phrunt

A new model is going to have to do a lot more than be lighter with some minor benefits, if it doesn't all it will do is drive up the sales of aftermarket coils for those who have waited out buying them in hope a new model comes out that's significantly better. I just don't see a new GPZ coming anytime soon. I'd love to be wrong, but I doubt I am. It will either be good and I'd want to own one, although I doubt,I'll be buying it as it will be another very overpriced detector for someone in my position with little gold to be found or it will be not as good as many hope and drive-up sales of aftermarket coils for the 7000. The 6000 already increased the sales of GPZ aftermarket coils, a new 7000 is going to do the same. People think do I invest another 10+ grand (Australian) on a new detector for some better performance, or a couple of grand (Australian) on my existing one and it also gets better performance for a lot less money, how close it is to the new detector is what we will have to wait and see, they may just wait until the 6000 and 7000's are all old in another 5 or 6 years and release it then, that way it's just a new model not needing to be that much better performing as people are looking to replace older detectors with problems anyway, and it can have all the modern lightweight features and whatever Bluetooth is around at the time, and better screens, batteries and whatever else other industries invent to improve the product.

yes, it can help with lead shot, for that very reason. As long as the gold in the area gives a better response than a little lead pellet you'll know the difference as it will number higher You will miss gold that reports the same as the lead shot though, although that's very small gold.

They worked out their 6000 coils fail too much so what better way than to have less warranty returns on them than give people a free Coiltek with their 6000 purchase. 😛

Your 6000 will beat it on depth on the small gold.

Yes, but if they really have tapped out performance for PI's on gold it gives them a purpose for a new model, they can then make a do it all PI, to suit a bigger market than just gold prospectors. PI's for coins, jewellery, beach and relics might be a decent market new models can open up. It happened with VLF's, the dedicated gold prospecting VLF's now offer very little over the general purpose multi use machines, often they're better.

I think we will see target ID on all PI's in the future, why leave it out when it can be so useful, I just don't get why it was left out so long when they were experimenting with it so long ago.

Might be some truth in that, as soon as the gold is gone, so are their sales. They sell products that eventually end their usefulness so they've trickled out the technology over the past decade or two.

Isn't this interesting, buy a GPX 6000 and Minelab will give you a free Coiltek coil. 😅 I have a feeling the Equinox 600 is about to be discontinued. Giving them away with a GPZ, on sale to clear stock in the US. They're giving away free M8 coils with the Manticore when people are still struggling to buy them the world over.

They might be in a rush to release an under $2000 GBPI challenge detector. At the moment they're losing sales to an unexpected competitor, one that would give a bit more of a sore spot than ordinarily. Garrett has dropped their Axiom price a bit, Nokta is coming and Minelab know it. Times ticking and sales are going to other brands than their own. They're certainly losing any dominance with VLF's, they'd hate the fact they are losing potential sales of their gold prospecting machines to other brands, an area they've mostly had to themselves for some time. I'm surprised they've held onto the Gold Monster so long when the Garrett 24k is clearly a better machine, I guess the GM still sells well enough and the 24k just doesn't have the same level of popularity even if better, this has a lot to do with Garrett's international pricing structure more than anything else I think with the GM being cheaper and from the bigger brand for prospecting gear. I maybe dreaming but it would be great if they were doing an under $2000 GBPI detector, I'd be happy with a modernized GPX 5000, maybe tweaked a bit to be a little better on the prickly gold and other types of gold its very weak on. I just hope if they do they keep the vast array of settings that makes the older GPX series what it is, but just have it in a nice menu system on a screen, they may need a screen like the GPZ for that. I know they'd never allow older GPX coils work on it, but it would be best for everyone if they did unless performance dictated they change them.

