Aureous

18 hours ago, phrunt said:

He's going to all that trouble and voiding any warranty anyway, why doesn't he just find a ground on the PCB and attach a small wire from it to the shield paint on the housing and paint the wire on with the shielding paint to bond it to the existing shielding paint, just make the wire long enough so he can pop the hood if he ever needs to..

I thought the exact same thing, this is what I wanted from the ML tech I spoke to. Except I also wanted a sheathed extension wire from the internal shield as well. Woody is only trying to mirror the exact same method that the orig ML engineer intended..... I agree though, the effort he went through could have easily been avoided by use of a bit of fuse wire, extra graphite paint and some masking tape. Coil the last bit of fuse wire around the lock-nut collar so that the nut could contact it (after the nut was sanded to remove the annodizing coating).

He has since uploaded another 2 vids including a field test (of sorts).

Woody has added another shorter video update on his progress....

No arguments that the 6000 is 'fairly good' with EMI handling, how it achieves this without a connected shield seems quite a mystery. Just Imagine it being as good as the E1500 with a proper shield? Ever since I bought a 6000, I was experimenting with an add-on copper foil shield and asked if the ML tech could one day add an active shield wire from the active internal graphite paint shield and poke it through somewhere so I could connect it. His dithering on the subject is now explained....there aint none! So I have only added an exterior passive shield onto another (interior)passive shield! A difference is noticed, but not hugely... Will be interesting to see how Woody's 6000's perform AFTER an active shield is added.....

In his long-winded video, he finds that there is nothing connecting the PCB to the shield, the confirmation that 2 components are replaced to fix the speaker EMI issue, the graphite paint is very patchy (and has no screen wire embedded to average it) and after doing '5 or 6', he confirms that they are all the same. I agree with him, it seems extremely odd to have only a passive shield and hope that the detector can combat EMI. Something's not right methinks....

34 minutes ago, PhaseTech said:

The guy making them stopped years ago. Been selling the gold digger picks instead since then. 

Sigh.... a great pity coz it was a great idea and no-one else has done this since....

Every ' dead tenement'  has almost always already gotten a re-application over it before it even expires. But, those tenements will take months to determine who gets it (often more than one mining/exploration company or individual will have applied for it) and in the mean time, it is now 'pending ground' and open to anyone to prospect on it without permission. There will also be documentation at the Mines Dept, outlining the work that the previous owner did. This gives the budding prospector lots of info to point them in the right direction as to where on the tenement the gold actually is. The gold that a mining company is chasing aint necessarily the same gold we're after. 

21 hours ago, Taz said:

the initial guinea pig users come up with the fixes

Lucky for us, we got our terrific Guinea Pigs @phrunt @Norvic  and @Nedkelly doing the hard yards for us and Algoforce. As Steve said, wait a few months with all new manufacturer products so that others can iron out the bugs and offer solutions. Its absolutely wonderful that a new company is so keen to offer solutions, bug fixes and repairs with swift responses. Because of this, maybe the 6 month wait is unnecessary with the E1500? 

11 hours ago, Jin said:

Looks like Nenad (phasetechnical) sells them

@PhaseTech  do you sell those supersede picks still? Not on your website 

Guessing this was a basic BFO type, no ground balance. Small parts count, be interesting to see what components are still avail or the nearest counterpart to suit. No real practical applications anymore, except maybe using for building work, scanning walls for unknown metal bolts, screws, elec wiring, plumbing etc

All my thoughts and best wishes to you CPT. A speedy and full recovery :-) 

There are a few murmurs of discontent floating around regarding the E1500 in hot ground and I was hoping to see some actual field reviews of this detector, but apart from a couple short remarks and Simon's testing.....NOTHING. If I am to part with my $$ to buy one, I'd rather hear from an actual user here in Australia first.  

2 hours ago, phrunt said:

This thing is cheap compared to a Minelab battery for the 5000, 6000 or 7000.

$225 for a 10Ah battery is in no way cheap. At best 4x what its worth. Not in any universe nor planet would I spend more than $50 for that size....'bomb proof' or not. It doesnt do anything that a basic Chinese 10Ah powerbank wouldn't do for our needs. All the extra 'bells n whistles' look like pure wank. But then, Im just a grumpy, pragmatic, lonely old bast%#d lol.

