jasong

Simon laid out a case with some basic numbers somewhere for expecting the price to be about what it ended up being in reply to me doing some calculations like what you came up with Steve, showing that it shouldn't cost that much in Australia if you just take the basics into account. But it ends up costing much more in reality. There are so many posts now though that I'm not going to try to search through all that stuff, but it's there somewhere... I wonder if US dealers could work out individual shipping to AUS/NZ for a more reasonable price? I just got a package a bit bigger than the Axiom box, and probably 6 or 7lbs heavier, shipped for $260 from Shenzen, China with DHL.

Stoked to have this option again. Also stoked to see you've (unintentionally?) shown here that the recovery rate definitely seems faster than the 6000 on those surface trash signals, a big bonus for working trashy areas. This machine is going to be great in some specific areas for those who know how to make it work for them.

Probably a stupid question, but I'm not too boned up on Garrett tech yet - does the "non Z Lynk" version of the Carrot play nicely with the Axiom too? In terms of both being on, and off? I have two of them and love them, but they definitely don't play nicely with the Minelabs. Even when off, I can't have the pinpointer lower than my shoulders and behind my back when using bigger coils on the Z for instance. And when on, I have to set the 6k and Z a good distance away to use it.

I was hoping I could get a custom pack with the 11" DD and 11" mono, just so I could compare and understand them and know where to use other sizes of monos and DD's with this machine. Plus on the 6000 I haven't found any use at all for the larger coils yet since I just use the GPZ when more depth is required anyways, and I predict my usage will not change with the Axiom in the mix either. I thought I saw something, somewhere, about a bare bones machine only pack + 11" mono too priced like $400-500 less or something. What happened to that? Or did I see a ghost somewhere?

The delay doesn't bother me when I'm working slowly, or doing patch work either. But when exploring where speeding up and covering more ground is the name of the game, it starts to affect things more. I'm not sure what the 6k headphones/transmitter are rated for, but I guarantee they have a longer delay than 40ms in practice, there is something extra happening there then. I think the actual delay is closer to 100-150ms. My coil is 1-2ft away from targets when I'm in faster prospecting mode. And when I say fast, I mean a speed where I can still reliably hear anything except the faint signals that I don't want to waste time on, so it's not swinging a golf club. To move 2ft further than I do with the speaker in 40ms would mean I'm swinging at 34mph which is half the speed a pro baseball player swings a bat - not possible to do, especially not all day. So something is happening with that 6k BT transmitter. I don't know what, but if it's stated delay is 40ms then it's wrong. Based on reviewing some of my video, at peak prospecting speeds I'm swinging about 6-8mph at the end of the coil, so the delay on the 6k headphones is up to something closer to 75-150ms, but this is all just rough back of the envelope calcs. But I mean, it's irrelevant in terms of the Axiom. I'm just saying - it's a problem with BT. And the less people work patches or ground they know gold exists (and thus swing slower), and the more they start to go off into brand new places where ground coverage is the name of the game, the more obvious the problem will be. For me, it's basically 100% of what I'm doing this summer, and so the issue is notable.

Oh, that was your binoculars I saw glinting in the sun in the distance? Seriously though, I'm positive someone put a tracker on my truck and/or ATV at the RV park. It's why I stopped staying there. A group of people somehow knew the specific and exact areas I was working, like a heat seeking missile, without wasting time on all the unproductive areas in between. Their tracks literally just went directly to my patches I was working that year, even though I went out of my way to take different routes in, leave very little traces, etc. I would highly recommend anyone making videos in the US not show any appreciable gold. I literally had people message me telling me they tracked me down to here, here, and here. Like it was some kind of challenge, and I should be impressed they stalked me. It's a bit scary.

Nice, 17ms should be more than sufficient. Do you think there is a possibility that we could see an even hotter timing than Fine with future firmware updates? Just curious because as you mentioned you stayed in Fine while running through the hottest magnetites and serp grounds in California, I wonder if there might be a little further it could be pushed for those people who detect in milder ground and could use an ever hotter timing?

Good to know. The delay physically makes me lose orientation sometimes, or balance when what I'm seeing my body do doesn't match what my ears are hearing. Kinda like having your own voice echo back to you when talking on a bad cell connection and trying to keep the conversation straight. A worse version of it happens when play drums through Bluetooth LL headphones where I'm moving even faster (32 and 64th notes) - it disorients my brain/eyes from the movement of my body enough that I lose coordination and it's literally made me almost fall off my seat. My coordination is degraded enough recently due to other issues that I really hate having to use devices that make it even worse. Yet I have friends who it doesn't bother at all, but when I listen to them play I can tell their timing is slightly off and they don't realize it. I don't think BT belongs on any tool requiring hand/ear coordination until they get some tech like this with a delay below the threshold of human detection. Until then, me personally, I'm all for proprietary solutions like the WM12 and whatever this Z Lynk is. *this was in response to a post that now appears to be deleted...

