jasong

I'd try one out if they want to send me one. 🙂 But, I'm hesitant to buy one because it seems to me the SP01 filter is doing something similar to Smoothing in that it's pulling out some information from the audio stream just like Smoothing is. If so, then I might as well just use Low Smoothing for free. The problem I see is that people insist on running no smoothing because it's a filter. But then they compress or filter the same audio stream with the SP01 to solve that problem. And I'm not convinced enough that's a problem I need to pay $300 or whatever to find a solution for since I personally have no problem running Low Smoothing when I need to. If you disable the filters, the SP01 is now just an audio booster. But I personally have found the WM12 to be more than sufficient for me, or head phones when it's reaaaaally windy and I'm not wanting for more volume.

I think something similar happens here too with all the air traffic. Jets flying in to Vegas all the time and low since they are on landing approach, tons of helicopters doing Grand Canyon tours, planes flying low for tours. Then Nellis Air Force Base nearby. I don't know if the jets make noise like the big old C130 engines but those military choppers I can hear on my detector. And of course Area 51 north of Vegas, but I can't talk about that and you never saw this post and aliens making noisy devices just to slow my detecting down definitely don't exist. 😄 I actually found a string of broken circuit boards and antenna components this year all in a long 2 or 3 mile line like a meteorite strewn field. From the 60's. Near as I can tell it's some sort of missile telemetry system, or from an experimental jet or something which they self destructed in the air? No idea. Found 3 weather balloon sensor thingamajigs too but those are just interesting and not really noisy or odd.

The EMI situation in places close to massive population centers like in California or parts of Arizona is another level compared more remote, less populated parts of Australia, or even places like NNV. Just California has almost double the population of the entire country of Australia. Phoenix metro area has basically the entire population of New Zealand. Just as two relative references. Lots of military, power generation, air travel, and other stuff that produces EMI that travels some distance. The SP01 is compressing/limiting/expanding the audio. I'm not sure which one exactly since I don't own one. But any kind of compression by definition destroys some part of the audio. So in that way, it's not a whole lot different than what low smoothing and boosting your sensitivity/volume is doing. In fact, before the SP01 came out, I posted about just such a thing on that old 4umer forum and how you could emulate such an idea with threshold and volume controls. The bottom line to me is that those settings are there for a reason and a place. Where we happen to be is a particularly noisy place. And people should not be afraid to use a setting (or hardware like sp1) or say they never will use it, if the results are more gold and less headache. That is after all, one of the principal design concepts of the 6000 from what I can tell based on the limited info we have.

I've also experimented with this a good bit. In the areas I detect I can lower my sensitivity from 18 to 10, take off low smoothing, and still have a bunch of spurious signals clogging my brain up and slowing things down so much that my head gets out of the game after a few hours. The amount of nuggets I miss by going slower and not having 100% focus is way more than the amount of nuggets I miss by jacking the sensitivity back up and then smoothing the mess out with low smoothing. Low smoothing also lets me run my threshold higher (still lower than most people) than I would normally, so I get a little bit back from that too. That said, I do take smoothing off when I'm cleaning a patch. And I hate every minute of it. 😄 Completely disagree. In fact, somewhere at home I have a video showing this isn't the case on an undug/undisturbed 7 grammer that was a great signal at 20, and almost nothing at 10 sensitivity. Pretty sure I also tested threshold levels and smoothing on or off on that one too. I will look for it when I get back. I've tested my settings extensively in the areas I work, I am confident that for my area, my brain, and the type of ground and gold I find, I am running as near as efficiently as I can. If I thought differently, I would change the way I run.

Oh, the other things I've noticed is that the GPZ interferes with the 5000 from a good distance. But the 5000 has to be pretty close to the GPZ for the GPZ to start getting interference. I think the GPZ must have some EMI filtering going on behind the scenes that the GPX series didn't have, just as standard operation. So that's another area I think the 6000 will definitely excel. Since they've had 6 years to improve what they already improved with the GPZ.

Yeah, I usually run a lower threshold and low smoothing with the 17" for that reason. I often don't go above 18 gain with it. But I also really don't like ratty thresholds. I can kick my threshold up 5-6 notches, keep my gain at 20 with the 8" and have it be nice and stable still. It does great in EMI. When I go on my next trip (in the hotter ground) I'm going to use this 17" at first to see if I can stay in Normal, try gains down to 6 or 8 or so if I have to. Then only switch to Difficult if the ground is still too hot.

Quartzsite actually wasn't too bad for EMI. Gold Basin itself can be medium to bad EMI, though I don't spend a lot of time in it proper anymore. However, Vegas metro area is a city of 2+ million and while it's some distance to drive, as the crow flies it's actually quite close to places I detect. That and there is a steady stream of helicopters and other aircraft doing Grand Canyon tours. Plus a number of large transmission lines from the Hoover Dam as well as various solar projects, and now more recently one of the largest wind farms in the US is being constructed nearby. Plus we have a large Air Force base. The cheeky Black Hawk pilots buzzed me maybe 50ft above my head with a guy waving out the door once a few years ago but mostly they stay north I think. Anyways, yeah. Tons of EMI out there, depending where I am at.

