phrunt

Your best bet is to contact these people. https://www.centrevilleelectronics.net/

I wouldn't worry about the AT Max being said to be more reliable, it has a 2 year warranty, the Equinox has a 3 year warranty. Minelab have a service center in NZ for the Equinox, for the AT Max you'd be shipping it back to the USA. My Equinox has not skipped a beat and I treat it like a tool, not a precious piece of equipment. It's had a hard life and it's got to be around 3 years old now. I got it as soon as they came out.

Personally I'd buy the Equinox 800, multi frequency machine with more features and more versatile. Both are good machines the Equinox is just the more modern machine that is overall a better unit.

Welcome to the forum. Firstly, I've never used Newegg, but it took 5 seconds to have a quick search on it to see Chinese clone fake detectors are sold on there all over the place, I expect that's why you've discovered detectors like the T2 which can be genuine or fake, more often than not fake as only Teknetics dealers would be selling the real thing and the TX850 is a Fake Teknetics G2 which is much like the F19 (another variation of it) you're also talking of. Keep in mind when buying these clones you're not getting the real thing, performance is variable as is build quality. Some models appear to work almost as they should, others not so much. If you want to do well finding these antiques you're better off buying a genuine detector. The Equinox 800 and Garrett AT Max as far as I'm aware are very rarely cloned if at all, so either would be a safer option and both suitable for what you want to do. I'm not sure why your only payment option is crypto but generally the stores that will accept that could possibly be the same stores that will be happy to rip you off 🙂

Well they were advertising on their site a new pinpointer is coming, I wonder why that would be..... Bluetooth perhaps 🙂

Here is a video of the 12x6" coil finding a little nugget, it's very windy there at the moment, I think he does very well to recover this with one hand while filming with the other..... I doubt I would be capable of doing that, I always put my phone down to recover it 🙂 They're currently working on an even smaller size coil so I will hopefully have a video of that one being tested soon.

I've seen two posts on Facebook now with people who had out of control EMI, they both had their GPX replaced and were then happy with the new one. It wasn't the coil in either case, one of them only had it a few days and took it back to the dealer where they tried another coil, the detector itself had a problem. There must be some part that's possibly a bit variable and makes some perform worse than others and in rare cases makes the detector just terrible to use, although this diagnosis is very simplistic based off only a couple of detectors. Yours sounds unusually bad and perhaps you also have a faulty coil or like these two people a faulty detector.

They used to make them in Adelaide Australia, and best I can tell almost all manufacturing is done in Malaysia but of course that doesn't mean all the parts are made in Malaysia, they'd be sourced where they can be, mostly China and Taiwan I would guess. Even detectors made in the USA will be made with parts sourced in Asia, it's certainly not unusual. Their investor report outlines a bit of information about manufacturing although they lumped Warehouses in with Manufacturing in the chart so it looked like they're made in many places when they're not. If you dive into it a bit deeper doing research outside of that document you can come up with this one Which basically shows the manufacturing is done in Adelaide South Australia, Penang Malaysia and Victoria, Canada I looked into the manufacturing in Canada and it is the radio communications equipment. As long as the quality is there and the support I'm not bothered by where it's made. I would hope making it in cheaper to manufacture countries would have some of the costs cut passed onto the consumers though and not just be to maximise profits.

Looks like a prototype toilet to me 🙂

Yes, the Chinese are pumping out replacement GPZ and CTX screens. There has to be a market for it or they wouldn't do it. I guess sometimes it's not practical for people to send their detector in to get it fixed if they need it or when they want to do it themselves to keep costs down or maybe they just don't have a service agent nearby or even in their country. The price of getting it fixed officially is just too high by comparison of doing it yourself and I'm sure they'd buy the genuine parts if they could, but for things like screens they won't sell them to you. I wasn't even able to buy the little rubber USB cover for my WM12 when it snapped in half, they wanted me to send it in to have it replaced, they were of course going to do it under warranty as it's under a year old I'd guess but they would not send me the part to do it myself even if I just offered to buy it so I can see peoples reasoning for sourcing aftermarket parts but having worked in a service center before myself I also know why they don't want people doing things themselves, it can go terribly wrong 🙂 If I was able to find that little rubber on a Chinese site I would have bought it just so I could do it myself.

Damn! you've beaten my total ring tally with one hunt! fantastic, good one Mitchel.

