phrunt

I'm glad you're all OK Mitchel, I've seen some of Santa Monica is now in evacuation orders, I can't forget your spot as I have it on a t-shirt that's getting a fair bit of use 🙂 Your wife is a very determined person when it comes to gold, she puts in the effort. The 15" CC is very capable of hitting down to 0.03 of a gram, in my mild soil anyway in normal, this was filmed at the same spot just a bit further along nearer to the entrance from the road from where I took you for your second day detecting. After the 8", 15" and Nox went to that particular spot I've not been able to find anything else with the 6000.

Got to love those security chips! No other part of the Goldhawks would be causing issues with supply. NF and Coiltek have been dropping legacy GPX coils for a while now, slowly supplying less and less models. If you look at Coiltek's Elite series, flagships for the GPX I'd say 3 of the 6 models are recently discontinued. X-coils discontinued all their legacy GPX coils a year or two ago. Hopefully NF reinstates some of their coils as MK2 models as new pickings are getting pretty slim for the GPX, Detech is still going strong though. Perhaps they just don't sell enough anymore to justify making them and would rather focus on the coils selling well. That's mostly why X-coils dropped them, big sales of GPZ and slow sales of GPX.

Hopefully detectors like the Algoforce, the newly well priced Axiom and the pending Nokta will drive prices down and they'll release a model competitive with them, especially if based upon the GPX 5000 modernized, I'd like that. Sadly, I can't include the Fisher Impulse gold in that, it never saw the light of day but may have helped move the process along had it come out. I just can't believe they'll leave this segment of the market alone and only go to the high end; with VLF they've been aggressively fighting for the low end giving better tech at much cheaper prices to hold market share. They just have to answer Algoforce, they got a black eye from that one being an ex-employee and they've done what they can do to local dealers who chose to sell it. I think we are more likely to see a product to deal with that more than an 8000, they're seeing all the hundreds of sales Algoforce is getting, maybe thousands I don't know, always sold out so hard to judge, sales they could have had. This could be the beginning of the end of their crazy pricing structure in PI at least, ZVT is holding its own for deeper targets and very competitive with PI on tiny targets, they can distance it quite easily to remain at the top across the board with modernization of the hardware, lightening it up and providing better coils and keep the pricing high, and the 6000 can stay high for a while being the best on the market in PI's unless they find they're losing too many sales to the other brands. No new patents showing up, if releases are this near it's likely existing technology, a GPX 5500 and a multi frequency Gold Monster is my guess.

I didn't think the American's may not realize that, it's based upon the Australian tax year not the year itself although Americans seem more logical having their tax year be the actual year.

Bruce Candy holds the vital 7000 patents and is still with Minelab. One of the likely many 6000 engineers is now Algoforce. Investor reports said nothing new was coming until FY26 but that could just be the long awaited Gold Monster replacement or another VLF line, no way to know. Codan 2024 Investor Report Is Out - Minelab Metal Detectors - DetectorProspector.com I don't have high hopes for an 8000 any time soon, it will be more interesting what the other manufacturers do in the meantime and if that forces Minelab to act in some way. It's probably wise to let peoples wallets fatten back up again after the 6000 release before pumping out a new model and with such long product lifecycles it's likely too soon yet. 6000 sales need to slow to a crawl. It's handy they have no competition for the 7000 so there is no rush.

This is why I think the GPX 6000 has improved ground balance, as it gives depths I would expect with GB turned off. I think they've done a great job with the 6000's GB. The 7000 has brilliant GB too in the way it can handle just about anything you throw at it, but I'm sure people stuck using difficult would love to get some of the performance people in normal can get so if they can narrow that gap it would be awesome for those people but as Ron pointed out, not something that would be encouraging me to upgrade as I can already get the benefits of normal. It's also why I think GB can be improved on many detectors, as in mild soils simply enabling it shouldn't cause such a noticeable performance drop. I would expect to be able to enable it, balance to the mild soil and it perform similar to having it disabled. It should be saying oh hell, this guy has super mild soil, I'll adjust myself so he can get maximum performance with minimal ground balance operating. On VLF this problem doesn't exist, it's a PI thing.

Leave it as it is, don't mess around trying to clean it.

