Aureous

Minelab's biggest problem is that they don't have an actual product end-user on the board. Just like politicians, 'they don't live in the real world'. No concept of just how poorly the 'biggest detector manufacturer in the world' is regarded by PR standards. No concept of customer expectations either. Their ignorance and indifference will allow other players to etch away at their market dominance....look at Nokta for an example. There are a couple of other minor players who are developing new designs in the prospecting arena also. It only takes one super successful design and Minelab suddenly have a problem. With their decline in revenue, anyone would think that now is the time to announce and release a replacement for the GPZ..... we now have to wait until 3rd quarter of 2024 I suspect. By then, it might be too late.....

Funny about that, Jim Normandi often said wacky things in his latter years...possibly another case of that mentioned here. I was thinking perhaps he meant "A way to remove gold from your quartz specimens" instead lol 😁

The coax may still be use-able, just heavily wrap the split section with elec tape and do a test. To replace the coax cable entirely is a much bigger job....you have to use enameled coax with a braided outer core and resistance of <.1ohm per metre. Stripping the enamel off both cores will do your head in if you're not familiar with various procedures. Couple that with the complete disassembly of the coil, careful retention of the shielding paper and screen wire, ablation of the solder joint cement....yeah, you get the picture....😱

@Northeast if you ever need more advice on home building it yourself, just PM me. As you may recall, I've built 5 of these. Conveyor belt mat is the best option....as Reg says, the lino will abrade to shreds in no time. I have all the wire, shielding, inductance and resistance specs at hand. SD2200 may just be the best option. A folded mono AI coil will need to be run in mono mode, not DD. The Coiltek 'Zulu' or 'Mothership' coils are wound as a DD though.

Detech were considering making Axiom coils also...no doubt these will be half the cost of the Kazakh coils. Just a matter of who does what, when. Good to see someone has made a start though...

The higher frequency doesn't lend itself to useful discrimination nor depth. Which is why we've never seen it. It would need to be a multi-frequency design and this type of design effort is something we will never see from FTP. Management is too disinterested to bring anything useful to market nor compete with the 'Big 3'.

I would say that the initial batches of both flat-wound mono's from the Malaysian contractor were woeful. Anecdotal evidence from the vast majority of users in 2022 would back this statement up....including me. If this coil has been manufactured since, and has been of better quality, is uncertain. Dealerships here tell me that very few have been sold this year as customers are happier with the quality of the 14x9 Coiltek coil and a great many are waiting for the NF 16x10. Word of mouth bashing of the 17" has also lead to lower sales.... 'Nobody wants them' seems to be the phrase often repeated by the 2 dealers Ive spoken to...

Ive only seen and used 2 of them. Both groaned like a kicked drunk. Had to dumb them down to manual 1 or 2 in difficult to even get past the noise. Small target quality was decreased anyway. Unless the quality has increased (akin to the 'better' 11" monos made since May), I would wait for the NF 15x10. Although the Coiltek 14x9 is pretty good I hear. Both owners of the 17 elliptical mono's I knew got rid of them very quickly.

Of all the coils available for use with the 6000, the 11" ML mono is by far the worst. Poorly made with crap shielding quality, bunched or gapped wiring and quality control was practically non existent. In quiet soils, it will work OK but in hotter soils, it will groan like a hangover. This is a by-product of it being a flat-wound mono, they all 'hear' mineralization to a greater degree....which is why neither aftermarket coil manufacturers use this design. By far, the quietest coil is the NF 12x7 mono. I hope that the square-block wound mono design that NF use, will be replicated in their 16x10 and 8.5x6 monos as well. Quiet means stable and stable means performance improvement. At the moment, the Coiltek 10x5 mono is the most sensitive coil out there...by a mile.

The only actual type-for-type replacement still manufactured (high frequency VLF, manual GB) is the Fisher Gold Bug 2. But, as Jeff rightly says, the best option is the Garrett remanufactured 24K. Best HF VLF detector out there, by far.

Where Sam and Tanya are up North of Duketon, the ground is mild like Tibooburra. All decomposed granite, like beach sand lol. Ideal for Normal on the 6000. Looks red and hot, but the dirt is totally non magnetic, even HF VLF detectors like the GB2 love it there...

Dont forget the Treasure Mate PP by Tesoro, if you can find one:

The exterior crust is way too thick as Jason rightly points out. If it was thin, I'd suggest 'maybe'.... best grind off a very small corner with bench grinder or steady angle grinder and see if any chondrules appear or bright native metal. A fine sander polish and coupla drops of nitric acid on the ground and polished surface will reveal any patterns like geohound suggests. At this stage.I'd say 90% no.