2 hours ago, Taz said:

Good to know that if i fall off of a cliff, get shot at, fall in freezing water and have a hand grenade thrown at me that my battery will survive even though my Algo will be in a millions bits. 😁
 

Yeah the video contained all of the BS and wank of a Minelab Ad...which is what made me imagine they were a subsidiary company lol     Plus the price of course 😉 

If it was half that price, I might be tempted. Not a subsidiary of Minelab are they?  😉                                                        

13 hours ago, Nedkelly said:

 It's not to fussy what coil you put on.  One thing I've noticed with the coils that I've tried is the bundle coils don't need to be calibrated but the spiral coils do. Just my observations.

I'm not sure about the larger coils , I wasn't all that impressed with the ones I tried. I think it's better suited with small to medium coils.

 

There is a large variation in coil resistance between bundle and flat-wound coils. I'm guessing that this is what is being adjusted for via calibration.

2 hours ago, Reg Wilson said:

I seriously doubt that the big loop concept is practical, as if it was it would have been used by the pro prospectors, and what's more Minelab would have been all over it like the tar baby over brer rabbit. If Bruce Candy could not sort out the bugs and shelved the project that tells me that it was not a 'goer'.

Could be many factors that lead to it being undeveloped. Bruce knows his stuff but who knows? I have my doubts that Woody is onto something but time will tell....

23 hours ago, phrunt said:

perhaps as part of the EMI fix with the inductors this was part of their procedures fixing this problem too, as I did notice not only was my detector no longer going crazy randomly it also appeared to be more stable with general EMI.

You're not the only one to think this Simon. When my 6000 was sent in for the speaker audio fix, I asked the technician if I could later on, get an external screen grounded internally. He said the screen 'Is checked for connection' and functionality and an external one seemed unnecessary to him. So it may be a rather common fault. Mine was also better with EMI afterwards.

Ive been detecting so long to remember the same concept being trialed and even built by several elec engineers. Compass Electronics even made a commercial system called the 'Depth Doubler' which was only a few hundred bucks back in the 90's. The use of a GPS lock to sync the position of the receive coil onto the location is the only thing that Woody can actually patent I think...everything else is already public domain. The concept is sound in theory AND practice, but lots of hurdles to overcome, mostly to do with the receive end I suspect. Perhaps the GPS lock is whats needed. It may have merit, but don't hold your breath waiting...., its Woody after all 😉 

1 hour ago, Valens Legacy said:

Nice looking coin and pure gold at that.

I just have one question and that is why did they put 2 roo's on it?

Coz the other Roo is called Chuck.... all our new coins got him on it....weird ear and all 😉 

If its from the Perth mint, its only 98% gold. The other 1.99% is in someone's bank balance....

2 hours ago, snakejim said:

"Never show your poke!"

Unless she asks nicely..... 😉 

I saw comments elsewhere that mentioned he got a positive signal the whole way down. Bit of a warble here and there but no reverse signal at all! Usually anything bigger and thicker than 1 gram will provide a reverse signal on the 6000. From here on, I'm not going to ignore any deep positive signals lol

This one will put a smile on ya dial....biggest piece Lee has ever found Savage Prospecting   Click to 7.30 to get the best bit 😉 

7 minutes ago, phrunt said:

The QED was an absolute pain in the backside to do the ground balance

Yes I remember that with 'fondness' lol. Glad to hear the E1500 has that issue totally and sensibly alleviated. 

2 minutes ago, phrunt said:

I hope to hear reports coming out of users in Australia soon, Nenad did a post somewhere in response to someone that was saying it's crap because it doesn't track the ground, and he pointed out how many people used tracking on the 4500 and 5000? Almost everyone I've ever heard of ran in fixed and pumped the coil every once in a while, and that's now primitive as the Algoforce is tracking the ground, and makes you well aware when you need to fix it by the screen display.  I've never hunted in highly variable ground to know what it's like, but if they used the legacy GPX with success for many years nothings stopping them using the Algoforce manual ground balance method with it tracking for you on the screen, after all its easier than the early GPX was.  A thing I don't like about the 6000 is the forced tracking.

The lack of tracking is what killed the QED to a large degree. From what Ive heard, the E1500 is far less dependent on accurate GB and somewhat self-tolerates moderate ground changes. Id need to handle one myself to see how factual that is though...