Most their detectors are made in Malaysia, and parts like shafts and so on come from China. My genuine Equinox replacement shaft came in packaging with shipping documentation of made in China. I guess this is relatively normal in this day and age, what isn't made there? not much! What you're seeing there with that Ebay listing is Chinese manufactured clone components, the Chinese have worked out that selling parts for Minelab detectors can be very lucrative. They sell everything now for many models of Minelab like shafts, batteries, screens, keypads and so on. You name a part they now make it. These will be the same parts they're using in their clone detectors so some parts might be questionable quality. I guess because some of the parts like screens Minelab won't sell you and instead want you to pay the service center to fit them into out of warranty detectors, some people would rather save the money and do it themselves if they're capable of doing so, in that case they source aftermarket parts to do it themselves. Often the labour on a repair can be more than the parts required.

All you do is paste the youtube link into the post and press enter, it will automatically embed. You don't need to do anything

If I was a dealer in a gold field area I'd let potential buyers hire out detectors at cheap rates, and the 24k would be one of them. I think if people try before they buy they'd work out what suits them best in their price range. I wish I could try detectors before buying them, I'd own far less detectors as some detectors you just like right from the first use 🙂 I see the Gold Monster and 24k a bit like the Vanquish and the Equinox. The Gold Monster being the Vanquish, and the 24k being the Equinox. The GM is limited in it's settings and just switch on and go just like the Vanquish. The 24k can switch on and go like the Equinox but you've got the settings for when you need them that can give you an advantage over the fully auto machine. Is that worth paying more for? I think so. The other side of it is the bump sensitivity, I can only imagine that's even worse in hot soil than in my soil but it does drive you mad. I like to run my detectors hot, as hot as they'll go being in rather mild soil. The GM runs perfectly fine maxed out in manual 10 here, never a response from the ground, but whatever you do don't bump the coil into rocks, it will sound off, in a very rocky area it's sounding off every few seconds from all the bumping as if you're scrubbing and run across a small stone that's enough to jolt the coil and sound off so you have to lower the sensitivity not because of the ground but because of the bump sensitivity. The Equinox is similar although not quite as bad. I never really understood the bump sensitivity thing as my GB2 is must higher kHz and more sensitive than the GM and Equinox on the tiniest of targets and has absolutely no bump sensitivity. The performance is there on these Minelabs, the bumping is just a distracting annoyance. The 24k has no bump sensitivity for me, absolutely none so you can focus more on finding gold rather than controlling the bump sounds even when maxed out in sensitivity. How much gold have I missed by masking, not from targets or junk, but from bump sounds distracting me and dismissing a small nugget as a bump noise. It's easier for a ground scrubber to scrub the ground without having to worry about knock sensitivity. That alone is worth paying more for and why I always hoped Nel would be able to make Gold Monster coils as I assumed their epoxy filled Snake might work very well on the GM1000 and not have bump sensitivity. Well, as it turns out Nel won't be making GM or Equinox coils, but will be making Garrett 24k coils, so for me that's the clincher, coil range means a huge amount to me and the fact Nel will also make coils for the 24k means the 24k wins the battle hands down and is worth paying more for. I'm now wondering if others will follow and we'll see Detech coils for it along with any other brands that want to jump onboard. This is what I've always wanted.... The 24k isn't perfect, it's missing things some expect in modern detectors like wireless audio and waterproofing and perhaps they'll come out with a newer version of it at some point with these sort of features, for me it doesn't matter as I only use onboard speakers and the 24k's speaker is nice and loud so that wouldn't be enough for me to want to upgrade.

Yes, that wasn't me, just passing on the information, the 12x6" coil and gold finds are the X-coils manufacturers testing the coil out. If it was me I'd be jumping for joy though, firstly it would mean I own a GPX 6000 and secondly it would mean I've got the 12x6" coil to use on it 😛 What I will do from now on is any information I get about these new GPX 6000 X-coils I'll put them into this thread, that way it keeps it all consolidated and for those that are interested they can open this thread up and see what's happening, and for those not interested it's all contained in once place so they know where it is. So here is the previous video of the first test coil being used, it's a 15x10" Also, the adapter is a fairly tricky one compared to the GPZ coils, with the chip needing removed from the original coil to make it, fortunately for the Aussies the guy that's currently making everyone's GPZ adapters there has said he'd be interested in making the GPX adapters for people too, and X-coils are in discussions with him about this taking place in the future so that'll make it a lot easier for the Australians who want to use these coils.

yep, I could go for a stroll behind my house to the river and pick up 100 in 5 minutes that look just like it.

