency Processing VLF Search 5 KHz and 15 KHz) 

Aww c'mon, I would never do that. Not even for a steak dinner.

5 hours ago, Dubious said:

 My cynical suspicion is that Minelab probably did try to do five frequencies simultaneously but somewhere during development found there just wasn't going to be enough horsepower under the hood (cpu speed, etc.) to do the processing effectively in anything approaching real-time, and had to reduce the number to two.

Building a 5-frequency metal detector would not be difficult, and there are plenty of processors with more than enough horsepower. But the transmit power gets divided amongst each frequency so you lose depth. There are tangible benefits to 2 frequencies. There are additional tangible benefits to 3 frequencies. There are almost no tangible benefits to more than 3 frequencies.

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The main difference between it and FBS, which also apparently uses two fundamental frequencies at a time, may turn out to be that it just has a few higher fundamental frequencies from which to choose, allowing it to do better on some lower conductors.

That is a correct assumption.

On 11/18/2018 at 11:16 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

I am quite certain myself that if it turns out Equinox works because there is a small squirrel inside the control box that makes all the decisions it will still continue to perform for me tomorrow just like it did yesterday. Good luck to all of you trying to litigate marketing statements with engineering reality. The fact is I sure don’t know how it works... I just know it works. 

That is a fair statement, and if what I have to compete with is performance, I am happy to do so. But some people buy into the gee-whiz factor more so, and if I come out with a 3-frequency detector they're gonna ask why I couldn't do 5, or 17, or 28 frequencies. Things no one else has done, either. The only way I can compete with false claims is to trump them with more false claims of my own, something that never benefits the end-users, and personally offends my sense of ethics besides. Instead, I'll just state the truth and do the best I can.

On 11/18/2018 at 10:50 AM, Dubious said:

So you saw only two frequencies for each mode?  What method did you use for coupling the signal?  Did you take any screen shots?

Yes. I used a magnetic field probe I designed & built. There are at least 2 threads on Geotech discussing all this, including scope pics.

El Nino, looking at the TX voltage on an MF detector is next to useless, you gotta look at the TX current to see what is going on.

1 hour ago, Dubious said:

If this is in doubt, it's a question someone with a multi-trace oscilloscope (which I lack at present) should easily be able to answer.

And that's what I've done.

8 hours ago, phrunt said:

What you are possibly indicating is multi IQ is basically a marketing gimmick, however.. even if multi IQ is over stated in it's abilities something is making the Equinox work better than a lot of other detectors...

I'm not arguing that the Equinox is a gimmick, a whole lotta people thinks it's a good detector and that's fine. I'm just stating what the detector is actually doing vs what Minelab would like people to believe it is doing. I've said it before, it completely baffles me why Minelab wants to lie about their technology when the truth is every bit as interesting.