If it has less latency than Bluetooth LL, I think it's a win, though I'm sure I'm in the minority here since people like headphone options and I only use them when there is no other option. I can't understand how no one notices the delay in the LL/APTX stuff though. How am I am seemingly the only one? It drives me crazy. A detector like the Axiom seems to lend itself to real prospecting in the same way the 6k does, and in those cases you aren't simply just swinging slow looking for faint signals, and the faster you swing the more pronounced the delay is with LL. The thing I'm wondering about is the inconvenience of needing to have a separate unit to use the headphones rather than built-in. Seems like one more thing to lose or forget unless I keep it attached all the time.

Is there battery discussion on another site? I haven't seen those comments. I suppose in part it's understandable though because when they first started building batteries into phones without replacement capability, there was a ton of issues. Even as recently as my S7, I lost my entire phone after the battery went bad. I also lost 2 cheapy field laptops where it was simply cheaper to buy new than replace the battery. Probably boils down to the quality of battery used, manufacturers today have figured out how to make them last much longer than they used to. A high quality battery shouldn't need replaced in the detector's lifetime. It's like USB - some people still remember the older micro-usb high failure rates and might be turned off by the USB. But the newer USB C is actually pretty reliable. I'm stoked to see Garrett used it so I can just use the cables I have laying around everywhere already, it's standard for electronics today.

The one thing that keeps nagging at the back of my mind is the way the coil connects to the screen. There is like a sharp bend in the coil cable where it goes down to wrap around the shaft. I'm guessing it didn't cause any issues with cable failure though in testing? Just wondering because that's how some of my GPX coils failed in the past, except at the coil end. Though the difference is they got much more back and forth movement/stress down there at the coil, whereas I guess up at the control unit it won't be moving much. The cable is better placed for setting the detector in ATV rifle racks at least though. I'm always worried I'm going to make a cable go bad on my 6k sitting in my racks.

Sounds like it opens the door to potentially use the old GPX trick with Salt Coarse in non-salt ground on the Axiom with Salt when detecting flats scattered with a ton of tiny bits of wire or tin slaw buried like 0-1" deep. A way to do "size discrim" essentially. Is it pretty much just the pulse delay changing, such that larger target depths are mostly unaffected as long as it's used in mild ground?

It takes effort sometimes to type "Axiom" and not "Axion" for some weird reason. Good to see I'm not the only one. Despite being lighter, the Axiom shaft looks burlier than the 6000's. Good looking machine.

Normal and Large mode both are described as timings to use in "highly mineralized soil" in the manual. Sounds like they are some flavor of the difficult timing? Normal doesn't appear to mean what Minelab defines Normal as. Fine seems to mean the opposite to Garrett as it means to Minelab too. I think Garrett's definition is more intuitive and is more like what many people who ran in Fine Gold back in the day thought it should be doing, but it did the opposite. The Axiom timings seem to combine both the gold and ground modes into one mode.

In Wyoming almost all the dealers they have listed are closed down businesses. The only one actually still open is a spa/hot tub sales place primarily. That and this drop ship place that actually seem to be located in Europe. They might want to do some updating... Or the dealers here might want to make sure they are actually listed. In my case I want to put an Axiom in my hands with a local dealer so I could answer a few questions on my own that aren't going to get answered on this forum. It's a 2-3 day round trip drive and 30% of the Axiom price in gas and hotels for me to go visit any dealer active on forums, so that's pointless in my case. So I'd like to find a local dealer.

To be clear: that drop shipper I "mentioned" is who Garrett themselves recommend on their find a dealer page for Wyoming, not me. Gerry asked if there were really drop ship only dealers, and I just answered his question with information from Garrett themselves.

