phrunt

Yea, but they'd be Minelab branded scales and if the same engineer makes them as made the Manticore or Equinox 700/900 the scales numbers would bounce around all over the place so you'd find yourself estimating the weight of your gold.

yep, when people say they found gold so small it shows up as 0's on their scales I tell them to buy some decent scales 🙂

The Time Ranger Pro/13" Ultimate is a great combination. Good luck with your trip, Norway is an awesome country.

Thanks yes they're my go-to settings, we don't really have too much EMI around here compared to high noise places like the USA I would guess. I have the volume down as I run with the Steelphase SP01 Audio enhancer which boosts it right up again, but I do run higher volume sometimes. It will feel different as they're lead pellets, tiny gold responds better than lead pellets in general because of the round sphere type shape of the pellets I believe, flatten them out and they respond much better so I'm just using difficult to find targets to demonstrate the sensitivity, I've done it for most coils I own on my Youtube so you could see the difference with the 15"CC if you want here and if you snoop around my videos I think you'll see where I do similar testing using small gold nuggets (flakes) comparing the coils too. I will try it again with a lower threshold and higher volume at some point and see if I can see any difference. I use the little lead pellets to play around and test settings and sensitivity on all my coils and detectors to work out which I want to use for which task.

I mostly only find small gold, very small gold really, all good advice, the 15" Concentric coil is far more sensitive than the 12" Z-Search on small gold especially at depth but overall tiny target sensitivity too but it's also requiring an adapter and obviously a more expensive coil and Phasetech is right the 15" Concentric has about a 10" coils ground coverage when run in difficult, slightly more I'd say close to 12" if run in normal due to the winding configuration so it's not perfect as a patch hunter although I use it for that as I desire the sensitivity being in a small gold area. I don't mind overlapping my swings as I'd be doing it regardless of which coil I use, it's all part of tiny gold hunting. In standard form off the shelf with no adapters involved and seeing you're considering Tibooburra known for it's very small gold I would say the 12" Z-search is a reasonable option being the smallest plug and play coil but not by much, I barely find it anymore sensitive than the standard 14x13" coil in fact personally I find the 14x13" better overall, but I run in normal, so I can't really comment on difficult and the difference between the two. In normal there really isn't much in it at all and I'd only buy the Z-search if I wanted a lighter coil more so than more sensitive. These videos show the small gold performance by using a small lead pellets as a comparison between the Z-search 12" and the 14x13" Standard coil, it gives you a basic idea of the sensitivity levels between the two of them Yes, they're air tests, yes they're lead pellets but the purpose isn't to do with ground performance, it's the overall sensitivity of the coil to small targets. Imagine trying to recover the same size/weight nugget in a scoop and this is what you're seeing with the pellets. It also shows you the spots on the coil to waive your scoop over if you're recovering very small gold. If it was me, and you were considering buying the 12" I'd consider it more if weight was a factor more so than tiny gold performance, that's in my conditions anyway and being able to run in normal. The "difficult" people may have a varying opinions. I believe in Tibooburra the soils pretty mild, and people seem to run their GPZ with Concentric coils in normal there from memory, I could be wrong but I'm pretty confident I've been told that so perhaps the 14x13" runs in normal there too and if it is I wouldn't be too worried about buying another coil, after all you have a GPX 6000 at your disposal too for the tiny gold and the 11" GPX 6000 coil is fantastic on tiny gold, no need to change that to another coil for finding tiny gold. I should add something to take into account is some people say the 12" Z-search runs smoother than their 14x13", I personally haven't noticed this but it could be a difficult soil thing.

I haven't got the weight yet as all the prototypes are in the hands of people using them, X-coils don't have one on hand however it's unlikely to be all that heavy, the stock GPZ 14x13" is about 1300 grams from memory, the 22" Concentric coil for the GPZ from X-coils is right about on 1500 grams including skid plate so my guess is under 2000 grams. I'd not be surprised if the Minelab GPZ 19" coil weighs more at 1830 grams especially seeing GPX windings are lighter than GPZ. It would work on detectors like the GP3500.

One of the major things you'll find with something like that Manticore that you'll miss with your Equinox 800 is the big hole in your wallet buying the Manticore leaves. Detectors were already so good before these new ones come out that there is not a significant difference in my opinion, yes they have strong points older models may not, how much that changes someones finds really depends on what they hunt and where, for a majority of people I suspect there would be very little difference in their finds.

yea, I can't imagine it's light, but if I was in a place that was viable to swing such a beast I'd gladly swing it. It was made because of popular demand in their part of the world for ancient gold relics.