Now that I've used it I think it's worth every cent 😉

The 24k is starting to appear at Australian dealers websites as in stock ready to sell, this is the place I bought the 24k Concentric coil from in Brisbane, really helpful store by the way. https://losttreasures.com.au/products/garrett-goldmaster-24k $1449 AUD which ends up about $1070 USD Unfortunately in NZ we are even worse off than Australia, if it's $1449 in Australia it's going to be an extra few hundred by the time it gets here.

Yes, coils can make or break a detector I think and it's really great having both Concentric and DD to choose from. It's great finding bigger nuggets but I get a real thrill out of finding the tiniest pieces, it's really exciting to recover the really small ones, the challenge of it is a real thrill. I think I get just as excited about very tiny bits as I do bigger ones as the technology to find them is just mind blowing. The smallest one was so small if I was to breathe on it I'd lose it. I had to be so careful putting it on the coil at the end of the day for the total photo as the wind had picked up a bit 🙂 The only way you can pick up bits that size is to wet your finger so it's weight is likely less than what the scales say as I'd wet my finger to put it on the scales, the water on it had to add a fraction of weight when the bit is that small in the first place. Garrett Search Coil Tech Sheet About Search Coils by Dave Johnson Search Coil Field Shape by Dave Johnson Coil Basics by Carl Moreland

Outstanding post Steve and one I'll print out and read over a few times and even take it with me next time I go to this area, I took it to this spot knowing it was up for a challenge and I was hopeful I'd find gold I'd missed with the other detectors that all struggle here on these green schist type of hot rocks. I'd previously done a post requesting help with the GPZ struggling on them when I originally found this scrape and detect spot and with JP's advice was able to tame them a bit, but they were always still a problem. I had the 24k handling them quite like the GPZ was with minimal settings adjustments. I basically ran the machine as a beginner first time user and managed to get it working to a point It found me gold by adjusting very few settings and was very happy with the results so even though the settings are there when you're comfortable using them and have a better understanding of the detector it really can be used on as a switch on and go detector and perform very well. Now I'll start to experiment and learn about the settings and adjust it to get even more out of it. To say I was happy with it is a bit of an understatement, I was very surprised how well it did. Having the settings the 24k has will be invaluable in these challenging areas and for me to get 6 pieces of gold there was rather odd, I'm normally lucky to get one and often go home empty handed.

I was pretty excited about this one so I couldn't resist posting the video of it, it's a 12x6" prototype test coil being used on the GPX 6000 to find gold, it found 3 bits on it's first run. This was one of my favourite coils on the older model GPX and if I end up with the new GPX it will be a size I'd have to have. It's long sensitive nose was great getting up between the rocks I regularly hunt in. This is purely for information for those interested in following the progress of the coils. These coils are not being sold by them yet, it's in a testing stage and they will require an adapter which involves removing a chip from the original coil. You'll see in the photo the adapter inline on the coil cable which has the chip in it that was removed from the standard mono coil. And the video The 3 bits of gold found while testing it. The one to the left was the one found in the video.