I should have a chance to try them out on what some would consider medium to hot ground here in the US next week. It's not a place I've detected at all with the GPZ so I will start in Normal and adjust from there. It will be a fun trip with a bit of time to detect as well. It's a private invite to private land though so I'm not sure how much I can really show. We do have some pretty hot ground here, places where I was forced to run Enhance or even use a DD. Since I'm totally mobile when I'm in AZ I just chose to seek out and stay in the easy ground (in my 4500 days) since I could run full bore everywhere and I knew most people around me (at the time) were staying in Fine Gold, which meant I was finding a lot that others were leaving behind. I got used to the geology and so as I expanded out, I tended to search for similar places, and so I end up detecting a lot of mild ground. But it will be interesting to see how they do in some hotter ground next week. I'll still try to run in Normal if I can, and then adjust accordingly from there.

Also, the amount of sensitivity to tiny iron targets on the 12" spiral and 8" have made me wonder how the 6000 is going to be in trashy areas. Both coils hit tiny iron waaaaaaay smaller than tiny gold. We are approaching sensitivity levels now where even almost invisible tiny iron trash makes a good sound. If the 6000 is about equal to the GPZ+12" on smaller, shallow gold, I have to assume people will find a bunch of new tiny trash in washes they thought were cleaned out. Because that's what keeps happening to me. The problem is when you start hitting that stuff at 4" in hardpack. A bootscrape doesn't move it. So you dig each and every one of them and make glacially slow progress. Some have the patience to dig that much trash. Me, I have to move on. Actually, maybe that's one singular use for the old stock coil I can see - intentionally desensitizing your GPZ in places you want to glide over that trash. I'll be interested to see how the 6000 deals with that particular issue. I almost wonder if they have some sort of algorithm to minimize iron signal response. But that seems unlikely since that is basically what discrim is, and we know the 6000 doesn't have discrim.

Last year I posted a photo of a wash in Quartzsite showing a bit of horizon in the background along with some basic clues. I challenged anyone to find it. Partly to give out a place I found many years back that I knew had good gold since I had my time with it already. And partly also to prove it could be done from some very basic info. Someone found it last year, took them a couple weeks of searching. I was hoping they'd post here as they ended up with about 3/4 oz, and they are a forum member. The area is getting some significant use by ATV'ers now, I assume to go somewhere else since they don't appear to be prospecting there, but where I used to have to hike a half mile in you can drive right to now. 2 parties passed me by as I was detecting, and one had detectors with them. So I'm not going to show anymore photos of the area as I there is now too much use back there. Anyways, I revisted the wash. The challenge winner's friend showed up a few hours after I did, and probably was surprised to see someone else back there, they appear to be raking stuff down now. I hope they don't destroy everything back there, there are lots of other places to discover too, I meant that as a learning place meant to teach someone how to find similar places on their own, the type of topography, signs of old timers, and geology to look for, and not necessarily a place to mine out and stay at. I had previously run my 17x12 X Coil there (and the stock coil), pretty much the only X Coil that I haven't been all out impressed with, and so I really wanted to try one of my favorites - the 17" X Coil - there too at some point. I finally got a chance to get back down. I was not let down, paid for the trip and more, and still really love this 17". Got a 10 grammer that gave a low-high with some tone curl on it, kind of a weird broken signal, strange given how chunk and solid the nugget is. Thought it was going to be a lunker from that signal, but hit bedrock at about 14 or 15" and lost hope. Still, not a bad find. This was right in the wash so I guarantee that for whatever reason, none of the previous coils heard this nugget. Very mild ground, I always run full bore settings in here with any machine or coil. There were some large rocks I moved before I started digging, so the true depth from the coil might have been more like 18". Ended up with 2 half grammers also. This one was about 9" deep, and was just the faintest little signal, but still unmistakably repeatable. I only got a photo of one, but you get the idea. I traded both of them off at the store when I got into town for some supplies. I was going to put the 8" coil on and try to snag a handful of smaller bits, but I had another spot I wanted to hit (skunked) and I was hungry so I headed back to Q. Most of the trip was for exploration in other areas, checking some totally unknown places out, most without even mines or prospects. Just going off geology and aerials. I spent 2 days exploring and got the big skunk. So nothing to report there. Stopped in to Quartzsite to see if the 6000 might still be here but no luck. My primary use coils have pretty much settled into the 8", 12" spiral, and 17" spiral. (I bought the 12, the 8 and 17 were sent to me free of charge, as noted in the past) I think I have most bases covered with these 3. The 17" is sensitive enough that I literally have to have my phone and keys in the top part of my backpack. It picks the phone up itself, the metal inside, not the EMI. Both the 12" and 17" will pick up my Garrett AT pinpointer at shoulder height when it's off, so I have to put it on the top of my shoulder on my back, and even there I can still sometimes just barely hear it with the 17". And this brings up a new point, we have now reached levels of sensitivity where eventually we may not be able to carry anything on us at all if sensitivity increases further. I've seen posts lately questioning wether one really needs coils other than the stock, or saying the stock coil is great. Let me say unequivocally, that in almost all the places I've detected, that is simply not the case at all and that the GPZ absolutely benefits from a range of coils. Sometimes greatly. That is just fact in my mind at this point. And there are maybe only a small handful of people in the world right now who have more field time in than I do on a wide range of coils on the GPZ so I'm, speaking from experience here and this isn't guesswork. So wether one is looking at the NF options to come, or willing to make an adapter for the X Coils, if one is sticking with the GPZ and is serious about detecting, I absolutely recommend you look into whichever coil option works best for you. But don't stick with the stock coil, I am not impressed with it at all. I am struggling to find one place I might even take it with me to use and I cannot. Again though, I detect mild to medium ground mostly, not hot ground. The 6000 might make all that moot though, interesting times to come ahead! There's a horizon I can show you. We got another 3" of snow after this and so I decided to explore down south. Unfortunately one place I was going to visit got 12-18" of snow and so that trip got momentarily delayed. That's my land. It may not be me there anymore as it's under contract to a new owner right now. If it goes through then I'm off to do a ton of exploration and to find new opportunities. If it falls through, I have a lot of mining to do next season.

