phrunt

The ruler looks clear plastic to me. I had a small discussion with the Detect-spurt on Youtube and she's assured me the stability problems of the 35 are resolved on the 40, and if this is the case then the 40's probably a pretty good pinpointer.

Now I know I've only just done my morning exercise with my one sit up as I got out of bed and I'm half asleep but did this detect-spurt just turn the Pro-Find 35 on with the thing damn near touching the belt buckle de-tuning the crap out of it that she's trying to show the 40 detects a greater distance on? She does the same with the 40 but appears to hold it slightly further away from the buckle and then gets a tiny depth of about an inch the large metal object. I've started the video at the location so you don't have to put yourself through the misery of watching it all. I gave up watching the video at that point, it appeared to be just a marketing video with no real information, I'll wait for end users videos not promoters. She even said the package came from Australia when clearly on the DHL label it said country of origin Malaysia 😛

I'm about as excited about that as well, nothing really... A red paint job, slightly larger speaker holes to let more noise out and make it easier to clean but still smack where your hand holds the pinpointer blocking the noise, the guy in the video even does it and says whoops, covering the speaker there. 🙂 They've added the desperately needed rapid re-tune that other Pinpointers have had forever onto it so you don't have to keep turning it off and on again when it goes crazy, sort of a bandaid to the Pro Find 35's instability in higher sensitivity settings where the only option is turning it off and on again over and over again or running in a low sensitivity and losing a lot of performance.. 10% deeper they say, I recall hearing something like that with the GPZ 19" coil. I'd like to put that to the test. All in all they are not selling me one of these. My 35 experience was so bad they'd need to do a redesign and give it to me for free before I'd want it, not just a few small modifications. Hopefully they've fixed up the Pro-Find 35's instability and then it would be a reasonable pinpointer for someone that only wants to use Minelab.

NZ is Minelab territory, I would say mainly because Minelab come out at reasonable prices. Nokta never had their Legend price advantage here with it being the same price as an Equinox. We had a First Texas dealer when I started detecting here a couple of years ago, but the detectors were insanely priced, a F75 or Gold Bug Pro costing more than a Nox 800, it's no wonder they didn't survive. Garrett are another example of extremely overpriced in our market with the Garrett AT Gold for example being about a hundred more expensive than an Equinox 800 and the AT Max being the price of the Equinox 900. The original XP Deus has had a massive price slash lately to be Nox pricing, the Deus 2 is Manticore pricing. No other brand is putting any effort into pricing to even be competitive to Minelab for largely lessor products, the problem gets even worse at entry level pricing where Minelab shows them who's boss. It's lucky Minelab exist here or detecting would be a very expensive hobby for not so great detectors.

I believe there are ski fields in the area too, get that Nox up under the lifts and around where people park up their skis, taking gloves off can be a risky process with rings hooked on them and people do it on lifts to play with their phones, and obviously when they park up their skis and snowboards to go eat or something. It's been one of my best places for detecting.

or more complaints 😛

haha no, I'm not much of a water hunter so don't have an Excalibur.

It was this forum that got me started with metal detecting, I have a lot of spare time on my hands and was looking for something to do, reading about the adventures of those using detectors sounded pretty exciting, reading peoples stories about finds and adventures in Alaska which is very similar to here really appealed to me and so my metal detecting life began. I signed up, asked questions about what to buy and how to do it and everyone was very welcoming and helpful. This forum was a life changer for me, so it is appreciated. It's like the ideal world, where everyone is helpful and nice to each other. It's people that made this place what it is and your guidance and setting the ultimate example of how people should act has made it the place that it is, thanks Steve. It sounded a bit like you're quitting detecting for a while there, but it is more like you're becoming one of us, just a user that can kick back and enjoy it rather than having all the pressures on you doing the product testing and working with manufacturers. You were involved in all of my favourite metal detectors so I appreciate that, if all I had was a GPZ and Equinox I'd be content.

Yes, the Pro-Find runs stable in low sensitivity, and won't do the falsing in the air, but then it's not good enough performance to make it worth using when I can run my Carrot and XP Mi-4 maxed out on their sensitivity and get better depth/sensitivity. My Carrot NEVER falses, if it makes a beep there is metal there. I'll be sure to test it out with the GPZ as the main reason I wanted it was for prospecting, as you can see in the videos with the gold chains its more sensitive than the other pinpointers and this is meant to carry over to small gold nuggets too. I hope it's true. 🙂

Something I should add to my previous post is products like this have no value, to the manufacturer they would cost more to pay to be checked than they're worth, they're never worth shipping back to the factory in whatever country for warranty purposes, often manufacturers have agreements with companies like Minelab that they just have to declare how many faulty units they get based on trust. The value is to the customer due to the price they paid, the manufacturing cost is so small the labour charge to even pay some third party to look at them before even attempting to fix them is more than they're worth. We pay a very high price for something of very little value. I know this from experience, this isn't an assumption. For example, Minelab are not going to pay some service agent in the USA $20 to pull apart some $10 headphones to see why they failed.