We've been in a bit of a Covid lock-down recently and during that time my Garrett 24k arrived so I wasn't able to use it in the gold fields straight away, it was quite painful to look at it knowing I can't go and use it, fortunately we came out of our lock-down and as took off for a prospect with the 24k as soon as I could. I ordered a White's 6" concentric coil for it to tie me over until Garrett and with any luck Nel come out with other coils for it, I hope they continue with the 6" Concentric as I'll buy a Garrett 6" Concentric as soon as they release it. It's a remarkably sensitive coil, I expected it to be less sensitive than it is as it's quite big however it surprised me and matches or exceeds smaller coils on other high frequency gold detectors. I've always been happy with Garrett coil quality so upgrading the Whites to a Garrett would be worthwhile I think. In saying that, neither the 10x6" Garrett coil or the Whites 6" coil were at all bump sensitive, not one bump noise the entire day. I'm so used to coil bump sensitivity from the Equinox and Gold Monster it was a rather pleasurable experience being able to scrub the coil on the ground like mad and bump it around not setting off the detector, giving me a distinct advantage over using bump sensitive coils. I started the day using the 10x6" Coil as I wanted to see how it goes and I was going back to a spot I'd found a fair few grams of gold in the past, about 30 or more nuggets using the scrape and detect method taking off layers of soil at a time and detecting it. The initial nugget which was just under half a gram and a fair few more were found using my GPZ including a 4.2 gram nugget and then I brought in the Equinox with 6" coil to clean up as a majority of the nuggets were very small and the VLF's tend to do better cleaning up these very small nuggets. I'd even gone over this little scrape and detect area with the Gold Bug 2 however it was a bit of a nightmare as the area is absolutely full of hot rocks and the Gold Bug 2 in heavy hot rocks isn't a good detector in my opinion, it's too busy making it's response noise to the hot rocks to worry about the bits of gold next to the hot rocks so you miss nuggets if they're near hot rocks. The problem is this spot is loaded with hot rocks all through the soil of various shapes and sizes mostly a green type of schist that is all crumbly and broken up and detectors love to sound off on it. It's likely there from the old timers, it's basically some old workings where the old timers left their rock pile in a little gully, and right on the lower downhill side of the rock pile was my little scrape and detect patch. Even the GPZ struggled with all of the hot rocks so I was quite pleased how the 24k was coping with them, sure it was sounding off on some of them too but it wasn't too troublesome and seemed to ignore the little broken up bits and very usable. I ran the 24k with the sensitivity maxed out, Sat on the middle setting and audio on Boost 2. The ground balance was quick and easy then I switched into the Locked balance mode. If the broken up schist bits of hot rock were too severe I left it in tracking which helped to knock them out. I gave the 6" Concentric coil a quick try and it struggled more with the hot rocks and i didn't want to lower my sensitivity down so I reverted back to the DD which appeared to handle them better and is still remarkably sensitive. So I just started scraping back layers and detecting taking about 2 inches off at a time knowing the gold here is likely going to be very small and it will be stuff I've missed in the past as I've scraped this spot out before and back filled it so I was essentially checking the same soil all over again for anything I missed. I had high hopes I had missed some as all it would take is a small hot rock to be sitting on top of the bit of gold the previous time and I'd likely miss it or just the bit of gold on it's side being a very thin one or any number of reasons, even just at a depth too deep for the size of gold with the detector I was using. It wasn't long and I had my first piece. Quite a decent size one too, I was baffled at the time why I'd missed this one in the past. The 24k had now found it's first gold, highly likely the first piece of gold found in New Zealand with the Garrett 24k, a badge I'll wear proudly. 🙂 Next up was a reasonably faint but very repeatable signal with no target ID showing, I delicately used my scoop to scrape soil away knowing this was likely a very small bit of gold and it sure was... my smallest bit of the day too and surprised I managed to find it with the 10x6" coil, I don't recall ever finding a bit this small using the 10x5" type size on other detectors. Can you spot it? 🙂 There it is! 0.007 of a gram, not bad for the 10x6" coil, especially in this hot rock infested ground. I always check targets in case they're odd little bits of metal with my pick magnet, and you'll see it was quick to build up black sand, this soil has plenty of it in it. I kept scraping down layers and found another. Quite small too... but a bit more meat on it than the previous one 🙂 I'd had enough of the scrape and detect spot by now and wanted to go explore a bit to see how the 24k performed for general detecting so I walked for about 10 minutes to another spot I'd found some gold in the past and detected for about an hour digging plenty of shotgun pellets, completely normal in this area as there is a rabbit plague that causes countless thousands of shotgun pellets to be distributed all over the place for me to clean up 🙂 I didn't have high hopes as myself and a friend (JW) have absolutely thrashed this area but it's always possible to miss gold when there is so many pellets. We generally scrape a few times and if the signal persists dig it, if it moves after the first scrapes ignore it thinking it's very likely a pellet. A few pictures of the sort of terrain I was detecting. My batteries went down to 2 bars quite quickly, within an hour. I assume as they're rechargeable and run at 1.2 volts instead of 1.5 volts for standard AA's but it stayed at the two bars for the entire day so still plenty of life left in them yet by the looks of it. Pretty wild rocky terrain and only really suitable for smaller coils. The GPZ with it's stock coil is terrible here, the smaller the coil the better in general. I did manage to find a piece though, after a lot of pellet digs 🙂 Not a bad size bit for the area too I now decided I'd put the Whites 6" Concentric coil on and give it another go as this area doesn't have near as many hot rocks as my scrape and detect spot. I found a bit of raised bedrock and had a signal that persisted down into the schist. At this point it almost had to be gold so I started filming. And it was gold 🙂 I had to break up the schist to get it out. A nice little piece too, a roundish flat one. This area has plenty of black sand too, this was my pick after checking that bedrock in case it was a steel shotgun pellet. It was getting near time to go get some dinner and I was pretty satisfied to even get one nugget in this area but I kept going a little while longer and it paid off. I like the bulls eye sight on the 6" coil, it really is the hot spot too, great for pinpointing. I had a signal that persisted down into the gravels on the bedrock. And got this one! It's hard to tell the depth in the photo but it was a reasonable depth. A few inches anyway. And that was it for the day, I was starving! So, do I like the 24K? You're damn right I do, it certainly exceeded my expectations and will now be my primary VLF gold detector replacing my Equinox which replaced my Gold Monster, and the Gold Bug 2 was just not for me, I didn't gel with it at all especially with the masking from hot rocks. I look forward to getting more coils for the 24k, especially smaller ones, and judging by how well it handled the hot rocks I wouldn't mind a larger size coil for ground coverage too. The total for the day. Very happy with the results.