AlphaZero has an open source equivalent called LeelaZero. Leela can run off a laptop computer ok. A Raspberry PI 4 at $55 is a full computer, with negligible weight gain, in which you can run an AI plus interface sensors (like a metal detector coil). It has a 64 bit quad core CPU, wireless, USB 3, etc. Shows just how cheap powerful electronics can be built today. There are competitors and various other peripheral devices built by essentially garage based, hobby companies for about the same price. A startup detector company could compete if they had good, highly skilled engineers and scientists, and thought outside the box. AI aside, just looking at the world of stuff you can do with the massive amount of cheap computing power avaiable to even hobbyists today - Minelab appears to be the only company looking at software solutions, based on their patents I've read so far. So again, the rest of the pack will find themselves left in the dust with nothing but a patent wall to contend with when they finally wake up to modern technology in another 10 or 15 years.

This is a type of a neural net AI. They can be extremely versatile. My roomate back in college was doing his PhD thesis on them. They can be open source and put onto a chip and set to learn and solve an almost infinite number of problems. Sometimes the most efficient solutions they come up with make no sense to humans we almost certainly wouldn't come up with them ourselves in that way. To understand just how versatile they are, recently a different type which was named AlphaZero was introduced to chess. Starting from nothing but the basic rules of the game, it did nothing except played games against itself and within 24 hours it was strong enough to beat the best human chess player in the world. In 3 days it figured out new ways to play the game and beat the strongest computer chess program humans had written in all the decades we've had computers. Now there is talk about pointing this very same AI to the basic rules of physics and biology to see what it comes up with. These AI's can easily be put on a chip that are affordable (like $20), especially smaller and more specific ones. Though the really powerful ones still run on supercomputers. I've been trying say for well over a decade now that there are tons of places that detectors could improve with modern techology and a company that simply is willing to pursue stuff that is at this point, "old news" in the tech world. That's ignoring completely relatively novel stuff like AI which alone could be a new frontier. It's hard to really put it in perspective how far behind the tech curve detector companies are compared to really any other segment. They are dinosaurs. Even some of the Minelab stuff.

Anyone got a good guess what the heck those extra 6 or so pins go to in the coil connector? I was hoping one of the engineers or coil builders woulda chimed in with something by now, because I have no ideas. It's gotta be related to this Geosense though. I thought it might be a DOD at first, but does that even make sense on a PI? If not, there are actually more than 6 extra pins. Or this machine is more GPZ-like than the GPX moniker lets on? So something very different and new is happening in that coil.

All comes down to salt performance for me on this particular machine (at least based on the info we have on hand so far). Really wish there were field reports. The conductive/salt setting and PI pedigree seem to me to suggest a great machine for NNV.

I have to guess most of us in the USA and Australia who would buy a GPZ at this point, already bought one. Sounds to me like the 6000 is going to be the polished "all arounder" for serious users, with the bonus to excel on the small stuff, which is the most common to find these days. And added bonus that it's nicer to use due to weight. Serious users who want or need to chase bigger, deeper gold probably will want a GPZ still. Might be some used GPZ's on the market coming up though, because the 6000 will probably meet the needs of many forum posters in a way that makes the GPZ somewhat extraneous due to their particular needs. Australia may be a different story, hard to tell. I was just about to post this when Trent replied. Similar sentiment as far as what JP said and the GPZ/6000 question.

