jasong

Very encouraging write up with regards to the EMI and improvement with Coilteks, thanks. I'll be curious to see what the repair shop says about the 11". Mine does basically exactly what yours does, except only in certain locations, but mine also purrs along just fine in other locations. Please update with results when you get it back...

I am for the right price, if you are serious. But my price and your price probably are quite a distance apart, since I can weld one together myself. Post that sucker in the classifieds if you are serious!

Check out that link I posted on the other page. This was a ferrite I bought 3 years ago. I told Rob about when I bought it. If the ones they are selling now aren't shiny metal iron underneath the paint, then the ring they are selling changed since I bought mine. What you see in that post is exactly what I got off Ebay at the time though. *Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think the Doc ring (at least, at first, maybe things changed now) was just a solid iron ring some manufacturer sold as "ferrite" or something. It was probably sourced from China, and I know a lot of times I get inexpensive Chinese components, they aren't actually what they say they are - they are just whatever is cheapest to make that performance "roughly equivalent". If the ML ring is actually powdered iron and not ferrite, that's the only logical explanation, and also explains why the other ring rusted after sanding paint off it.

Heard, but I still don't think the ML ring is powdered iron. At least, not if that's what the other ring is, which it has to be because it rusts and is much more dense and highly magnetic. The ML ring is painted yellow, not black. The black is the ferrite itself after I sanded the yellow paint off. Density, magnetism, conductivity all indicate it's ferrite when compared to the other ring. Looks, walks, quacks like a duck... But I'll try to find those rings again and throw them on the XRF just to see for certain. I'll post back here if I can find them, all my unused stuff is packed into boxes right since I'm moving so I'm going to have to do some digging. It'd be good to know, whatever the case may be. What I can say for certain is this: the ML ring balances out on the 7000. The other ring does not, it sounds like an iron target. So they are definitely two different materials and one probably isn't doing the job it was intended to do.

Hard to understand until it happens to you. In my case, the 6000 worked ok this winter, EMI was there but I could deal with it. Yet, as soon as I travelled up north and started trying to prospect different areas I discovered that the 6000 won't work in some places. Like - at all. No stability. So much wasted gas and time. I don't know what the problem is, but I'm not compensated to figure it out for Minelab. I paid for a finished product. I don't detect on weekends, I am a prospector and this is part of my income and business, I pay taxes on it. I expect my detectors to work when/where I need them to work, or I sell them. Great detector in certain locations. Useless in other locations. I made no secret that the 6000 was my favorite detector to use - until it stopped working in places I needed it to work. So, if a better alternative is available, I'll take it.

ML themselves seem confused on the issue then. Because if you grind the paint off the official Minelab ring, you will see it's actually black ceramic ferrite under the paint, not metallic powdered iron as they apparantly recommend. Unless the powdered iron look black also? In which case, the Doc's ring was some kind of pure iron then, it was shiny and metallic and extremely magnetic. The two types of rings respond very differently on the 7000, the metallic iron rings will not balance out and sound like more like an iron target than ground noise. I found the thread where I showed the difference here. You can see the black powder on my hand from the official Minelab ring too.

To add onto Swegin's question, what's the updating process like, out of curiosity? Do we need a program like XChange to install the update? Or how does the process work?

I'm stoked there is finally another choice/competitor out there, and I'll be putting my 6000 on Ebay too the minute I know I can get an Axiom on my doorstep the next day to replace it and keep me up and running. Normally I'd be raising a stink, posting videos of the problem, trying to encourage some kind of fix. But for the first time in my detecting career we all have a choice and I can simply speak with my wallet instead of my voice now. That's a nice option to have at long last. Looking forward to trying this Axiom out, I could care less what company makes the best tools, I just want them to work, whoever makes them.

Please do. Something just seems fishy here to me. Unless I'm missing something, there seems to be a large scale issue with poor cable/coil shielding. As usual though, Minelab's complete lack of response makes it impossible to do much but guess. I'd send mine in to the shop, but I know what the response is going to be, based on others who've sent in with the exact same problems. And I can't lose a full month of prospecting out of a short 3 month season for no reason. So I'm just going to sell it once Axiom's become available and stick to the locations where it works ok for now, and thus I won't be able to cut it apart and see for myself since I need to sell it to fund the Axiom. I did take some video showing normal and unstable operation, not quite sure where to post it though as really this has nothing to do with Coiltek and I just have written the 6000 off myself now - I'm now positive there is some kind of issue - so it seems pointless to make another dedicated thread on the problem since I know it exists, and don't really care if no one else sees it or not. Jen's point about cable shielding might be a good first place to look though if you cut into things. I'll be curious to see.

The 6000 must have some large scale shielding relating issue on it's stock coils then. Because in the same location as other 6000's, mine acts the same as the other machines - so it doesn't seem as if it has a coil fault unique to my specific machine/coil. Unless literally all the coils sent on 6000's to the US at the same time all had shielding issues? If that's speculation then I'd love to hear an actual, non speculative answer that makes logical sense. Because this one single issue is enough to make me sell my 6000 as soon as I can get an Axiom in hand to replace it with no prospecting downtime. It's totally unusable in some locations, purrs along just fine in others. It's not a loose wire/failing cable/bad connector type problem. That we have to spend another $400 on another coil just to potentially fix what sure appears to be a factory problem or design issue is pretty low IMO, if that is really what is happening.