They must have really wanted it bad to import from Australia... bet that cost a mint

I will find out for you.

yea, the poll only let me ask 3 questions.

A couple of years ago X-coils discontinued older legacy model GPX coils, however demand has been large in their part of the world by relic hunters and big deep gold hunters for a large coil, so they come up with the goods with a 32" Spiral wound GPX 4500/5000 coil. It's an absolute monster of a coil, I can't imagine this being sold into the international market due to shipping a coil this size, hopefully the people in Europe can find some good deep relics and gold with this thing. It's good seeing some life brought into older models with all the excitement and talk these days of the newer models.

Thanks, fixed. I don't think you can change your vote though.

I thought it's time we kicked off a poll to see how happy people are with their purchase if they've purchased one of the new models. The forum limits the number of questions you can ask so it's a pretty simple poll to get an idea of how many people bought one of these new models and how many are finding it as good or better than their old model. Feel free to comment below with other things you're found with the new models, hopefully Minelab reads it and takes not of anything people bring up of importance.

That's great to hear, I've always found Minelab customer service good but I've obviously never used the US repair agent. With spam filters these days which are pretty necessary on publicly broadcasted email addresses it's pretty easy for an email to disappear into space. Excellent they contacted you and sorted you out, never heard of someone to get the fix done and not be happy with the results, it's the primary reason I've stuck with my 6000 and not swinging an Axiom right now, seeing I've invested so much into the 6000 I've just stuck with it after the fix, and really like it now. Let us know how you go with Garrett and the arm cuff, I doubt you'll be disappointed in their response.

yup, that's the puzzle.

I'm very pleased you are getting the EMI fix done, you won't regret that one. It's hard not to like Garrett as a business, solid products and a good ethos as a business that's focused on their customers, something some other manufacturers lack.

Skilled repair, I couldn't have done better myself, in fact I'd probably do quite a bit worse 🙂 I'm sure Garrett will replace the cuff for you no problems at all. My experience with Garrett has been nothing but positive. I've never had to use warranty on my Garrett products but they've been plenty helpful in other ways when I've needed it buying bits and pieces and even helping me get a detector I couldn't buy locally by assisting by getting it all the way from the US of A.

Thanks for the post, I had a friend who tried out the Gold Finder 2000 and was quite disappointed by its fine gold performance vs the GM1000 which he was more used to using, the 24k on the other hand is a beast!

I can just picture you sitting in the sand in your budgie smugglers pushing it around looking for coins Mitchel 🙂 You maybe able to retire your Nox.

I for one won't be flashing back, in my mild soils the update is exactly what I was hoping for. It's kept depth the same while improving target ID's.

ahh yup, I was able to replicate your detectors setting behaviour. Damn, I was hoping it was as simple as you needed a replacement detector.

Sorry about the bad lighting, but there is most certainly something wrong with your firmware, it really makes no sense either but with mine, as is meant to happen when you change stabliser off 0 it's meant to turn on, and off when you go back to 0, yours doesn't do this and that to me makes absolutely no sense, you still have a software problem. Maybe your Manticore has bad memory corrupting the files as what you're getting is weird, it makes no sense, they should all behave the exact same running the same software unless something is corrupting the software and in your case it sounds like that's exactly what's happening. I'm just trying to translate your issue into computers as that's what I know and for example if you were to have a computer with a bad memory module and you flash it's bios with an update you will get corruption in the update, it could be as simple as text doesn't come out how you expect or it could be much more of an issue causing the flash to fail, but a common thing was something like the bootloader screen normally saying American Megatrends AMI Bios version 101.10 or something, and after the flash with the bad memory it would say A%mer-can M^gatrends AM7 Biov ver0sion 1.~!.`10 with the code being damaged in the transfer by the bad memory. This seems to me like it's what's happening with your detector, something similar. I don't think your problem is firmware related, I think you've got a faulty detector.

I think a mistake Minelab have made is allowing saved settings to transfer across between firmware versions. An example of this is when people roll back firmware versions they've had things like the big red numbers exist and stuck on with a firmware that didn't even have them. I think best practice with Manticore firmware updates would be the factory reset before and after updating which is what I did with mine, and generally always do on detectors that update. A habit I learnt over the years flashing many thousands of laptop and computer motherboards. It's always best to start from a clean slate.

Some interesting reading. https://www.tuko.co.ke/416534-rick-ness-net-worth-how-earn-episode.html