jasong

Agree with Fred, coil would be the first thing I'd be checking out, double check your coil connections and that all the pins are there too and not loose. See if a dealer or forum member is nearby that will let you borrow one for a moment because that could be a quick fix. Just out of curiosity you might also try flipping into Mono or Cancel mode on the front switch and see if that changes anything. Mechanical switches could get flipped around (happened on a GMT to me) and you could be in Cancel when you think you are in DD mode. Unlikely, since Cancel would still pick that belt buckle looking thing up, but worth a quick try anyways to see if the other modes work by some chance.

Heard! Carrying and packing/repacking all that stuff every target can be a real test of patience. Appreciate you taking the time to make this one. Agree with Strick, footage looks real sharp. Good to see a video where I can hear the sounds.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, younger people are interested, they just don't hang out on Facebook or forums much, especially today. Forums especially seem to be retaining mostly older crowds. And Reg is right, most of the TV is consumed by 40 and over crowds these days. Youtube and even more so now, Instagram are where the younger crowd is. Even places like Reddit are getting younger by the month. Point of reference - when I bought my first gold detector in 2006 I think I was the youngest fairly consistent poster on the forums. 13 years later, I still feel as if that might be true and I'm 40 now. I've never in my life met a serious gold detectorist younger than me in the field in all that time. I never even met anyone within a decade of me until maybe 2014/5 or so. I've met Dave, Chris, Boulderdash and Lunk who I think are all in my general age range, but that's about it, in my entire career, and I lived full time for over 5 years in the field living (meagerly) off gold prospecting. Conversely, I have 35,000 subs on a Youtube channel (I have a prospecting related channel), so there is definitely interest from younger people. That is about the global subscriber base of ICMJ for comparison. Looking at demographics the majority are in the 25 to 45 range, though that number is slowly creeping up as I get older. I get young people telling me all the time they dream of doing something like this but can't afford it. In 1995 I bought my first coin detector at garage sale and my friends refused to be seen in public with me so I tossed it after a year of messing around. In 2003 or whatever year the Ace 250 came out I bought one and my college girlfriend was horrified anytime I'd use it around her in public. Last week I was getting my hair cut by a girl in her early 20's who was proud to tell me she owned and used a Ace 250. A few days ago in the park I saw some kids in their 20's drinking some brown bagged beers and taking turns on some no name detector. I had a kid come up to me at a grocery store in Arizona and say he liked my vids and really wished he could afford a gold detector but that he got a Bounty Hunter for coins. Things have changed in the coin/relic world, it's not nearly as uncool as it used to be. Coins/relics are everywhere. There isn't a detectable nugget within 1,000 miles of a lot of the US/Canada population though. Even if there were, the serious guys on Youtube are all using at least 4500's if not GPZ's now. People see that, want to use the same thing, feel hopelessly behind if they can't, and then see they are in for a $2500 ride or whatever a 4500 costs now and give up. A retiree can just buy a GPZ on a whim. That's why there is such an age discrepancy. Even at 40 I've had to pay for my 4500 and my 2 GPZ's via business loans, otherwise I'd still be detecting for coins. That arbitrary pricing in the detector world is offensively overinflated IMO, it's almost single handedly make me swear off any kind of collaboration with detector companies. And that's a big reason why few to no younger people join electronic prospecting while the coin/relic world is experiencing a boom probably not seen for decades. This Vanquish seems like it might be trying to address this general issue. But if it's what it sounds like, it may succeed in the coin/relic world, but it won't find anything but mediocre success in the gold world, for reasons I went over in the Garrett thread. No serious prospectors are going to be using this all day in most their videos. And Minelab doesn't seem to care about connecting with the prospecting related content creators anyways.

Wow... That signal was a screamer in HY, not that far from overload. If you are completely confident that you gridded that specific spot and that wasnt even a whisper with the stock coil then that's crazy impressive. Would be awesome to see a comparison of a signal like that if you happen to have a hunting buddy with a stock GPZ, or feel like switching coils for benefit of a vid. If it's that big a difference I for one would void my warranty and forget about resale value as that much difference can easily pay and more.