The Id on the screen when swinging is the ground minerilization, so if you're heading out of balance the bars next to it go up and that number increases, as you can see, I was well balanced. NZ has a lot of pure black sand beaches where a VLF is lucky to get an inch on a coin, this one just has it scattered around and it usually forms in wave lines from the tides, and yes, it's magnetic. The tide goes right up to where I was standing up near the top of the beach, it's a really shallow beach, you can go a very long way out and it still be shallow. They mine the stuff out of some of the beaches that have the larger quantities of black sand, they'd mine them all if the government would allow it 🙂 Not far up the road from this one there is a beach with more black sand than this one where people sluice gold from the sand, have claims on it and all. We can get snow all year around, and often do, it snows on the mountains regularly in summer and this summer it did snow often on the mountains, but it doesn't normally reach ground level until about about now, and it hit ground level in a few places yesterday. We don't have high elevation towns, all people tend to live well under 1000 meters, (3200 feet) so snow isn't overly a problem outside of some days here and there in winter. The bad beaches don't just have it in pockets like this one, all they mostly have is black sand.

You'll be able to weed out some shot pellets by them having very low ID's most commonly 00 and gold the sizes in that photo will have an ID very different to a pellet. A good thing about the Algoforce is it seems to hold it's ID's until it no longer gets an ID, the ID's don't creep lower or go higher as they get deeper like is common on VLF's. It might just be my milder soils causing this very stable ID I don't know, I'd love to hear from someone else on it as nobody else with an Algo has mentioned much about it, and to me it's one of the coolest features of the detector.

Thanks, I didn't know that Quest existed, I have the Wirefree mate kit but not ideal for the 6000, I'll look into getting that Quest off you closer to winter so I can fire up my Sp01 again, never did like the 6000 speaker anyway, too quiet so I might go the Quest/Sp01/Speaker on backpack method and give that a try.

Thanks Chase, that was a great post, my lack of understanding of iron is due to my lack of ever really finding iron targets. Nails are about it, and tiny little shards off digger buckers in gold areas. The odd old metal matchbox from the miners or broken-down tin can from their foods but really, not a whole lot of iron targets in my life.

I've learnt to live with the higher range of the Manticore, although it's 0 to 99 and also has the 2D charting to give more information on the targets and seems more stable than the 900, the earlier Manticore firmware was also more unstable on ID's for me than the more recent update, The 900 has -19 to 99 so even more and no 2D chart and perhaps why so many complaints are about ID stability on the 900. I've not used a 900 and the Target ID is what's holding me back, I'm often a cherry picker out of necessity so favour detectors with accurate ID's for coin hunting. I would have bought a 900 if it had the ability in the firmware to switch between legacy IDs and extended ID's, that would be an awesome feature. Best of both worlds. I'd also of course love the Manticore to have the same feature, as I can see in a few situations the extended range helps. I think they gave the 900 the expanded iron range for the Europeans and perhaps in their situation often digging iron intentionally it is beneficial, you can't please everyone, yet you can, by giving both ID ranges on one detector, perhaps it opens them up for their next generation Equinox's and Manticores by doing just that, if they see demand for these things they love it, as it gives them an excuse for a new model, rather than a firmware update. 😉 A competitor used a ferrous range of 1-10 and a non-ferrous range of 11 to 60, from what I've been reading they have hit a sweet spot between a bigger range spreading targets out while maintaining more stable ID's. The best incarnation of a large ID range detector I've ever used is the CTX, biggest range by far yet also the most accurate, so that's why there are always hopes and dreams of a new CTX, if they can get FBS3 working in worse soil conditions with faster recovery so those customers see how good I see the CTX that would be a great detector for them to add to their stable. At the moment I'm worried they're going to discontinue the 800, the 600 looks like it's going the way of the Dodo, with discounting happening in the US selling off the stock. If the 800 goes on sale too I'll be very worried. I don't particularly want to replace my 800 with a 900 as the ID's are the thing I like best about it, I'd just use my Vanquish if my 800 died and my only option for replacement was a 900. Instead of discontinuing the 800 I'd prefer they just keep it on the market and put it in the 900's body and have the range they do now with the older Equinox models still existing but with their known hardware flaws fixed by incorporation of the 900's build.

Still, the Target ID is incredibly good compared to the GM probability meter 😛 That thing is next to useless unless a big obvious target.