After watching Dilek's facebook video I'm pretty impressed, it's hard not to like Nokta as a company. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=889745971917245&ref=watch_permalink I'm glad they're ditching their 2.4ghz headphone system and going to Bluetooth, I bet they're going to use Bluetooth 5.2 and that will put them ahead of the competition for audio straight away for having the lowest latency audio, yet completely standard. Interesting she said they've only had a very small number of leaks with the Simplex and they've all been machines that have been opened up previously by service agents or dealers and so on, so their waterproofing is much better than the competition. I also found it quite amusing she reiterated they feel they only have one competitor in the market, just one, the other companies are not seen as competition. I guess in a way it's true. I also like they're just releasing one version of it, not a scaled back and high end version, just one, solves all confusion. She said it will have a high enough frequency for the gold prospectors and will have a gold mode, now that could mean 20kHz so that's a bit of a worry. Hopefully it ends up at least with 30kHz ideally 40kHz or higher. It's going to have flashlight and vibration, I think that's pretty cool.... a point of difference and I have found a use for the flashlight with the Simplex, quite handy. Don't you wish all manufacturers would come on and talk to customers like that? They can have my money now, I want one.

I was kinda hoping it wasn't lightning as I didn't like that name 🙂 My brain kept associating it with a product that lasts for a few seconds and appears to make a big impact then instantly gone. Thanks for popping in, I will be watching on Facebook.

Well, after being rejected by customs twice in Australia before even departing the country as "dangerous goods" and the poor dealer in OZ having to spend hours on the phone to Australia Post my Whites 6" coil arrived! I should say a big thanks to Justin at Lost Treasures in Brisbane Australia, my old stomping ground for helping me get this coil, he really went out of his way to help me. The good news is the White's coil cover fits the Garrett 10x6" Coil perfectly! I took a bit of a gamble getting a Whites coil cover for my Garrett coil seeing I was ordering the Whites coil anyway so the dealer could slip it in the same package. A nice snug fit. At first I didn't think it was going to fit as it was quite hard to get on, but once on it was locked on tight 🙂 So if anyones considering getting a Garrett 24 (I would be) and sees some dealer clearing out old Whites 24k coil covers, grab some! A design feature that may go unnoticed is the tapered edge on the 10x6" coil which you can see in the photos above, it'll help it glide over small stones when being scrubbed on the ground with less impact. I like that. It's quite funny as my 10x6" is a black coil with a White cover..... and my new Whites 6" coil is a white coil with a black cover 😛 I still have another of these 6" Whites coils coming from the US, it's currently in Erlanger, Kentucky.... I'm kinda hoping that's where KFC came from! 🙂 I've taken the 6" for a quick test run and really like it, sensitive little sucker and runs nice and smooth although I think that's the norm for the 24k, it's such a smooth running detector. The little 6" is a bit bigger than I expected, not quite 6" it seems but still, small enough, and I'll be getting the Nel Snake coil when it's released as my tiny coil anyway, this 6" size is still a good one with reasonable ground coverage for a smaller coil. It's noticeably bigger than the Equinox 6" I can't wait for Garrett to come out with their 6" coil, I'll be ordering it straight away as I think it's going to be the most used coil for the detector, with the Snake being the specialty coil. The 24k has taken over as my primary gold prospecting VLF from my GM which I retired to use my Equinox and now the 24k. I never really took to the GB2, sure it had the sensitivity I desire I just found it fiddly and missed having Target ID's. The GB2 also was terrible with it's recovery speed or something, put a hot rock near a bit of gold and the blanking out of the hot rock in disc or even just the sound response on the hot rock made it completely miss the bit of gold. This isn't apparent on the GM, Nox and 24k and as many of my areas have a lot of hot rocks the GB2 just didn't cut it, they'd need to release a modern version of it for me to show interest in using it much, and well... we saw what happened there. I have yet to go to the gold prospecting areas with my 24k as my area in NZ had it's first Covid lockdown since March last year right as my 24k arrived, we've come out of that now so I'll take off for a gold detect in the next few days and be the first in NZ to find gold with the Garrett 24k 🙂 A title I'll wear proudly.