Awesome Bill! Please do report back. Fingers crossed the smaller coil cuts into the salt instead of making it worse. I have no guess either way, and have been hoping a brave soul would test it out. If you find it cuts the salt down quite a bit I'm going to have to reevaluate my no warranty-voiding decision post haste. And a lot of other people too I'm sure.

One the easiest ways to knock salt response down on a PI while still maintaining or increasing sensitivity to the sub 1 gram stuff is by using a smaller coil. I guess it remains to be seen if that holds true with ZVT or not yet.

You chose to follow it at some point, there is a box up top to the right of the topic title that says "follow" with the people's names who are following it, you can click that box, then click the red "unfollow" button in the new box that pops up, or select "do not receive notifications" if you are on mobile and if it doesn't give you the red button for some reason.

Nice stuff. I'm real curious to read a report about the differences in ground between there and Yuma, what sort of settings changes are necessary on the GPZ between the two.

Pegmatite w/schorl or pegmatitic granite.

He will be missed by many I'm sure. I'm glad we had a chance to speak a few times in email and always wished our paths would cross in the field, Jim seemed like a genuinely good person and a pioneer electronic prospector to boot.

Exceptional these days in AZ, I'm looking forward to hearing how you do in OZ.

Someone, please start another rumor about a GPZ software update or new coil quickly so I have something to look forward to again. If this infographic were true it would seem to be doing a lot at once. Pricing itself into the Simplex market, replacing the long in tooth Xterra without having to change coils to detect smaller gold, tapping into the massive success of river detecting (for relics/bullets) on Youtube where almost every one of the content creators uses a Garrett currently, and potentially replacing the long in tooth Excal too. It would seem like a good product to release from a business standpoint for Minelab. But almost certainly a snoozer for serious prospectors unless someone wants a cheap machine to bang around with in the water. Price would almost certainly have to be competitive with the Simplex otherwise it's hard to see any room in the market for this product today with the EQ 600 being the upper bound, though if it's entirely water proof that would add value. I guess that might be one positive - continuing the trend of decreasing prices. I can only hope someday they start selling something like the GPZ for what it should actually be going for today, which IMO is closer to $1999 max, and I don't see any reason that a machine like the GM1000 should be selling for more than $300 or maybe $400 max. If they really wanted to release a machine that got me excited about the prospect of a greenhorn being able to finally enter the electronic prospecting market, that would be it, and I'd even give up my GB2 finally and get one myself for that matter.

When I was in the oilfield I remember we often had to monitor solar activity and geomagnetic storms. Our MWD tools were sensitive to them, even downhole, the magnetometers would get skewed. It would alter the declination readings, which if I'm remembering correctly means that the local magnetic field of the Earth itself was slightly altered there too. It may be possible scientifically for the sun to have some effect on detectors too when the sun is out vs sun down, by the same token. Certainly less EMI too.

Uh. Minelab slow drips vague marketing intended to generate rumors for all their new machines straight into the social media vein like it's advertising steroids. See: the Equinox. What exactly do you expect? If one creates a monster, they had better be prepared to live with it. Also see: Vanquish video, clearly intended to generate rumor. Is it not Minelab's video? If not, no one has bothered to say so since it's getting free advertising for them either way.

Nice work guys. Chris seems to be getting real good at beating the veterans at final weigh out!

That would be awesome Dave, but with a handheld unit would it be possible to get anywhere close to that kind of useful resolution? Seems like it'd be hard to keep the coil perfectly parallel to the ground or not jiggle it during a normal swing, but maybe none of that matters with GPR? I have no idea about that stuff. To me, the perfect detector is perfectly quiet on everything except the target. No ground noise, no EMI, only target. If there is anything which could be easily improved on with the cheap, readily available microcontrollers today which have stuff like Fourier analysis built in already, it's in signal processing and noise reduction. So if I took a serious guess at whatever the next big improvement in the gold world would be, that would be it. It's doable and within reach. That's also why I still have hopes the GPZ can just be firmware updated since so much of this processing can be done in software today, I'm guessing they had the foresight to put a beefy MCU in the main board to future proof it at least a little since even a good one is like $25 vs $10 for an ok one. Who knows what this Vanquish is. But that's my guess for the future of gold detecting. And maybe discrimination and a bit more depth as we're seeing with the X Coils already being possible.

