jasong

That's doable too if you are still around when I'm down there. I'm a bit delayed this year though, so I'm not in AZ yet. Either way, just PM me later in the year if you are around and want to try something out and we'll see if something works out with timing for both of us. I haven't tried the 22" out yet, I just traded for it and haven't had a chance to run it yet so I have no clue how it runs yet. Also have a 15" CC, that one I've definitely got some hours in on already.

Lunk, if you have any desire to give a 17" spiral or 22" CC X Coil a run late Feb or March in Arizona, shoot me a PM. I'd be really curious how one or the other does in a spot you've done your ultra precise cone gridding with the 19 if you were interested in spending a day running it.

I'm not so certain about that as you are. Everything I saw just said "50% more power", with no statement about what or where. I didn't see the video with the engineer talking about it being specifically to the coil, but what I see when I look at the detector is a detector with a higher gain RX circuit. The Manticore must have higher gain since most users are saying they cannot run it at full gain in suburban areas. This would be on the RX side of things, not TX. RX gain introduces more EMI, not TX, and the gain/sensitivity setting is an RX function. Also, the coil is both an RX and TX antenna. So the engineer could have simply mispoke, or was trying to dumb it down. Or maybe meat 50% more amplification power of the signal at the coil. There would be no reason - for the reasons Steve noted - to add 50% more TX power, it'd just burn battery while accomplishing very little depth gain. For these reasons, I'd suspect they actually mean 50% more RX gain is what is happening here. And that gain is relatively useless - as people have reported - if it comes with 50% more EMI too. Again, I don't know for sure since I don't work at Minelab. I'm just saying what I observe here.

While I don't specifically know the answers, and I don't know what exactly they mean by more power with the Manticore, I may be able to offer a few observations: 1.) The FCC approval in the US does not seem to care about the TX power of the detector itself, they only look at TX power of the Bluetooth/wifi equipment. I've noticed this is true for the FCC reports of every detector manufacturer I've looked at. So either the TX frequencies are unregulated (thus there is no max legal TX), or they are underneath whatever the power would be which might require certification/testing. It also appears to be a way for the companies to circumvent early release of information...just use the same old Bluetooth equipment that is already approved, or eliminate onboard BT/wifi on the unit itself. 2.) When a manufacturer talks about "power", they need not specifically refer to TX power. They might be talking about RX amplification, or using the term colloquially. The Manticore might have the same TX power, but could just have a more sensitive RX amplification circuit. TX power runs against a wall of diminishing returns. RX power gets pointless past a certain spot because the signals just get much smaller than the noise and so you introduce more noise than signal by boosting it. The nice thing is - there are ways to eliminate noise and a lot of modern tech addresses more efficient signal processing. AI is good at it and getting better. Lots of chips have processing built in onboard, and new algorithms are invented/improved every year. So, the RX wall - in my opinion - is not so much a wall but a temporary barrier at this time, and we still have gains to make both in amplication and general noise reduction as detectors catch up with modern tech.

If I had to guess I'd say that rock wasn't merged, but grew more like a concretion on whatever the flatter rock is. There is also the potential it's some result of differential weathering/erosion where the rounded part is softer and the flat part is something harder like chert, and it spent time in a water course where the water rounded the softer part and the harder part was not as affected. But it looks more like a concretion to me.

I'm going with GotAU's first guess (I think the black is some kinda lichen?) - some kind of calcareous rock like limestone or even something like massive caliche. The darker spots would probably be little areas of higher iron concentration oxidizing more than the surrounding rock. Another option is desert varnish, but the crumbly, unstable nature of these rocks would seem to preclude that. One example in the desert SW that comes to mind is the Hualapai Limestone, which also looks like caliche (it often has caliche sitting on top of it), and has a lot of spots of darker oxidation in it in places. It can be a semi congolmerate in some places, as I believe it was the remants of an extinct lake or sea. A photo of it by Lake Mead, swiped from Google images. You can see the darker coloration on the exposed cliff face. If it showed the rock debris closer, you'd see the same thing speckling the rocks too on smaller scale.

This is the idea I've been trying to preach about for years, in terms of where metal detectors can continue to improve, and why we aren't at a brick wall yet with detector advancement. Less EMI means more "effective" depth. Not just running higher gains, but allowing our own brains to more accurately process the most relevant information. Human brains, no matter how skilled a person is, have limitations when it comes to sensory overload where we have to listen to or see lots of data. The more there is, the more assumptions the brain makes. Even when sensory input is minimal, our brains still trick us by making assumptions and throwing away data (magic/visual illusions work like this). EMI is useless noise, and our brains will inevitably begin to discard the useless noise without our conscious mind realizing it - discarding some of the good signals along with the noise. Especially signals that very closely resemble the noise (edge of detection targets, other faint signals). This is what sensory adaptation is, and not even the most talented detectorist on the planet can avoid it - it's inevitable for us all even if we don't realize its happening. The irony is - this general idea is what Minelab appears to be aiming to address with Geosense. But they did the opposite in a way by introducing their own noise into the hardware on the board, apparantly by using unshielded components near the speaker. That's fine, as long as it's corrected and explained so people understand and aren't left to guess what really happened. Calling it just an "audio fix" though is misleading by them. The problem is that Minelab's own hubris appears to have prevented them from really admitting they made a design error, which is why months later we still have people wondering if it's a fix for anything at all or just a dumbing down to decrease performance. ML publishing a partially hidden, misleading and vague article on "audio" has led to conspiratorial thinking now as people automatically equate more EMI with higher gains: thus the assumption among some is that the fix must be lowering gains or adding some kind of audio smoothing in, when there is no evidence that I'm aware of pointing to this. But of course Minelab has not bothered to clarify, as they almost never do. Anyways, sorry for the ramble Dutchman. I'm glad to see other people posting their experiences, and I hope more follow your lead! More data is always a good thing. And these days it seems that it's up to us the customers alone to really figure out what is happening and to demand fixes when things are broken, this can only happen with communication between us all.