Sheriff and even BLM rangers all have the power to arrest high graders. They just choose not to, generally. Because in their view it's not easy or even possible to prove the ownership/validity of claims in the first place. Further, actual boundaries are a fuzzy topic and the sheriff can't exactly rely on your own corner posts as being accurate. Things like this... That's why mostly they insist they won't get involved and say it's a civil matter in court. You have one other option: you could try to talk to the county prosecuter. If you can convince them both of the validity of your claim/boundaries (get a real survey), as well that the value of the theft is large, you might be able to convince them that it's a case worth their time to prosecute. If the DA agrees it's worth prosecuting such a case, they might recommend the sheriff patrol the area or respond to a call. But it'd have to be something like systematic claim jumping and theft of a high value. Try different carriers. Verizon used to be best for rural. Now I think ATT is better. Also, wireless cell repeaters/boosters can take 0 bars to 2 or 3 bars, especially if you get the antenna up really high.

If it's really that rich of a claim then why not file for a plan and work it with your own people on site? Or have someone go patrol it once daily with a camera? If you have a plan filed, you should be able to also file for temporary occupation and keep someone posted out there beyond 14 days. Though being in California, maybe things are different, dunno. You can't file criminal charges in a civil lawsuit even if you prove they stole something, so at best you'll be able to recover whatever gold you can prove they stole. And it's going to be an expensive, long suit doing that where 100% of the burden of proof is on you. And in the end they still won't be arrested either. Whatever the case, don't use violence, or even implications of violence. That will put you 100% in the wrong and make YOU liable for criminal prosecution.

Yes, there are places pushes still reveal a lot more gold. It all depends on the depositional environment to begin with. The obvious one is deeper washes. But the key factor, no matter where you are at, is to find spots where the erosional forces bringing rock/soil down onto a patch were either greater or less than the erosional force removing rock/soil from the patch. That's the basic balance to keep in mind when evaluating a spot. In places where high energy events occured - floods, landslides, streams, glaciers, or gravity due to very steep terrain - in general deposit more overburden via erosion than is removed by wind, you might get deeper patches. Where the converse is true, especially where mineralization is not geologically ancient (like NNV), deflation dominates and usually dictates a shallower maximum patch depth. In AZ you often get both a shallow enriched surface (deflationary) patch from wind, together with a deeper, less concentrated patch at depth because of this. Each individual location varies due to it's geomorphological history.

Hmm. Major head scratcher to me. Something doesn't make sense here, I can't put my finger on it yet though. There is some puzzle piece missing. You may have it with the windings...hmm. Well anyways, thanks for posting the results, very helpful. Simon and NedKelly posted Coiltek results on the page prior to this one - I didn't mean to flip the page here, people should check the actual results out on the previous page, rather than reading my rambling.

Something doesn't make sense to me. Geosense is something living inside the control box, not the coil. I don't get why just changing the coil would cause it to work better if Geosense was the problem? If so, it should be a problem with all 6000's then too, wouldn't it? They all have Geosense. Either that or a good percentage of coils are actually bad and a lot of people just are so used to noise that they can't tell the difference between a stable and unstable detector, and that seems unlikely. Mine does the same as yours - every 5-10 mins goes crazy. Does it even more frequently if I set it down to dig a target. But that's the same way basically every 6000 acts that other people own who I know too. Thing is - it's highly variable based on the location I'm using it. Sometimes I can't get it to go stable at all, ever. Other times it almost runs like a dream, then loses it only occasionally. That problem just doesn't seem coil based to me if it changes with location. I'm confused here. It seems like there is either some large scale fault with the 6000 and/or it's 11" coils if these Coilteks make these problems go away. If so, Minelab should be seriously commenting and letting us know wtf and if it'll be fixed without us having to pay to correct it. Or, if there is no problem to fix, comment on why the heck an aftermarket coil seems to fix a problem but in fact it's not really fixing anything because there isn't actually a problem...? Even typing that makes no sense... Which is enough on it's own merit that I think Minelab should comment too to clarify.

Thanks for the results guys. Keep 'em coming. Man, almost tempted to just keep the 6000 and ax the Axiom purchase if the 6k becomes totally usable with a $400 aftermarket coil. That stability problem is far and away the main reason I want to ditch it. On the other hand, don't want to spend another $400 on something that doesn't help too. Wish someone with another 11" or Coiltek lived anywhere less than a full day's drive from me so I could see... Can't really stop mid-season and waste a month with a detector in the shop either. No good solutions that aren't going to lose me a big part of the summer season or another chunk of wasted change. So strange though. Why would simply changing coils solve the problem? Simon, like your 6k, mine just randomly goes unstable constantly, even when sitting and not moving. Every 6k I've been around does it to some degree. How does a different coil solve that? I don't get it. Did you try JW's new 11" on your machine ever to see if it made a difference?