There are certain places with certain types of gold where a person would be wasting their time without using the latest and greatest, which is currently a GPZ. It's not like in the past where the difference between a 4500 and a 5000 meant less than the operator experience and skill. In some places this isn't the case, but there are plenty here in the US. Now to be clear, there isn't a single thing in this entire thread relating to a new prospecting machine which isn't entirely unfounded rumor with zero sourcing. But these threads are for fun. There is always a lot of speculation come 3 or 4 years after the release of a prior machine, and always will be. It's fun to speculate and discuss things. If a person is of the opinion that they can keep using what they have and it will do just as well as anything else then there isn't much use reading or posting in a thread about potential new equipment now, is there? I can't help but notice the various sub forums related to the 5000 and prior are pretty dead these days though. Forums are for discussion, and the unknown is always an interesting topic.

If any other company would make an concerted effort to understand the millions in free advertising they are passing up via implied endorsement on Youtube then Garrett would be on the same path as Tesoro took. I don't think it's intentional marketing that is floating them, their users showed them a roadmap and they are just on cruise control following it now. Very few of these content creators do any real prospecting, so I doubt a innovative prospecting machine is high on their list as of yet, especially with so much competition from Minelab in that arena. From what I see, their products didn't succeed because of performance, I think they succeeded in the mass market because they are affordable and the average viewer can have one via Amazon prime tomorrow. Because they are easy to use and learn. And because they all look more or less the same. If I buy an Ace 250 it looks about like the AT Pro the guy I follow on Youtube is using. Not like a toy model of the Starship Enterprise like say a Go Find. These things don't require innovation or increasing performance, they just require keeping cruise control on and letting others do the work for your platform that found success in mediocrity already. Low effort, low expense, high profit, a company can't ask for more ideal conditions. Until other cars get on the same road with a faster engine anyways, as Klunker alludes to.

Or if they signed non disclosure agreements, someone could be feeding spurious information at a conference full of moles and leaky sieves in order to weed out the leakers. What were your 2 dealers names again? If on the other hand they didn't sign such agreements then they should be willing to step forward surely and be the first to the market with all this hotly anticipated info.

I really hope it's not true. The GPZ to me represented the end of the "new $5k machine every 4 years" cycle. If we've simply moved from that to "new $10k machine every 4 years" instead, then I'll move on and find some other way to do the things I need to do after I finish with my GPZ this winter because that would be my personal bridge too far. If a replacement was in the works it sure would be a great time to rush to release a coil which only works on the machine which is about to be replaced though, before a lot of people stop using said machine. JP called the move "greedy" and implied the coils were not ready for production yet in another thread, with no real reasons given for the greed comment. This would certainly be a reason. I hope JP comes here to deny that line of conspiratorial thinking. ? I won't believe any rumors until I see the machine itself though. All in good fun talking now and that's about it.

Or functionally combining the CTX with the Excalibur 2 or something. The trend is making things do more than one task at once, which the description also alludes to. I just figure if it had to do with gold at all it not be replacing the GPZ, but augmenting or replacing what people use the GPX series for in civil war battle fields, beach jewlery/treasure hunting etc, with some capability for gold potentially too since that series seems to be at the end of it's shelf life anyways. From Minelab of all manufacturers, I kinda feel like we should be past the basic old school VLF thing at this stage, and it should be some fancier new acronyms. Unless it's targeted at the lower price ranges. They usually lead the market with their new releases with something at least somewhat new or novel that isn't in the market yet. Unless it's Go-Find level stuff for the entry level market.