That's what I was getting at, people in bad ground are saying the 6000 for them has little to no difference between normal and difficult, and for me in mild ground I'm seeing the same thing with very little performance drop in difficult, however if I switch to difficult on the GPZ I see a dramatic performance loss compared to running in normal, If they can narrow that gap with the 7000 like they have with the 6000 that would be a good improvement for those in bad soil, what is holding back difficult compared to normal? My guess is ground balance. When you use VLF as an example, I have long enjoyed single frequency VLF's for great depth in my mild soils, especially low frequency ones on coins, yet it wasn't until multi frequency came along that inherently handles bad ground better people in tougher conditions noticed the depth improvements, why was this? better ground handling of course, the better the detector handles the ground the more depth it achieves. With engineers saying physics has limited the depth of detectors and very early models can achieve the depths of the most modern detectors in the right conditions then that clearly demonstrates the weak point is how well they handle the ground. With VLF the best depth is achieved with an air test, surprisingly closely followed by mild ground, the worse the ground gets the less depth achieved to a point where there is virtually no depth in terrible ground, it's safe to assume PI and ZVT is no different, improving ground balancing is the key to more depth, if possible, of course. I rightly or wrongly associate it with ground balance as in difficult it has better ground handling yet worse performance even in mild ground where the ground handling doesn't matter, I see a similar thing with the 5000 and this is where my association comes from, if I disable ground balance entirely or go into coin and relic timing I can get a dramatic depth increase over the other timings, so with my limited understanding that means the ground balance is hindering performance and an area that can be improved upon. Same goes for the Algoforce which is why I pushed for a way to disable ground balance, there was a major jump in performance across the board with it disabled using its ZeroGB mode in my mild ground. I'm sure everyone would love to be running around in Coin and Relic, Sharp or Normal, what's stopping them? Their ground, is it the more ground balance involved the worse the detector performs? Then, if ground handling was improved it would be positive for everyone, how possible is it? I don't know, it's well above the pay grade of everyone in this discussion. The 6000 seems to do a pretty good job of narrowing the gap between normal and difficult, although as they say no free lunch, its hyper sensitivity has lit up hot rocks which means severe ground. Don't throw all your eggs into one basket, save some for the next model. Happy to be corrected, just my observations

The performance difference between difficult and normal on the 6000 is quite small, demonstrating they've really got the 6000's ground balance working incredibly well. With the 7000 the difference is vast, difficult really cuts performance over normal; this is where I can see improvement taking place, that and of course more modern coil designs like they took on with the 6000 using flat windings instead of the old bundle which are also used in the original GPZ coils. It's well proven the GPZ works very well with flat windings and can be very sensitive to small targets, Minelab can no doubt improve on this further with the 8000. I'm sure the 8000's coils will be an area of big change and they will have small, medium and large options. Where I can see them struggling is making it worth the upgrade for people like me that have a 7000 with a bunch of coils and a 6000 with its very high pricing as the performance improvement I don't expect to be all that much, however it's a top of the line detector, and is likely just going to be mostly upgraded to by the most serious of prospectors with good gold to be found to justify the purchase. I don't think I will be buying one.

That's what I was thinking, probably know some loophole to keep it active longer or provide some other benefit by renewing it all the time unnecessarily, they probably have a few full-time people looking after this stuff, it's what keeps the competitors away 🙂 ZVT is the last hope they have to stay on top in the gold area, PI is now becoming far more competitive and they won't hold top dog in PI forever I think, once they hit a stage where its hard to get any improvement the others then have time to catch up. I remember when the Equinox came out, I thought that was it, Minelab owns VLF, then XP came along with the Deus 2, and Nokta the Legend which pipped the Equinox. The Manticore is a tweaked-up Equinox which XP is still very competitive with and the Legend will eventually be a tweaked up Legend 2. Once competitors catch up it's increasingly hard to stay ahead. Unless they come up with something entirely new, I believe ZVT is the future, and it has a lot of potential.