I used to have a claim probably no more than a few miles away. But I already have a big box of magazines so I wanted to give someone else a chance. 😉

I got a guess if no one else gets it. 🙂

Very curious here too. I know someone in Macau and she said basically not possible for foreign people, and even for Chinese citizens it would be difficult due to government as well as some organized crime in rural areas. But clearly it is possible for some people... I'd be interested to know more, just for general interest.

Niiiice! 👌🙂 Was hoping you'd post something again.

They are replacing unshielded inductors with shielded inductors. I've seen the parts list. The inductors from what I can tell are still the same component values though so it's unlikely that sensitivity would decrease. It was a hardware issue on the board with lack of shielding, affecting all 6000's made before September or so - which is exactly what I was saying on this forum for months when people insisted it was my unit in particular defective and I should send in for repair (this was prior to the fix existing, so it wouldn't have helped). I knew I was seeing the problem on all 6000's I had come across though even if no one else believed me or could see it themselves, so I didn't let the matter drop and pursued it with Minelab, and in a roundabout series of events, this is why we all became aware of this hidden fix, and definitely why it became available in the US finally, as I spent another month trying to get it here prior to anyone else knowing about it yet. But I won't get into all that story here. The only thing it's should do (from my understanding) is decrease the spurious EMI. There is a chance any EMI getting to those old unshielded inductors could affect the 6000 even without using the speaker, so I wouldn't doubt the performance is improved with headphones too, but I can't say that with any certainty since I almost never used the headphones before the fix, nor after, so I have no reference frame to judge headphone performance with. But I can say with 100% certainty the 6000 is much improved with the fix while using the speaker. If you are making vids, it would be worth it to get the fix for that alone IMO. Minelab is seriously misrepresenting what this fix is - they make it sound like it's some kind of audio only fix, which could be interpreted as something like adding low smoothing or stabilization in - and it most definitely is not that at all. Unless they are doing something they aren't telling us, then nothing is being filtered or processed - shielding is just being added to reduce external EMI at the circuit board. If anyone out there has some actual evidence that sensitivity has decreased after the fix I'd be ultra curious to see it. It's not what I've observed myself, but if there is some decrease in sensitivity happening then we should ask Minelab to rectify that as well, but we'd need evidence that it even occurs to even start that conversation.

I'm curious where the idea that the 6000 fix might cause sensitivity decrease comes from? I haven't seen any evidence anywhere to indicate it might be the case, yet I keep seeing people wondering if it might and I'm not understanding why...? The fix makes the 6000 work much, much better for anyone using the speaker in my experience. Is there a reason people think it might cause sensitivity decrease that I'm not understanding? Less noise = easier detecting/more ability to jack up sensitivity/less sensory adaptation, all of which greatly benefit a detectorist. Those meteorites look like a bit fresher falls than the Gold Basin to me, you might have found a different fall there GoldSeeker? Worth looking closer at anyways I think. I've only ever found a couple tiny scattered meteorite fragments on that side, and I'm fairly certain they weren't Gold Basins proper but a different fall, after I showed them to a few people experienced with it and got their opinions too. DolanDave also found a fresher piece from a different fall out there that wasn't a Gold Basin proper many years back.

Makes me think of what old nickel coloration looks like when dug out of the ground. I think some of it comes from copper in the nickels or something though. No idea though...I'd have done a density test already, quickest way to tell what it isn't. 😁 Just put a container of water on the scale, zero out, then dip the sample in on a string. The weight of the water displaced is equal to the volume of the sample - since water density is simply 1g/cc. So the additional weight on the scale in grams will be your volume in cc. Divide the dry weight by the volume in cc and you'll get a density in grams/cc, which is standard. Takes about 20 seconds to do. Trying to calculate volume by displacement (Archimedes method) is way too prone to error - estimations, meniscus, etc. Don't use that method. Send it to me with return postage and I'll XRF it for you if you can't find anyone to ID it.

Scratch it good with a nail or knife or something hard - does it smell like sulphur a bit where you scratched? Being extremely heavy and metallic inside, my first guess would be galena. Or if not smelling like sulphur, it could be a massive hematite or something like that.