The Manticore has certainly had a good sensitivity increase since the firmware update, the tip and toe of the m8 are now VERY competitive with the 6" Nox coil on the tiniest of gold. It's at the point now it's very hard to tell the difference. I'd love a smaller coil for the Manticore than the M8, it would be great, but really, there is so little in it now and the M8 has the advantage of more ground coverage. I haven't bothered testing anything with the 11" Coils. So my opinions are based on M8 vs 6". I can also get my Manticore sensitivity much higher than Abenson can in his video, part of this could be the smaller coils and just we don't have as much EMI around here once away from power lines that's about it really.

This posts a bit of a waste of time but any information is better than nothing. The coast has had pretty bad weather for a while now, today was meant to be a break in the weather and it was nice and sunny at home when I woke up so I thought I'd try take the Algoforce to the beach and try it out, I was going to be in the area anyway as my dentist is near to this beach and I had an appointment, seeing it's over an hour's drive each way to my dentist I figured it's a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and hit the beach before the appointment. Half way to the beach the wind picked up, the sky was grey and it was raining, great! I'd not want to live on the South coast of NZ, it's sure got some weather issues, drive inland an hour and you're in a vastly different climate. It doesn't help some storm from Antartica is sweeping over our island over the coming days either, so I'll have to try the beach again another day. I did film a small video while there, I dug a hole in the sand and put a $1 coin at the depth the Equinox started to lose the target, if I went much deeper the Equinox didn't pick it up at all, I was worried when I backfilled the hole the Nox may lose it but it kept the target, it was up averaging the ID's a lot, it should ID the coin flicking between 21 and 22. The Algo at that depth gave a near perfect ID on the coin which should be 66 according to an air test, I also experimented before backfilling the hole with the coin in there and the Algoforce was picking up the coin with a target signal deeper than the Equinox would. The Algoforce does lose the Target ID's at some point in depth when it still had the target signal. From this little experiment I've worked out on this beach at least I would be able to ID this coin much more accurately and deeper than the Equinox 800 can in the settings I was in, which was Beach 1, all defaults, ground balanced and 24 sensitivity. I didn't play around a lot as it was only about 5 minutes after I jumped in my car to leave the heavy rain kicked in. I did briefly take the Algo down to the salt water and have a try at ground balancing and it worked fine, this was all with the 10" Spiral X-coil, my most sensitive to small targets GPX coil so I was quite happy about that. The tide was right out so I didn't go all the way to the water to dunk the coil, It was too cold. I only didn't take my Manticore to check against it as when I went to grab it I had left the M8 coil on it and was in a rush to get out of the door so I couldn't be bothered trying to find the other coil and fitting it, so the Nox got the job 🙂 I think the Manticore would have done better than the Nox. Pure estimate, the coin was about 20 cm deep. (8 inches) The Beach does have some black sand, not ridiculous like some beaches around NZ, but still enough to cause a bit of havoc with VLFs. Here's the Video, I've kept it unlisted on Youtube as it's not very good and doesn't give all that much information but the best I could do given the circumstances. I'll try again on a nicer day when I have more time. I'm also kicking myself I didn't dig the target I found when in the wet sand, it could have been a ring, the right ID range, I was talking myself out of it as I would have had to go to the car and get the shovel and I just wanted to leave 😉 This is the weather I was dealing with; it's meant to get worse over the coming days and all the purple area is going to be snow, blue is cold air. Red and yellow are the warmer air. I'm guessing the maroon colour over Australia is the crazy hot air, we don't get that here 😛

Steelphase no longer makes them, Nenad took over making and selling them. Good product but being left behind with everyone going wireless these days, I haven't used mine in some time.

Stumbled across it on Facebook.

I have the Nel branded one for my Gold Bug Pro, nice coil on the Bug.

oh, if you can get it grab it, the Cors Shrew is the Nel snake, they just sell it under two different brand names, Cors was sold in the US where as Nel elsewhere.

Some may find this interesting.

That's an old first generation 10" coil. Woody did a video on that blog post, he is puzzled why it has ferrites in it and thinks they won't do anything, yet the original and other aftermarket coils also do. This is the original 14x13" Minelab coil, thanks strick for the X-ray. I'm a bit puzzled by quite a few things said in his video.