Yeah, north side of the road surrounded by salt brush, and to the west of that other road that intersects at a right angle. It's a big trench that they dug apparantly with the intention to infill it, but then never did. It's been over a decade since I've stopped there though, it coulda been filled in by now, no clue. It was very well hidden in the bushes. There were smaller trash pits around it too, IIRC, think those may have been where I got the bottles actually. I also have no clue how anyone ever lived there, it looks like it would have flooded yearly, probably why they all just up and left. There used to be some similar time capsule places in AZ too, people just left and never came back. I remember an abandoned house that still had like 60's 2001:Space Odyssey-looking chairs with velvet, tiki heads everywhere, leisure suits in the closet, highball glasses and 60's drink mixers laying around, lounge music records. Those places got totally hit and destroyed though by Mad Max style scavengers when more people moved in the area.

Good job. Right to the point, no "ummms", well spoken. You could make your own Youtube vids. Looking forward to seeing how the speed settings alter the target recovery speed when I get one in hand. The "other" detector leaves something to be desired there when working in trashy areas, causing lots of holding the coil still and waiting for recovery. Also curious how the timings work in alkali. Like, is Salt timing kinda overkill? Fine or Normal work ok with a bit of grunt/groan?

Same thing happened to me when I made vids. A few people went to extreme lengths. And when they found my spots they raided them in the dead heat of the summer when no one was around and took an excavator in to some places, in others it looks like they had a team of 4 or 5 people judging by boot prints and they placered down entire banks and washes they recognized straight from my videos. Like literally, those exact spots and no where else. It's not possible to make real prospecting vids if you show good finds unless you literally do nothing but show the hole. No identifying features, no nice cinematography. Nothing. Just a hole in the ground. People can, do, and will track you down if you get enough exposure. I literally had people find me in person and say they considered it a challenge to locate me, like I should be impressed or something.

I just encountered some BIF today prospecting, took a picture for this thread. This one is a bit more rusty than the original photo, but same general stuff. I picked up another piece that looks almost identical to the original photo but then I forgot to take a pic of it, doh. The stuff on Google images is usually more decorative. What Margot has (and what I'm trying to show here), is what common BIF looks like. It's often confused for either schist or petrified wood in the same way slag is confused with meteorites. Interesting fact: BIF can also get silicified just like petrified wood, making it confused for petrified wood even more often. This is jasperized BIF, not petrified wood: It's far and away, 100%, the most common ID request I get in person from friends and friend's kids.

Did you see that massive old trash trench at the old Jungo townsite? That thing is pretty interesting to walk through, even though it's been picked over. Surprisingly a lot of people don't seem to know it's there even though it's almost in site of the road....like 1/4 mile long trench. It's like a time capsule, walking through all eras of trash up to 1960's - tricycles, fridges, old tables, and then bam! Nothing. I got some kinda cool 1950's bottles out of there, but that was like more than a decade back. You can tell looking at things that it was a happening place with families and stuff, and then everything just up and died one day and everyone walked away just like that. The dirt hovels that people lived in in some of those old placer areas are pretty interesting too. Just holes in the ground with like candle stick holes in the wall and an old backseat from a Model T or something as a bed.

None, I prospect so much that I watch literally anything except gold prospecting on Youtube. Youtube surpassed TV for quality content years ago IMO, it just takes a lot of separating wheat from chaff. I'm not really too familiar with who makes detecting vids these days though. I learned a lot about smelting, crude assaying, and processing lode from MBMMLLC though. And I thought Dan Hurd had some interesting and educational vids on general prospecting occasionally when he'd cover oddball things like the pyrophoric iron prospect. Haven't watched anything prospecting related for a few years though.

You'd be surprised how many "dealers" there are. Being unfamiliar with Garrett and wanting to see an Axiom in person, I checked for Wyoming dealers with no expectation of finding one. Imagine my surprise when I find what appears to be a major internet detector dealer based only a few miles from me! How could I never have heard of them? I called, they had European accents. I kept saying it was amazing they were based here and I'd love to meet them in person, that I thought I was one of the only detectorists in 100 miles or more and was happy to see a dealer based here. They kept changing the subject though. Finally got them to admit they have no real presence here. They said they only drop ship from Nevada and Texas. Sounds like they are actually from Europe. I won't mention their name, but I'm sure you can figure it out if you are curious. They sell Minelab too.

If there are other goldfields along the way then I'm guessing they made some more videos for later release? The one US video is just a guy mostly in his basement with a microphone... Said something about an AK trip, but he didn't seem like an actual prospector, I don't recognize him from anywhere either. They must have something else planned for release because there isn't much else left to talk about right now, I'd think they'd want to keep momentum going...

Ahh, dang, that stinks. I just assumed every dealer sold at MAP, not MSRP. I mean, you'd probably be better off buying from a US dealer selling at MAP then!