phrunt

Well you missed the point entirely, the CTX which came out before the Nox has the same weak coil ears, the Vanquish that came out after the Equinox has the same weak coil ears. They had no motivation to fix the issue. Now with the Competition attacking the build quality and using it as a marketing tactic they're VERY likely to fix it on the Equinox 1000, you can bet the 1000 will have marketing going on about enhanced coil ear strength. It benefits us as all our kicking and screaming didn't get Minelab to fix their coil ears, maybe Nokta's gloating will do the job better.

yes, there is a hologram viewer in a little genuine booklet that comes with the detector and you enter the code under the hologram to the website and it confirms it. You can use polarized sunglasses if you hold the hologram at the right angle to just see it enough to get the code. Any Minelab dealer should have the hologram viewer if the guy with the detector doesn't have the manuals and booklets that came with it still. Fakes have the hologram too, it's code just won't verify on the site.

Does anyone have any idea if this coil is ever going to be released... I looked on their website in their text list of coils available and it's not there so I moseyed on over to their NEW latest Interactive catalog on the website from 2016 and it wasn't there either. Don't tell me it's going to be like the Impulse AQ and take years to get a coil to market after advertising it some time ago. I guess I should just move on to greener pastures, I was hoping to get one but I guess with all the new multi frequency detectors on the market now from various brands what's the point trying to revive an old beast with another coil.

It may end up a bit of a mistake by Nokta, they're starting a war with a giant and who knows how far along the Nox 1000 is, and what improvements it will include. They may even have the CTX 3030 replacement in the near future pipeline, or even better a combination CTX/Nox replacement on the cards. Pointing out Minelabs build quality and constantly making a big deal about it by Nokta is also a short sighted thing, sure it may hurt the 3 year old detector a bit, most who wanted one have one now anyway. Now Minelab know what to improve to fight back and throw it in Nokta's face. Love this stuff, it greatly benefits us, the end users! Bring on Nokta's cheekiness and attitude, it's going to backfire on them. It's a bit like New Zealand picking a fight with USA.......

The big reason they wouldn't have filmed is you never expect larger nuggets in NZ, they would have been pretty confident they were going to be digging some junk. A big booming target like that... Nearly impossible it'd be a nugget. I've done it myself, when I film nugget finds I tend to film the little signals that live on past being a shotgun pellet near the surface. I've never once caught one of my bigger nugget finds on video as they're so much less common than the smaller ones and a target like that blowing your ear drums you would be 110% confident it was junk, it was a once in a lifetime find, but I do hope they do it again some day 🙂 I doubt I'll have a find video like that to post up, but you never know... that's what keeps us scratching away in the soil. 😛

Despite all of this, isn't it brilliant there are now going to be a range of multi frequency machines from various brands competing against each other, it's fantastic we aren't going to be limited to one brand and even if you don't intend to get any of the new ones it still benefits you as it encourages competition and may just hurry your preferred detector up to getting a new model, or even make them think again about their build quality. Nokta may have duplicated many features of the Nox, but they've also added their own touches like their torch and vibration, not to mention their enhanced build quality... name the last time you heard someone complain about a drowned Simplex or coil ears snapping off their Anfibio. Sure the detectors are NOWHERE near as popular meaning there are far fewer of them out there... that means less breakages and drownings but the numbers are high enough we'd hear of coil ears breaking by now. The Simplex not being an ideal salt water detector probably doesn't spend much time in the water, fresh water hunters may use it but I'd imagine a large percentage of them are swinging something else. The more popular a detector is the more likely you'll see failures, that's pretty obvious. I think the Ferrocheck is a good idea, if it works as well as they say it sounds like a good idea although it reminds me a bit of the Fe304 meter on the Gold Bug Pro and other First Texas detectors. Seems to do a similar thing unless I'm misunderstanding it? You get your target ID and check the Fe304 meter to see the chances of it being iron. Obviously the CTX and Etrac seem to have another version of it with their Target ID's. I was reading Detect-ED's website with his information about the Legend where he pointed out Nokta testers are saying it's far better at identifying iron targets with ID's that suggest they're not iron. Either way, I'm pretty excited about the Legend, not so excited I'm going to rush in and order one, I told my dealer I'd be more interested in going in on his second batch after I've seen and read some user reviews rather than Nokta information as I don't trust marketing and don't need anymore detectors unless they genuinely add something I don't have already.