Sounds more like a GPX replacement to me from their "about" description and the tones indicate some kind of discrimination so maybe it's a new detector using new tech found in the 7000 or the EQ instead of pure PI, I can't keep track of all their acronyms these days. Something you can use gold prospecting or on the beach for jewelry or looking for civil war bullets. If it replaced the aging GPX series entirely you might even say it "vanquished" it. ? "For Metal Detecting, water hunting, relic hunting and treasure hunting" from their About section. Gold is a "metal" if one wanted to be vague I suppose and let people interpret it a thousand ways. It could also just be a Go-Find replacement that might also incorporate some prospecting ability. Which would actually be pretty cool since a lot of younger new people who would otherwise love to start electronic prospecting are turned away by the utter lack of an affordable machine that is decent at gold too. There seems to be 3 names out there at various locations oddly, Vanquish, Victory, and Vantage, maybe there are 3 price points in a series of 3 machines with increasing functionality? Each word being a somewhat stronger version of the last. Who knows, just dipping my toes into the guessing game like everyone else. I thought this topic would be relegated to the non-gold sections of the forum by now though, so I figured I'd actually look into it since it seems to be staying here. Drip. Drip. Drip.

AFON: I haven't addressed the 80% thing directly on my channel (USMiner), it was just some numbers I was randomly using or guessing at roughly to demonstrate a different way of looking at prospecting, and that there are cases where it pays to not dig it all. I'll grid and dig everything just like everyone else when the situation calls for it though. The way I look at it is kinda like the progression a lot of us went through when we first started running a sluice. At first we try to meticulously save every color, with tweezers if needed, maybe feed a little recirculator with a spoon for fear of one tiny speck going out the other end. And eventually you get to the point cleaning out your dredge 5 years later where you are tossing 100 colors out your pan back into the river because the time to clean them up is better spent doing something more productive. Of course it's not really exactly the same since you might miss a lunker somewhere when it comes to detecting nuggets, but it's a risk I am willing to take especially since I do eventually end up back gridding when times are lean. For the same reason, I probably spend more time wandering around looking for specific types of dirt or specific geology or topography, or just for signs of old timers than I do swinging a coil when I'm prospecting, even if there is no trash around. Which is kinda taking the "don't dig everything" philosophy to the extreme and not even detecting at all now. Because while gold can certainly be anywhere, it seems to me that 80% of the time (random guess again) the better patches are somewhere close to an area that "looks right" to me so I just scout for them and pass over huge tracts of land that previously I would have spent weeks detecting. I probably miss a lot of 1 off nuggets or small patches, but I'm cool with that. Doesn't hurt that I actually like exploring and hitting rocks with hammers more than swinging a heavy coil all day too. That said, there does seem to be a point where someone just starting should dig everything no matter what, for a time. That's the only way to figure out what "looks right" in terms of what produces nuggets when they reach the point where it pays to stop digging everything and start covering more ground later. *PS, if trying this approach I find it essential to keep all your tracks recorded on a GPS and a main database of them on Google Earth or similar. I recently lost a card that held a ton of my old tracks from 2008 to 2015 and it really made things difficult in places I had left incomplete to revisit later. Think of exploration like macro gridding. Find a place you are interested in with good geology then systematically cover it, maybe an area 25 miles square, the same way you'd cover a patch 100 meters square. Keeping GPS tracks is essential in my book. When you find a productive area you can also use your tracks to make sure you've not missed any tiny washes or other productive zones that are easy to miss on the ground.

Sorry Flak I think I inadvertently implied you were a new guy. My second response was just addressed to the ether - anyone in general interested in reading or discussing it as I think it's an interesting topic. I know you've been swinging a coil since before I even knew what one was. ? I think your questions are good questions. And detecting in a field of AR bullets, casings, and fragments can definitely make one start asking a lot of questions, man been there.

Awesome Andy, sounds like you earned that one! Nice work being tenacious and changing your sleep schedule to get some hunting done in the off season, paid off.