Yeah thats Aussie dollars of course, they were AU$1100 new here. Most high frequency VLF's with ground tracking sell for C. AU$800 here, so its value for us lol

Ive owned a lot of Whites units and still have nostalgic happy memories of using Goldmaster VSAT, Goldmaster 3, MXT, GMT, TDI and lastly the 24K. I often glance at a GMT at a pawnbroker near me.....sad and unappreciated on a wall for many months. Definitely worth the $600 asking price. Maybe after I pay for my Nokta Legend, I'll end up grabbing it. Seems like no-one else is gonna 😞

Exactly what I'll be doing 😁

Awesome, thanks Jeff. Think I will go for the Legend then...👍

Thanks, well if it has Bluetooth, that should imply a phone app to adjust settings...great!!!! The SMF 'score' detectors release also shows that Nokta have zero concern about Minelab's anti-SMF lawsuit against them lol

Jeff, with your prior experience with Equinoxes, how do you find the Legend versus the Nox 800 for gold prospecting using the 6" coil on either unit? I'm about to 'dive in' and buy either a used Nox800 OR a new Legend. Or anyone else's experience using both... or the Legend alone for this purpose.

Interesting that there is nothing about these products on their website as yet... curious about the pinpointer.... does this one run via an app like the Sphinx???

The RRP for the 6000 and 7000 is way above what most Africans can afford. Back when the big Sudan-Chad-Sthn Egypt gold rush occurred a decade ago, the majority of the big dollar detector sales went to Arab buyers who 'rented' or took share positions in their use by African local prospectors. Now that the easy gold is gone, these partnerships and rentals are now far less important, hence the lacklustre sales performance. The GM1000 is a far more logical seller (and was extremely well designed for said purpose for Africa) but has a far lower profit margin. Steve's original <US$2000 PI proposal would have suited the African market perfectly. Sad that no manufacturer has come to the party....the Whites TDI-SL attempted it, but manual GB and lower sensitivity detracted its appeal in Africa, along with poor marketing/promotion efforts. Nokta still seems likely to be the only world class manufacturer to bring such a detector to market, even though the 'big' African goldrush is over....

I remember this exact same argument being offered when the GP3000 came out. It only takes a 10% improvement in either depth or circuitry efficiency to achieve a performance increase relative to the amount of gold in our pockets. I'm still going over the same ground I detected almost 40 years ago....and I well remember telling myself back then: "I've found all the gold here, there's nuthin left". Just a couple days ago, I was detecting a patch that was dozed and detected back in the late 90's and then rehab'd. I bet they thought they got it all then too, using SD2200's. The result was 5.5 grams. It was also a spot I'd detected heavily back over 10 years ago, resulting in almost an ounce. So, it doesn't take much improvement to get results....

The qualities, tech and engineering are already quantified to achieve this extra performance. These parameters have already been supplied to Nokta who are working on their upcoming prospecting PI detector. Code timings bias have a big role to play, along with coil energy increase and timing saturation to 'energize' deeper gold. Matching the correct types of coil design to these timings is also a large % of the potential increase. So, not actually a 'tall order', its a series of advances that were on paper several years ago and yet to be realized into an actual detector. Time will tell which company brings these parameters into fruition. I'm betting on Nokta being first, provided they add ALL of the key elements into the one machine. This will be the only way that Minelab and Garrett will be forced to 'catch up'. You can bet Nokta will release something way cheaper than the other 2 world players will compete with. I'm hoping (perhaps vainly) that this could be the 'big reset' in the Gold prospecting detector market.

Gerry, as a general 'rule of thumb', any dredging activity needs water..... Kalgoorlie is a semi-arid region where water is a very precious commodity as you may recall... But you're absolutely right, the transition to a new country, learning the ground, mining regulations, cost of getting there etc etc....not worth the effort to actually expect to make a profit coming from the USA. Its not like the 80's or 90's where you could reasonably expect to make serious $$. Those days are gone, sadly. But to experience it as a bucket list kinda thing, go for it! I want to come to Nth America one day and do the same.

There is so much wrong, excluded or delusional about that 'article'....not something that could be relied upon. It looks like some half wit spent a day selecting various inane, pointless and misleading web-page quotes and assembled them in a mish-mash article. Clearly no understanding of the subject matter.