Yes, I think you're right with the location, similar location to NuggetHunterNZ's great find last year too. They do genuine videos and do seem like great guys. A different approach to many Youtube video makers that's for sure, just real guys doing real prospecting.

Yup, I think most regular buyers of stuff know service outweighs price, especially when the price difference is pretty small. There is a dealer here that's slightly cheaper than my preferred dealer, I still shop at my preferred dealer as his service is outstanding, as is yours from my experience in the few times I've bought stuff from your shop.

Wouldn't it come down to finances which means only the buyer could really decide? Is the $800 price difference worth having an entirely new detector with a 3 year warranty? To me, yes it is. If the detector is half or under of the new price I'd be more inclined to go for the older one, anything less I'd be edging towards the new one.

I went up a creek where I found a number of nuggets on my first day gold prospecting when I had JW there to show me what to do and I've rarely detected creeks since. Craig (NuggetHunterNZ) found his giant nugget using his Whites 24k in a creek, and that may make sense as my Nox and GM 1000 both struggle a bit in the creeks as all the rocky base of the creeks are loaded with hot rocks, and where there is bedrock often the detector signals on the bedrock, especially the bedrock with a green tinge to it. The 24k so far appears to handle hot rocks better than the GM and Nox so I'll take my Garrett 24k to this same creek in the near future and see how I go. I could take my GPX with the same Joey coil as the guy in the video although I'd be worried about dropping it in the water tripping from the fast flowing creek and slippery rocks being an expensive detector as I've taken two falls there already and the GM has been dunked underwater from one of them. I am guessing the guys in the video found their big nugget on the West Coast of the South Island where Craig found his. About 6 hours drive from here but I believe all the good creeks would have claims, these guys will have claims as they're dredgers. I'm not sure of the geology in the West Coast area, I should do my research.

I wonder how many countries you actually get more for less, its looking to be very similar priced to the Nox everywhere except the USA. Even in the UK the price for the Nox 600 is 679 pounds with free wireless ML80 headphones. I didn't look at multiple dealers as the first one I checked gave enough information. https://www.crawfordsmd.com/minelab-equinox-600?search=equinox 600 The price guide for the Legend standard pack is surprise surprise 679 pounds. It seems only the US gets the cheap pricing from my research so far, lucky buggers.... maybe it's the market they're chasing the most 🙂 In other countries dealers are going to have to put it on sale straight away to beat Nox pricing, and that's if dealers don't put the Nox's on sale too to combat it.

https://www.ja-gps.com.au/Minelab/equinox-800/ Even includes free shipping. https://www.minersden.com.au/minelab-equinox-800-metal-detector

It happened last year with Craig Douglas (NuggetHunterNZ on DP Forum) finding a 177 Gram gold nugget and now it's happened again, these guys have now found a 121 gram nugget in a creek similar to how Craig found his this time using a GPX 4500 or 5000, not sure which one. And the video of it, these guys make a heap of good videos usually of them dredging but this time it was detecting when they found it. The video has a fair few gold finds on it, Perhaps I need to start looking in creeks more often 🙂

They have their entire reputation on the line on this one with all the Equinox bashing they've done. If it's not better than the Equinox like they claim, well.... it can only go badly for them. Yes, it sucks to hear about people having Nox leaks and the broken coil ears but it's put up with for the performance. It's a lesson Minelab need to learn though so I hope it's a Nox killer, but I don't expect it to be. I buy Minelab products expecting I'll need to use the warranty . I've needed it for my GM1000 (speaker and coil), Nox (shaft), Go-Find (folding mechanism broke, didn't bother with warranty and used glue), Pro-Find35 (falsing), Pro Sonic (two faulty ones that were DOA, ended up refunding) GPZ (WM12 and a lower shaft clip) and last but not least CTX (17" coil ear cracked, not bothered with warranty as I'm fixing it myself) I'm not impressed at all by Minelab build quality, it's the performance that attracts me to them, but I'd happily jump ship if something better came out from another brand and if not I'll keep the Minelab service agent's phone number on my list of favourites on my phone.