yea, something has been going on with the original patent where it says it was abandoned, so it just looks like it's been refiled under a new number. Same old patent though. They seem to refile it every few years. US20220390643A1 - Constant current metal detector with driven transmit coil - Google Patents I don't understand this stuff though. Application US17/888,081 events 2008-06-27 Priority claimed from AU2008903280A 2009-06-29 Priority claimed from PCT/AU2009/000836 2011-06-17 Priority claimed from PCT/AU2011/000738 2012-12-19 Priority claimed from US13/720,828 2014-03-26 Priority claimed from US14/225,908 2022-08-15 Application filed by Minelab Electronics Pty Ltd 2022-08-15 Priority to US17/888,081 2022-12-08 Publication of US20220390643A1 2023-07-17 Priority to US18/353,711 2024-06-07 Priority to US18/737,833 Status Abandoned

It may explain why he made one of the most well balanced nicest to swing detectors ever made, to this day I still think his T2 design is the best to swing, although quite heavy by today's standards it just works so well and is a real pleasure to swing. Such a loss to not only those that knew him but the metal detecting community in general, and by the sounds of it the ALS sufferers also. He achieved far more than most, his family should be proud, a great person.

I sympathise midalake, some detectors just suit conditions, I'd fight to the death the CTX is the best detector for me for coin hunting where I choose to hunt, yet others would argue its well behind their favoured machine, we are likely both right and I know from experience. I live in a country of extremes, we have it all, super mild soils even with SOME gold fields that VLF's dont even need to ground balance and we can find tiny gold, yet super-hot soils too, the blackest of black sands, salty inland areas, the works. I've been to places where a the 5000 can't balance even with a DD and is lucky to get an inch or two on targets, where the Nox overloads and struggles to hit surface targets. Aussies who think I know nothing about bad soils have no idea what they're talking about, we have worse than they have by a long shot. I've detected places my Nox is impossible to use, not just difficult, impossible. We have volcano's galore and a super volcano that makes Yellowstone seem tame, Taupo is the most active super volcano in the world, and had the biggest eruption in recent history with the biggest eruption in the last 5000 years. A typical New Zealand North Island black sand beach I may often talk about how lucky I am to detect in mild conditions, but I certainly know what bad conditions are, and have tried and failed to detect in them with various detectors. I'm lucky I can choose to detect elsewhere 🙂 Tarsacci had a short-lived life in NZ, the local dealer advertised a NZ specific coil for it to handle the black sand beaches, those that bought it thought otherwise, and it was short lived and the dealer no longer has them. Interesting thread on it Our worst black sand beaches are said to be made up of 82% magnetite, 8% Iron Oxide, 8% Titanium, Silica, Manganese, Vanadium, and Phosphorous. The NZ dealer has some Tarsacci coils left he's trying to get rid of on clearance, telling you they're good away from the black sand beaches. They killed detectors, full stop regardless of any marketing attempts.

Keep in mind the Target ID isn't like a VLF, it's a conductivity ID, the higher the conductivity the higher the number so iron can come up higher numbers too, it's only useful if you know the ID number the target will come up as, lead pellets for example, 00, and a $1 NZ coin is for example 65, and that 65 is very accurate to good depth, ID is better than most VLF's if not all but you need to know the number of the target you're chasing. If you have good ears you could know the tone or near enough to it of the $1 coin and cherry pick it by tone using the screen to verify although the right size and shape iron target could be a 65 too. The thing that makes it so good is how accurate and stable it is.

The blade is ever so slightly magnetic, it's made of stainless steel as it has that stamped into it in tiny writing saying "stainless" The other metal which is at the front there where the blade goes in is a goldish colour is also inside below the wood and the pins holding the wood on are also that metal, it is non-ferrous and won't stick to my magnet. I'm unsure the age, it's the first pocket knife I've had since I was in my teens when my mother brought a genuine top of the line Swiss Army knife back from Switzerland for me, I refused to go on that trip, silly of me now I think back on it. Sadly, that Swiss Army knife was stolen from me when I had it in the center console of my car parked in the Brisbane city centre in Australia as some clown broke in and stole my toll road coins from the glove box, my pocket knife and car stereo. So this will be my new replacement pocket knife, it has some value to me as I found it, first target EVER with my Vortex. I don't remember if I had iron audio on at the time, it came up a nice solid 71 on the ID's though, was just in a little bush sitting on the rocks, not buried, maybe washed down the river in a flood, the river floods a few times a year.