phrunt

The v1 coils are more sensitive, without a doubt, the v2's handle ground better, to me it makes no difference as I'm in milder soils.so I'd not have any interest in using a v2 coil. If I was in mineralised ground, I'm sure I would appreciate and benefit from the v2 coils and greatly benefit from them being less sensitive. In bad ground less sensitive means better performance. In my opinion the biggest flaw with everything detectors are they make things work for everyone, people in mild soils suffer for those that are in difficult ground. Coils are an example of this I know personally first-hand being given prototype coils that would never have a hope of working in bad ground but wow, the performance they can give in mild ground is impressive, if they were sold as "general purpose" coils they would flop, as many owners mostly in bad ground would say they're terrible however owners in milder ground would be singing their praises. Manufacturers tend to take the middle road, products that will work in everything. I personally would label products to suit conditions, for mild soils I'd have a range suitable for the inert ground, for mineralized ground I'd have another range, the problem is consumers are not all that clued up and would buy the wrong coil hoping for the better results. The problem is this complicates the process, there is a reason Minelab are making their detectors as user friendly as possible, with everything completely automated, turn on and go...... You see it across all detectors from all brands, why can they run in full sensitivity, and I cannot? My detector or coil must be faulty. Most manufacturers make their detectors run at maximum sensitivity and run stable, why? it makes them look good, to the savvy user, this is a massive letdown. I want a detector I have no hope of running in maximum sensitivity even in the mildest EMI free area, I don't want to ever be able to max out my detector. If I can do that, my detector isn't meeting my needs. Gloating about running max sensitivity in the best timings isn't a positive, it means the detector isn't good enough. I run my GPZ in High Yield / Normal / Maximum sensitivity with the 8" coil all the time, when doing so all I think is the technology can improve a lot, I shouldn't be able to do this. Manufacturers have come to the conclusion it's better to restrict sensitivity than to leave it wide open as the general user base believes unless they can run it maxed out, they're losing performance, when often less is more. Automatic cars vs manuals come to mind. The Axiom and the Manticore have gone to the "red line" on this, and who knows if that's beneficial for them or not, to some educated users it's great, to others which seems the majority they complain they can't run in high sensitivity settings.

I've waited multiple months for a reply from them previously however one eventually came, my last two emails to them many months ago sometime near the start of the year went unanswered. Great coils, customer service can be a little lacking especially communication. I have no idea about their junk filters they're using however whenever emails never get answered it's always a possibility. A very public email address like their own must often be flooded with junk mail. Might be an idea to try email them again from a different email address and hope for the best.

With no built-in wireless is there much they would even need to do? When I read FCC reports on detectors its always all about the wireless audio transmitter.

With you owning the 8" I see no need for the 10", too close of a coil, the 15x10" DOD sounds a reasonable choice for your needs, especially if the spirals have trouble in your soil, although a lot of the spirals are now v2 which are slightly less sensitive than the v1 spirals, but they handle the bad ground better. The 10" is only very slightly less sensitive than the 8", they've pushed the limits of the GPZ's potential on small targets. The 12" spiral is a bit of a sleeper, not enough people own that being so close in size to the stock coil but it's a killer coil, I think it has all the sensitivity of the 8" coil with more ground coverage and depth. It's now a v2 coil, I have the original and the v2, I prefer the original for its extra sensitivity but if its noisy in ground like yours the v2 is likely a better performing coil. I prefer the v1 spirals as I have mild soils, but I'm sure people in worse soils appreciate the v2 coils although plenty seem to get away with using the original v1's with no issues in their ground across Australia but seeing you're finding you have to wind back the sensitivity with your v1 17x12" you likely would have to do so with every v1 spiral.

You just disable the wireless in your GPZ (Saves battery) and plug this into the back headphone port on the GPZ Avantree Relay | Bluetooth Adapter for Airplanes A very good combination for the GPZ.

I've not used any of their bundle DOD coils except the two small ones that are bundle DOD because they have to be to fit the windings in, the 8" and 10". I have the 15x10" spiral and it's very close to the 10" in sensitivity because the 15x10" is spiral and the 10" bundle, I believe offering a bit more depth and obviously more ground coverage, the bundle DOD version won't be as sensitive as the spiral version though. I've not had any interest in the larger DOD coils preferring the spirals, DOD's are more suited to people with very bad ground which I don't have, and I want the best small gold sensitivity I can get being in an area that really requires that. Think of the stock 14x13" coil vs the NF 12" which are both bundle DOD's , and reduce its size in your head to the 15x10" and that's about the performance you'll get I would think with the added sensitivity towards the tip and tail of being elliptical. I like the 15x10" form factor for its ground coverage while still maintaining pretty good small gold sensitivity being only 10" wide.