Well, as per usual it looks like NZ and Australia will pay more for the Legend. You can pick up a Nox 800 in OZ for $1095 AUD, the basic Legend package is the same price as a Nox 800, the Pro Pack more expensive by $250 AUD so enough to buy a Nox 800 with the extra 6" coil for the price of the Legend Pro Pack. Nox ends up the better deal. So I guess the more for less with Nokta is more as in a flashlight and vibration, there is no less about it, it's certainly not cheaper, not even remotely. Nox 600 blows it away for pricing at as low as $799 AUD, $300 Australian dollars cheaper than the basic Nokta Legend package. I'm expecting the pricing to be worse for NZ.

I'm not sure of anything really, a British series Hoard Hunters wasn't too bad for that sort of thing although not exactly what you're after. The old Whites series Treasure Hunting in America wasn't too bad for a bit of a primer into metal detecting although quite outdated. It's got a number of episodes on Youtube that you could look at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=treasure+hunting+in+america

That's the ticket. No I wasn't including Fisher, I'd be more likely to include Rutus in the main detectors category than Fisher as they're actively developing and releasing new detectors, they just need to make their way into the international market and start finding dealers and service agents in the US and other big markets to get the ball rolling. Nokta did that quickly, Rutus could too and they're very innovative and actively working on and improving technology. Sure Fisher took on someones project to try bring something to market, overall its not been successful so far and too much of a niche product to bring them back into the game. Nokta is a role model for these other smaller manufacturers on how to come out fighting and bring products to market to complete and excel over the old boys.

You consider them a main manufacturer? they haven't made something new in years, possibly decades!

Fisher have nothing to lose now as they don't even have a horse in this race. The last race they participated in was the Vanquish, Simplex and Apex release as their T2/F75 variants were up against them and well I'll let anyone be the judge of where they were positioned in that race. Even then they were riding on an old horse with decades old technology so they have no investment in that race they just let their old previously high end technology complete against modern day entry level machines. If they haven't made back their R&D and production costs and garnered a substantial profit off those detectors by now there is something wrong and I'm sure they have, they've been on the market for such a long time. The days of doing that are gone, detectors are becoming more like normal electronic products now with a much shorter lifecycle. Those that don't keep up with the pace are out of the race. Counterfeiters won't be such a problem with more regular new models, having a detector on the market for decades is asking for trouble. The multi frequency general purpose machines are even making their flagship dinosaur Gold Bug 2 redundant, or at least an even more specialist machine than it already was. Now for a majority of people just using a multi frequency machine with a small coil can be just as good if not better than using a single purpose gold prospecting VLF machine. I think Nokta know that too as they've culled down their gold VLF's to just the Kruzer and Gold Finder 2000, there is no need for a big range of models when multi purpose multi frequency machines can do it all. Their other single frequency VLF's will be sitting on the shelves at discounted prices. I'm happy Nokta, Garrett and XP are in this race, we don't need another monopoly like Minelab have on the high end gold machines and it would be awesome if these detectors like the Rutus enter the race as mainstream detectors too.

Set the R&D costs aside as they get them back over time with sales of this and future models the Legend will cost similar to what the Simplex does to actually build in construction costs, they're making good money on the Simplex so they're making a lot of money on the Legend. You only have to look at the Chinese clones and how cheap they can sell them to see what the actual production costs of detectors are where they can make and ship a high end Fisher model knock off for $100, I'm simply talking construction costs of the detectors, they're very low. Nokta being made in Turkey and Minelab being made in Malaysia where production costs are very low... What do you think a GPX 6000 costs to actually make? Very little, in the hundreds. It happens in a lot with various products, the higher the model is in specifications the more profit is made on it. They put the Legend at a price they think gives it an edge, they could go a lot lower if they needed to and they'll do that with specials and promos in the future by throwing in coils or pinpointers and hats and other gear to try take more of the market share. The fights on now and we are at the interesting part, the manufacturers have put it out there what they have, let's now see how they respond to each other.

