phrunt

Yep, Aliexpress with Paypal is the go, I've bought hundreds of things over the years, especially little electronic bits and pieces and it's all been good, they have a good disputes process too so if your stuff never arrives or arrives faulty you get a refund. You could use two singles if you had to.

at least you're famous 🙂

That's really cool you made it onto Pawn Stars with it! I thought he came in low on the price though.

SMD in terms of electronics is a surface mount device. and SMT is surface mount technology, so that battery box is designed to be soldered down directly to a PCB. You could solder onto the mounts if you had to. You could try AliExpress, this one contains dimensions so you could see if your batteries will fit. This one also gives dimensions, but there are hundreds of them on there. You could just use solder battery tabs and something like this and hardwire the batteries.

Hopefully it works well for you, it's worked nicely with everything I've thrown at it, although bad ground isn't really my specialty, it handled salty ground well, and handles hot rocks as good as the GPX 5000 from my experimenting so far, yet you don't need to dumb it down like the 5000 to handle the hot rocks, it handles them in ultra fine for me. You may need to drop back to fine mode if the soil is too bad. Just keep dropping down the modes until it handles the ground, knowing you'll lose some tiny gold sensitivity doing so, although not that much. You can play around with it in your house to get the feel for it, something other PI's can't really do.

The Garretts aren't Bluetooth, they're their own form of 2.4GHz wireless, the ML80's are Bluetooth LL so they're fine for using on a BT transmitter. The Garrett headphones would need their own Z-Lynk transmitter to work.

Sounds similar to the other 2.4 GHz wireless transmitter/receiver combos on the market.

What is it you didn't like Jeff, I've never used their MS-3 headphones, could it be specific to your hearing or likely a general audio quality issue? I ask because often people have different hearing, and as we age certain tones are far harder to hear than others. I'm not a big headphone person at all though, I prefer the speaker.

True, they do use more power to have colour.

That would require an entirely different screen, no can do.

I believe you've mentioned this in another thread and were told the VLF's cause far less interference than PI's so don't exhibit problems with 2.4GHz wireless systems like maybe experienced with a PI. I would not be surprised if the audio with Z-lynk on the Vortex is near flawless being a VLF. The Minelab GPZ which is the most expensive detector around drops out with its 2.4GHz WM12 wireless audio it's supplied with unless you wear it on the side the detector is on and even then, it's hit and miss how stable the audio is, very small range to have stable audio, to get around this I just use a Bluetooth Low latency transmitter and forget about the built in wireless, it then lets me use whatever Bluetooth headphones or speakers I want and can upgrade Bluetooth versions as they come and go with a new transmitter without a care in the world about proprietary devices. Z-Lynk is fast, very fast, so if it works well on the Vortex, it's a good option.

Their point of difference is trying to make a machine very user friendly, not a complicated machine at all, and I'm sure a big part of the market will appreciate that, adding a couple of features won't change that, the screen as they say is very capable of displaying anything they want so they can add changes very easily without key combinations and complicated submenus.

That works well for some customers but I'm betting a lot of them out there won't feel comfortable doing an update, they'd prefer it came with it. I would think generally most on a forum are competent enough on computers to do updates but you can bet there are plenty out there that won't or can't, many won't even have a computer to do them on. Garrett likely just wants to flash them all up to the new firmware before shipping, I can understand their reasoning behind that.

It just keeps getting better. I had a hunch they'd add something like this at some point, Nokta had a similar launch whereby they were insisting iron bias wasn't required, it got quite heated for a bit there and now of course they have it. Garrett is responding to user requirements even before release, delaying release to ensure they're ready, can't complain about that. By putting a proper screen on it suitable for updates like this they don't need to deal with the mess of configuration combination hold this button and that button and access secret menu stuff other detectors have had to deal with, a good move on Garretts part.

Here is another video I took yesterday of mild mode running