I wonder what price it would have to reach before Reg Wilson would make the effort to bend over to pick up a subgram "flake" 🙂

That exists in the way of a Bluetooth dongle, just ignore their built in wireless and use your own dongle, problem solved. It's nothing to do with programming languages, it's the Bluetooth modules configuration, basically the headphones handshake to the detector's Bluetooth module, and to do so they require authentication, much like a password, on their devices the authentication is included in the product so they can connect to the detector, 3rd party headphones try connecting without having this authentication password and can't connect, but they may not connect even if they did if they're not capable of the settings running on the detector with the bitrate configured. You may have noticed on some Bluetooth devices you have to enter default password like 0000 for them to connect, same thing except the ML products auto-authenticate. There are a few reasons they could have done this, one is so we only buy their equipment, they have a track record of liking that approach, another possibility is the bitrate, as detectorists we want a very low latency to assist with finding targets accurately, LE's default latency isn't ideal so what they can do as part of the handshake is have the bitrate pre-configured to a lower rate on the headphones and detector, this affects sound quality a little but makes the audio really fast. I doubt detector audio would be a case where the lower quality audio would be noticed but it does majorly improve latency. Generic LE headphones will want to connect at the bitrate they're designed for, which is very unlikely to be a low bitrate due to the audio quality being less, they're designed for listening to music more than anything. I give Minelab the benefit of the doubt on this one that it was done for audio latency as they're no longer using aptX Low Latency which was a standard codec we could buy any aptX LL compatible headphones to use due to it basically being discontinued they had to move on, and this was the best path to take. Phasetech's post here is an interesting one in why ML may want you using their headphones more than generic music headphones too.

No wonder you make such good prospecting picks with all this experience on the tools. I spend winter skiing and summer is my detecting time with the odd exception detecting in winter although coin hunting can be good in winter in some spots with the softer soil and no damage to the grass, you'll see the brown ground below in this spring video which is why I avoid coin hunting when the grass is dry as I don't want to cause a mess and problems being able to detect spots in the future by damaging the ground. I spend my winters skiing down mountains and my summers walking up them with a detector in hand. Late spring to early summer the grass is greener and safer for coin hunting. While skiing I'm often looking down on prospecting locations and thinking about the finds I'd made down below. Ski fields are also outstanding detecting locations in summer after the snow melts, especially under lifts and around the base building/cafe area. Rings come off with glove removal, and mighty big stacks help with stuff in pockets being lost, if it sinks into the snow it's gone until summer, so beginner areas are great for finding stuff as they stack the most. People are constantly removing gloves on lifts to use their phone, and the touch screens don't work with gloves on. I've seen stuff dropped under lifts that I say to myself I''ll go back and get in summer, some stuff is dropped but the person who dropped it has no hope of skiing to where it was lost, so they have to accept the loss, the next time it snows a few days later it is gone until the melt, that's if it doesn't sink straight away. A last-minute decision on the last day of skiing for the season was to make a video of the day, I was so ill prepared I had to try charge the action camera on the drive to and up the mountain in the car, it hadn't been used in a year, it didn't get enough charge to last so I turned off the microphone which gives it a fair bit longer runtime. Stats are a little out of whack as we all often forget our phones that record them, particularly my 13yr old daughter who only has a phone to record her stats and never uses it otherwise. For anyone bored here's the video, shows some of the skiing in NZ and the land below where gold can be found. The video was done with the action camera on my daughter's helmet.

I once dropped an open gold bottle on the carpet in my house, you can imagine, NZ tiny gold, carpet. Bad mix.... I lost quite a bit.

How you find these things I don't know 🙂 I see the guy in the video is using an X-coil, looks like the 15" CC to me. The guy with the 6000 looks to be having a bit of trouble.

You should start a detector museum; you've got a great collection.