Yea, Coiltek were weird with that, I asked if they were considering a closed design, or even a closed skid plate for it and they're not. Odd for a company that is focused on making gold prospecting coils. Hopefully Nokta do a solid 10x5" or 10x6" coil for the Legend as I'm not expecting aftermarket coils for it from Nel. I'll buy a Legend as it's cheap enough to waste the money on if it all goes wrong. I have no doubt its build quality will be good, but I don't care how good the build is if the detector performance isn't what I want. I'd rather a lesser build quality and more performance. Ideally good build quality and performance, if they have done that I'm happy. If it forces ML to release their "fight back" sooner I'll be happy too. Now all the main detector manufacturers have a full real multi frequency machine on the market so we as users are in a pretty good place and I can't wait to see the battle of the manufacturers and how this goes over the coming year or two. Can someone dethrone Minelab, I hope so as it may force them to change the way they operate, start listening to customers and build better quality detectors, bring their ego back to earth. So, I am hoping the Legend is a legend, I look forward to getting one, but I may have the get rid of my Simplex, too many detectors. I hate getting rid of detectors and I have to have a very good reason to get rid of one. The only one to go so far is my QED which I swapped at a complete bargain for the person for his old AT Gold to get rid of it, the Simplex is next on the cull I guess as I'll replace it with the Legend. On paper I like everything about the Legend and it seems more my style detector than the Deus 2.

Not everyone lives in America and cares where American coins end on the ID scale. We have 925 Silver Half Crowns that ID at 33, 34 and 925 Silver Florins that ID at 31/32, they're some of our best coins to find. The UK have the same coins, the Aussies where Minelab is from funny enough also have large 925 Silver coins that are up in the 30's. One of these silver Half Crowns was wrapping around on my Gold Bug Pro and often detecting as iron. I had to do an internal POT adjustment on the detector to allow it to detect the coin at ID 99 rather than iron. Fisher didn't take into consideration these large silver coins I guess, although my second Gold Bug Pro detected it as 99 out of the box, so perhaps a slight tuning problem. I had to turn the POT the smallest little amount, barely move it at all for it to come right.

Well, my wife found her on Facebook and has sent her a message about it, no reply yet but she hasn't seen the message at this stage. I bet she'll be surprised, she lives in Auckland on the North Island so another unfortunate thing is she spent an entire day of her holiday down here looking for it with no success, and her access to the ski field would have been around about $130 for that day for her to look for it. At least we have found her now so if there is important stuff on the phone I'll ship it up to her, I'm sure the SD Card will still work, those things can handle a lot. The phone may even work when it dries out, I've found phones at the ski field before that came to life after drying out. This is a photo of the front of the mountain range where the ski field is that I took yesterday, you'd never even know the ski field is there, or all that stuff like the lake and so on as it's all on the back side of the range.