I know of another guy that had the same problem where the speaker completely stopped working. He's had it repaired already in the USA a few weeks ago.

I was lucky and one of the X-coils guys were kind enough to acquire it for me and send it over to me, it's on it's way at the moment, that way I don't have to try buy it from some foreign store that may never ship it. I'll be sure to let everyone know what I think of it.

I doubt they know or even checked, things like this are disposable. The Manufacturer of them will just swap them out to a new pair for Minelab just like Minelab are doing for you.

You can use EMI paint to paint the wire onto the tape, you don't solder it. You can also buy electrically conductive wire glue .

I suspect you're right.

I tried various high quality batteries on both the ones I had including a Li-ion, I'm down to one now as I just had two at once as my dealer sent me a replacement to compare against my first one. I even tried true 9.2 volt batteries photographers use in flashes. Nothing made it as stable as it should be for me. Glad it helped yours as yes I do notice they play up worse when low battery but in my case that wasn't the cause of the issues and then Minelab confirming the behaviour is normal.

Mirrors my testing, with the biggest improvements on the tiniest of gold, the bigger the gold gets the less the improvement is if there is any at all, it's really that 0.0X of a gram to 0.1 of a gram stuff the update really improved and that's the stuff I contacted Minelab about saying it's performance was lacking.

I have a Sphinx 03 on it's way to me now, looking forward to comparing it to the others to see if it lives up to the good feedback I've heard so far. At the moment my favourite two pinpointers are the Garrett AT and the XP Mi-4, the many others I have rarely ever get used. The F-Pulse and Pulse Dive are my beach pinpointers as they're superior in the salt but I don't often beach hunt. The Sphinx needs not to interfere with my GPZ and GPX and have the small gold sensitivity of the TRX while also being able to handle the ground the TRX can't in high sensitivity and I will be happy.

You mean this? My dealer swapped it over for me and the replacement was worse! So I contact Minelab and they say it's normal.... normal for the Pro-Find I guess but my various other pinpointers don't do it except the TRX. Mine also stops working until I turn it off and on sometimes. It's a pretty poor pinpointer, I think they had a first year engineering student design it 🙂 The Garrett Pro Pointer AT is far superior. Garrett have recently extended warranty on their products so perhaps you should see if your Pro Pointer is still under warranty now they've extended it to 3 years?

I can't even remember when it first came to market but people were saying in April 21 they had them in Australia, so it was quite a while after release it was being talked about. Both you and JP were on the money really, knowing it was behaving like EMI but not caused by external EMI sources. The speaker was the explanation as the problem was worse when using speaker as JP noted in September 21. It took until March 2022 for Minelab to come out with an evasive excuse product notice basically saying there is no fault. "Because the detector is generally used in an outdoor, open environment, the speaker plays the audio with a high volume to account for wind and other ambient noises. Due to the highly sensitive nature of the GPX6000, in some circumstances the speaker itself may introduce detector noise that sounds like interference. If you experience this situation, Minelab recommends first performing a Noise Cancel by holding the coil still and about 10 cm (4”) above, and parallel, to the ground. Press the Noise Cancel button on the control panel and wait for about 5 seconds until the confirmation tone signals the end of the Noise Cancel procedure. This will cause the detector to operate on a different frequency where the noise should not persist. Typically, the speaker is best to use when digging to locate a nugget. Minelab recommends for best detecting results that operators use either the wireless or wired headphones which will not have this problem and will also suppress any environmental noise and ensure the Operator detects the smallest and deepest of nuggets. Should the problem persist, please contact your Dealer." They put this little line at the bottom saying if you've tried everything above and its still noisy to contact your dealer, in other words if it works better on headphones you're fine, if it is crazy on headphones too you may have a bad coil and need it replaced by the dealer which no doubt by that time they'd been replacing a number of noisy coils. Finally on the 26th of August 2022 over a year after release they posted the new notice saying there is indeed a fault causing it, although this notice was only visible to those in Australia for quite a time after that. It's hard to know the reasons for their delays, perhaps they were genuinely slow at finding a solution, or they were reluctant to admit fault as they know that's a big expense doing all the repairs. I don't know if Minelab did wrong by their customers in this process as they never speak so you never know what's going on behind the scenes but it sure seems like there was a cover up going on but the voices just kept getting louder and forced their hand.