Inertial navigation using accelerometers and then dead reckoning is far more accurate than GPS for moving systems. It's sufficient for things like general ground sensing. When used in combination with mag sensors and coil data, you could achieve sub-inch resolution easily. Essentially you would make the ground it's own reference frame while swinging the coil using inertial navigation, and then tie that high resolution work "chunk" to a traditional lat/lon reference frame via GPS.

I bought one from either you or Doc (it was off ebay, can't remember who sold it now) and it absolutely was not a real ferrite ring or equivalent to the Minelab one. Just an FYI. It was highly magnetic, same as pure iron, and contained a high amount of actual iron. It was quite a lot more dense than the ML ferrite too. Also, I sanded the paint off the bottom of the ML and that ferrite ring, and that one I bought was silvery/metallic (not ferrite) and the ML ferrite was powdery black (as a ferrite should be). No big deal, I never saw any difference with the real ML ferrite ring. But whatever that one I bought was, absolutely was not equivalent to the ML ferrite and nothing I could do could balance it out due to the high amount of pure iron content in it. Pure iron is not ferrite. Ferromagnetic vs ferrimagnetic.

Agreed. This is kind of what I gather Geosense is trying to do already, though much simpler and maybe not technically "AI" yet. AI needs either constant human feedback to teach it as it makes changes, or it needs to be able to acquire it's own feedback to adjustments. Teaching it to discrim gold and iron using existing discrim (or lack thereof) circuitry is not something neural nets can do unless a human is right there for every target telling it what is good and what isn't - impossible since humans ourselves are not capable of doing this accurately to begin with, and we are slow creatures in terms of feedback to a computer. Neural nets come up with novel, interesting solutions because they iterate billions of cycles through a sort of process emulating evolution. Humans can't provide that much feedback in a useful timespan. EMI and to a lesser extent ground noise however, do not require human feedback because noise can be defined mathematically. A neural net can make on the fly adjustments and see for itself in real time if they've made a positive or negative result, and continually adjust based on that simple algorithm. Their limit is the speed of the CPU, not the speed of the human providing feedback. I followed the Alpha Zero (Google) AI with a ton of interest. I love chess, and it taught itself to be the strongest chess player in history within a few days of just playing itself. AI's do great when they have constant feedback, even if the feedback is only from themselves. If they have to sit and wait for humans to give them feedback, then they aren't much better than a human themselves.

Interesting. Almost tempted to buy a coil to see if it'll fix my 6000 stability. I really don't want to throw more money at it if I'm selling to buy an Axiom though. Were you running with the speaker or headphones? If it's seriously a coil problem and that simple then Minelab should be giving people coils, not making them buy them to fix a factory problem. Interested to see if it's just you, or everyone's stability improves with a new coil.

That's my first thought too though, seriously. Hard to tell, but trying to decipher what's on the screen, I bet this is some software that comes with some $20k Kellyco LRL or something. Edit: here's the first one that came up on Google Images. The first 4 axis rotation icons are the same, just different order. It's probably some older version of this, or similar type program.

Definitely recommend the last one too, after first learning the basics in a prospecting book. They'll talk in great detail about the geology of that specific area - then you can go out and put your eyes and hands on exactly what they are describing, know what it is, and recognize it in other areas. Prospecting is all about pattern recognition. The best prospectors I've ever know all just seem to have a "nose" for gold, and what I've observed is that nose is another term for simply recognizing patterns subconsciously, knowing what conditions were most likely to produce gold in the past. So the more you can familiarize yourself with actual, real conditions in the field in places known for producing gold, the better "nose" you'll have for sniffing out nuggets in brand new places too.

I'm pretty certain it's a limb cast. I've found a handfull of them thinking it's also what you are diagramming there too, but every time I was wrong and it was ID'ed as a limb cast when I took it in to the museum and had the experts look at it. But yeah, definitely get a 2nd opinion if you can. There is a natural history museum in Vegas too, they might have resident paleontologists like the museum near me has. A bunch of people sandblasting bones out of rock in the back of the museum, always seem happy to have someone walk down and show them something new and get their opinions, I've learned a lot from people like that.

Man permissions are getting hard to come by these days too. I have permissions from a few large ranches thankfully. But it's not like 20 years ago. Now a lot of these ranches are being bought up and consolidated by very rich oilmen from Texas and whatnot, and it's getting harder to get in contact with them. Usually I get their attorney or something and they just say "nah, we don't give permission, too much liability risk". They will sell gate keys and what not. But it's like, how many $500 gate keys do I gotta buy through checkerboard land just to get to where I want to go? Argh...

For sure, never know till you check! In my case usually what I'm doing first is driving huge areas with the ATV, just looking at the ground for gravels. I take a bunch of ziplock baggies of sample dirt with GPS coords, pan them later at home. Then come back out with the 6000 and cover about a square mile of land around every sample site that had fine gold in the sample pans. Kinda narrows down the amount of land I have to walk over. I'm sure I'm missing some nugget patches that just didn't have any fine gold in them though too - not uncommon in Arizona to find that for instance.