Well, you may remember some time ago I said I was going to go back and see what the girl lost, she did spend virtually a full day at this spot under the ski lift trying to find whatever it was she lost, by half way through the day she had an army of helpers trying to help her find whatever it is. She must have lost it the day before as she came back armed with a metal detector. Well today was the day I finally decided to go see what it was she lost. I waited until the snow had melted enough to get up there in the first place and I picked a day where it was overcast as I hate heat and climbing that far up the mountain I'd overheat, I'd be like some guy trying to drive a little mini car up the mountain full of people, the thing would explode from overheating before it gets to the ski fields base building, well that would be me walking up to this spot on a sunny day 😛 This is the poor girl during winter trying to find whatever it was she lost. She dug a huge hole. I never did work out what detector she was using but at the time it was making a hell of a racket, I think I know why as now when I had my Nox up there it was going crazy too, it turns out on that lift directly between each of the lift poles is an underground high voltage power line, it goes up into each lift pole. It was making my Nox go crazy. I had to run the sensitivity really low in a frequency of 10kHz for the Nox to even be usable. No idea what her detector was but it was likely confusing her completely as she seemed very frustrated with it and I think she'd borrowed it off someone for the task and had no idea how to use it. Her recruits, just people that saw her there all morning and by afternoon felt compelled to help, there ended up way more than that by the end of the day. 🙂 My wife and daughter decided to tag along as they wanted to go for a walk to the lake, there is a cool lake up on the mountain, this lake is about 1800 meters (5905 feet) above sea level so remains frozen all winter and well into summer, in winter you ski across it, people even camp on it that are climbing to the top of the mountain as it's nice level ground. She took some happy snaps of us walking up to the lake area. We are walking a cross a creek here, the creek disappeared under the snow, was a bit scary as I wouldn't really want to fall into the creek, the snow was still thick and firm enough it wasn't an issue. and the lake.... slowly starting to melt A lot of it was still thick enough to walk on, one side must get more sun and melted sooner. Anyway, after that I had my mission to find the spot the girl was searching, I knew she didn't find whatever it was as she was there until the ski field closed. This was taken from half way up the walk, I had to get to where I've marked in the photo. A lot harder without ski lifts 🙂 It's a lot steeper than it looks in the photos. Off in the distance there is the base building where my car is parked. I got to the spot, you'll notice in the earlier photos with her doing it she was just past a lift pole. Now to find whatever it was, I expected a ring or something with her motivation to try find it, something very important to her anyway. And I found it, a phone! It's sitting just above the center of my shaft in the photo, to the right of that is a little bit of a creek, and the phone was in-between those grasses in the creek, hard to eyeball, easy to find with the detector screaming on it. I doubt if I went up without the detector that I would have found it. A couple of photos of the area from up there Looking up from where I found it. The lake is straight ahead in this photo, you can't see it in the photo though as the little grassy ridge line is blocking it. I did a little more detecting on the way back down, mostly just under the lift cable and found another phone much lower down. People drop phones on the lifts all the time as they rip them out to take photos and drop them and they instantly sink into the soft snow under the lift never to be seen again, until it melts 🙂 I found a couple of $1 coins, ended up giving them to my daughter who bought a block of chocolate with them. So my tally for the day wasn't all that good, it was mostly hiking and climbing in the end, only about an hour on the detector I'd guess and we left at lunch time as the ladies wanted to go shopping 😛 The Nugget Finder solid skid plate was awesome on the 11" coil for sliding on the snow, perfect for the job. It just glides along. I think that's a bit of broken gold jewellery, 2 NZ $1 coins and a weird Asian coin of sometype. At first I thought it was a washer. The phones.... hers is the black one to the right. Inside a secret compartment was her credit card and drivers license, so we'll be able to track her down and give it back, a girl in her 20's, she has a NZ drivers license so must live in NZ, I doubt a Queenstown local or she'd likely have gone back up to try and find it by now. My wife's going to track her down on Facebook to get it back to her, it might have important photos on it's SD Card as she was obviously desperate to try find it. If not we will hand it into the boys in blue or ski field and they can track her down. The ski field will have her details from her buying a pass. Well, all in all a bit of fun, and at least now I'm not constantly wondering what was so important that she lost that she'd spend an entire day trying to find.

Here is the live launch video from Facebook, I only bothered with a lower resolution copy but it'll do. The price seems good in the USA, I don't know how that will translate here but I'll soon see. The Apex is going to cop a beating because of this I suspect as in NZ this SMF is likely to be cheaper than the Apex, seeing the Apex is priced virtually at Nox 600 pricing here, not sure how well it'll affect the Nox sales, time will tell based on performance. I'm confident it's better quality as even the Simplex entry level when using the Carbon shaft is far better quality than the Nox. It's fantastic this is helping push the pricing of high end detectors down, for far too long detectors were over priced for what they are, these modern day Multi freakers are bringing manufacturers down to earth on their pricing. Now Nokta, get to work on a lightweight PI prospecting machine, I think you'll surprise yourself how big the market is for such a machine at a good price.