Even when the website came out with the notice they've tried to get out of fixing every detector by saying it's an infrequent problem acting as if it's only rare and on some detectors yet I've not heard a person yet who's had it done that doesn't notice an improvement and many are reporting an improvement even when using headphones. Then they go on to say they've incorporated the fix into every new detector. Minelab has identified infrequent cases where users hear audio feedback when using the internal speaker. Please refer to the product notice on our website by clicking on the link below. https://www.minelab.com/support/product-notices?article=482551 Minelab have produced a hardware update that removes this effect. This update is present in all newly manufactured GPX6000s. In the event you have a production standard without this update and have experienced audio feedback when using the speaker please follow the procedure below in Australia to arrange for this update to be completed on your detector. Please note for maximum performance headphones should be used. Headphone performance is unaffected with this update. From what I can tell, it wasn't an identified problem by ANYONE until many months after release, the first murmurs of the problem were many months after release when some people starting pointing out it appears to be more stable on headphones so it was missed for quite some time I think. Either way, if anyone should have picked up the problem it's the engineers.

The thing that puzzles me about Minelab is they don't seem to do any failure analysis to work out why the problem exists and how to remedy it. The same weak ears transitioned from CTX to Equinox to Vanquish and they were replacing coils over and over again for a decade for people with broken ears yet they did nothing about it until finally the Manticore came along, they knew they were a problem right back on the CTX and even if it is end users breaking them by leaning on detectors and so on they were not near as robust as other brands and I think they only did something about it then as Nokta were giving them a bit of a hard time about the quality of their products without even mentioning any names, but everyone knew who they were talking about as everyone knew Minelab had the problems. The GPX 6000 comes along and now what 2 years later people are still buying them with dodgy coils, at this stage at least so far it doesn't look like they've found the root cause of the problem or they are just doing the same as they did with the coil ears letting the problem ride out, perhaps its cheaper for them to replace coils than it is to fix the problem. The shipping back to the service agent in USA seems quite expensive, here it was $11 for my GPX and insurance was automatically included so no big deal and that turns into about 7USD but you guys pay a lot so it's a real inconvenience sending stuff back to them all the time to repair/replace. You would think the engineers would be desperate to pull apart faulty coils and work out why they're failing so they can adjust manufacturing to prevent further failures, which would be a normal business practice. I really don't understand their way of operating but it sure doesn't give confidence in their products and shows a certain level of contempt to their customers.

I'm surprised the Chinese Cloners never made them, they've duplicated many Whites models before and especially after their demise and the Tesoro's would be such an easy clone for them even with schematics floating around for models to make it even easier yet they never bothered. I guess they just figured they're too outdated to make it worthwhile. I expected when they went bust the cloners would go nuts making them but it never took place. I guess they'll only clone what they think will sell well enough to make it viable and if they can't sell lots of them with their very cheap prices Tesoro had little hope in todays market. Part of that problem being the lifetime warranty, why buy new when a decade old second hand one is still under warranty forever so just as good as new. Great for the customer, terrible for the business unless they're a very innovative business and new models obsolete old models so people want to upgrade, in their case little changed with models so they killed their own business.

When I had trouble pairing mine to my GPX 6000 this was the solution, so worth trying just in case I guess Conducting a factory reset on the speaker will clear all past pairing data and restore the default settings for the product. You may want to reset your speaker if you have trouble pairing it with your devices. Step 1: Turn on the speaker. Push the power switch towards the Power Icon side. You'll hear "Power On," and the speaker will vibrate. Step 2: Reset the Headphones. Press and hold the volume + and - buttons simultaneously for about 5 seconds until the LED briefly turns PINK. You'll also hear two "beeps," indicating that the speaker have reset. The speaker should then go into pairing mode and the LED will alternate between flashing RED & BLUE. You are now free to pair the speaker with any device!

I know a guy that bought an Invenio Pro, the detector its based off is very lacking and the technology is not even remotely valid for the price they're asking. In saying that, I applaud them for coming out with something different, albeit very over priced. I don't think they should stop development, but perhaps not release another model until it's ready or dramatically lower the price. Hopefully the imaging turns into something we all want to use someday and becomes a standard feature on detectors.