I'm in those ideal conditions of clean soil with very low mineralization and the bigger the coil the better for me, some detectors plateau and bigger coils don't make much difference, the T2 was an example of this for me where buying the 15" coil was a pointless exercise as I barely got a centimeter more depth over the mid-size coils for some reason. I didn't have the boost version which is said to improve upon detecting in longer grass and overcoming the air gap problem some detectors seem to have. The Nox also doesn't seem to like an air gap so didn't work as well in long grass for me as the CTX does, the Manticore seems to be fine with the air gap of long grass like the CTX still finding the deeper targets. The Manticore and Nox both benefitted from their 15x12" coils over the 11" for depth so I expect they may give more depth with the 18" in my environment, I've had a bit of trouble buying an 18" for my Manticore with no access to buy it locally and I never bought the one for my Nox 800 as the CTX was significantly deeper with its 17x13" coil on the silver coins I was chasing. I intend to get the 18" for the Manticore soon and now have a path to buying it sorted out by Coiltek directly so should be able to report back in how I'm going with it. I think it's going to be excellent for my conditions and the Manticore seems the right detector to buy it for with it's obvious to me extra depth over the Nox.

yep, here's an example of it happening where a guy's coil failed on him, I've seen a few people have the problem over the past few years. It's why I said Minelab would need the original coil to prove it was caused by it and not an aftermarket coil, as it's the exact same problem, exact same message, exact same fault. Out of warranty you'd be all out of luck. Jin on this forum is an example of a person that had the original soldering fail inside their GPZ's cord on the plug end that goes into the detector, it was causing stability issues but fortunately didn't short out on him, if it did, he'd be in the same boat as this guy. Here is an original GPZ coil where the soldering failed that was able to be resoldered and repaired. Out of these cables I bought from faulty coils from a dealer in WA, one had failed at the coil plug end so was not able to be used for the purpose I hoped without being repaired.

yes, it's a shame that as early adopters and experimenters with the coils we had a mishap with the GPZ, repair cost of about $1800 USD too, but they were early days and it wasn't overly known at the time the results of incorrect wiring, now with more knowledge and experience and preventing customers making their own adapters that problem is fortunately a thing of the past, thousands of coils out in the hands of users now without a single mishap with the professionally made adapters. It's not the coils that would cause damage it was incorrectly made adapters, Aussies are lucky they have a highly experienced guy there making their adapters now and he's made a crazy number of the things without a single mishap. It was a mistake at the start offering instructions how to make adapters though, and in our case we didn't even have that, just a picture with some foreign writing on it and some numbers showing how to wire it and it didn't go to plan, all part of being experimental at the time, I don't think you could even buy the coils at that time they were just test coils. For you in the USA without someone making adapters with a lot of experience making them, I wouldn't use them either. X-coils make every type of coil you can think of, not just Concentrics, you hear the most about them as they're the most popular coils, but yes, they make spirals, semi spirals, bundle coils, mono, the lot, they are the only brand that's made spiral DOD (Super D) coils for the GPZ too as the NF and Standard are just bundle coils, and the Concentrics have been done in bundle and spiral but the spirals of the Concentrics are superior. The good thing is X-coils are real innovators of coil technology, much like Coiltek, Detech and Nugget Finder have been too, and that ends up indirectly benefitting people that don't even use the particular brand of coil, as in the end other brands even the detector manufacturers may end up using techniques these coil innovators come out with. The coils themselves don't void the warranty on the GPZ, Minelab can't void your warranty for using one, at least in Australia and NZ, not sure about US laws but it would be crazy if they could. They can only void your warranty if the damage to your detector is caused directly by using the coil, such as the coil shorts out and damages your detector, and that's not different I would think if you're using a NF coil that does the same thing. The stock GPZ coils aren't immune to that either, I've seen a few now that the stock coils failed and taken out the detector with it, however ML do the right thing in that scenario and if the detectors still under warranty they cover it whereas with an aftermarket coil they don't need to. They'll know the part on the PCB that fails when a coil fails, and unless you can provide them with the genuine coil that has the fault that would cause that problem then they will be weary of the cause, they'd have the replace the faulty coil and repair the detector. Woodys in the same situation with his 6000 adapters he's doing in these videos if he starts making them for people to use their older coils on the 6000, They can't void the 6000's warranty for using an older GPX coil on it if it fails like the screen or speaker dies, unless the coil or adapter ends up being the reason for the 6000's failure, although I'd probably be just as worried about the 6000 failing by its own quality issues than by the adapter/coils being connected to it as long as made by someone capable like Woody. The problem Minelab face is how do they know 100% if people were using something that caused it.... I've had warranty on my GPZ twice, but none of my problems were associated with coils so it was easy for them in this case, one was my WM12 and the other my shaft clip, you can bet they know my detector uses aftermarket coils so they'd have more scrutiny with mine if the detector itself failed checking to see if they can void it somehow 🙂It's just out of warranty now I think anyway.