I think we were just told in no uncertain terms to abandon that particular hope. $6000+ likely.

The cables themselves go bad too, pretty frequently actually especially if you change them a lot and wrap/rewrap. Also where the cable connects to the coil can get an intermittent open circuit if you wrap tight and then push the coil up with your foot to pinpoint or detect vertical walls a lot.

Are you saying you didn't pre-pay for a 6000 already then?

Are you getting some kind of early release 6000 from Minelab, Gold Catcher? Because as far as I know dealers don't even know how much they are nor when they are coming out in the US, how would they be taking payment for one already or even know what to charge you if you paid someone already?

Nice. I've been seeing them talk about this in their bi-weekly BLM data dumps for a while but never got around to checking it out. Looks like they build a new Geocommunicator basically. For those who were around to remember that. This one seems to run way smoother and faster though. Edit: I take the faster part back. It was working great, now it won't load the claims layer at all anymore. Oh well, they are still working on it it looks like.

The difference between the 7000 pre-release and the 6000 seems to be lack of field performance reports. Steve and JP's field reports on the 7000 convinced me to take a loan out to buy the biggest purchase (at the time) of my life, and I'm glad I did, on day 1. There was a real feeling in the air at that time that the 7000 would really open up some new ground, and it did. They should let their testers talk about the 6000 now...

But even the standard design NF coil is outperforming the stock Minelab coil on all sizes of gold you tested according to your report. In addition to being better in bad ground, and better with EMI. I cannot find a logical reason to believe Minelab, undisputed king of detector technology, intentionally only produced 2 inferior coils and called it good there and stopped. Without some other logical reason. If the reason isn't what I gave, then what is it?

Also, given my personal experience with the GPZ and X Coils, I strongly feel that Minelab is intentionally crippling the capabilities of their machines through coils in order to create or sustain a market for their lesser machines. I'm not saying that to be argumentative. That's my opinion and my observation based on the information I have available, which is granted, not as extensive as what you have. Maybe I'm wrong. But if not, that right there seems like a critical tactical error on their part which also gives an upstart company a good potential toehold into the realm of competitiveness with Minelab. When it comes to the ZVT business anyways, which again, is probably impossible until the patents expire. But when they do, I know there are some US based engineers who have already built their own similar designs which might otherwise be held from market for fear of patent litigation. These designs with better performing coils, modern design, and an inexpensive price tag would certainly be an interesting entry into the market, depending on timing.

Right. I'm not suggesting someone straight up copy the 4500 when it's patent expires. What I'm saying is that someone like a Garrett or Fisher, or even Nokta could be free to develop already existing or similar designs similar to such a machine without the current fear of ending up with their own machine in litigation because ML didn't like the idea of a competitor. I've seen it posted that this is one reason that has kept other companies from really developing competing machines. Stuff like the QED is based in part off earlier US designs, so it's not like there aren't people available here who don't have the understanding or capability to build such a machine, in fact we've seen posts from some of them showing they already have, at least generally speaking. Then on top of that, a ton of stuff like noise filtering is simply built into inexpensive, powerful MCU's today. That alone, which clearly the 6000 is employing to some extent, goes a long way in modernizing a machine similar to a 4500. Add in modern ergonomics and good modern design, and sell it at cutthroat prices at a loss to develop a customer base, and a company might have something that at least puts them in the arena to try to compete on some level and maybe hire some engineers and scientists to start patenting ideas themselves and position themselves for the future. Because honestly, a big part of the tech business world today is about patent jockeying. The question in my mind is how much future does electronic prospecting have exactly? 20 years? 40? Is there enough for any prudent investors to even want to try to build something to compete with a giant?

Agree. I am of course, as I often do, playing a bit of a devil's advocate for the sake of interesting discussion since this thread is literally asking "how does anyone compete with Minelab". However, I will note here, that just a few month before the 6000 news came out, I was virtually one of the only people posting here that I still thought there was room to advance PI technology and suggesting how it might be done - some of those suggestions now being seen in the 6000, while most other posters were saying PI already reached it's limit of progression and we won't see many (or any) more advancements there. Seems like pretty much everyone has changed their minds now. 😄 But I still believe there are some fairly inexpensive ways to advance something like a 4500 when it's patent expires, and make a fairly competitive machine in some markets, especially if a company was willing to weather a few years of losses and do some really cuthroat pricing schemes. Anyways. Eventually ML will reach a tech barrier unless they find totally new technology. And that 20 year clock is always ticking. Therein lies opportunity for some company. Eventually. If anyone is even still seriously detecting for gold by that time, whenever it might be.