phrunt

I've used the Quest Wirefree on my GPZ with no issues, it's latency isn't as fast as aptX LL however it's more than adequate for a gold detector. It's range is better than the WM12 that came with the GPZ too. I've used it on my GPX 4500 too with no problems. The 2.4ghz wireless has a better range and stability than Bluetooth. I purchased mine from Nenad, always a smooth easy transaction with Nenad, I wish he was a NZ Dealer 😉

I guess for me I was used to the 21/22 target ID on a coin where as now that same coin is anywhere bouncing between 60 and 70, sometimes bigger, the jump seems too big for just the extended ID's of the Manticore. I should also point out that I'm talking about deep targets, I don't care about shallow coins which my definition of a shallow coin is 8" or less they're often my junkers, I want the deep coins and they are the ones where ID accuracy has gone downhill. If I was chasing shallow coins then yes, it's not too far off the Nox accuracy even with the bigger ID range. Other that that its' a damn fine detector. I guess I was spoilt with the CTX and it's deadly accurate ID's too even with an expanded range.

I doubt you'd be disappointed with the GPX 5000, fantastic detector that can handle just about anything you throw at it, with some modifications like a different battery and a wireless transmitter you've got yourself a fine machine. It's also the detector with the most coil options on the market and second hand coils go for reasonable prices if you wanted to get a range of coils on the cheap. I wouldn't go a 3500 unless you had to, the 5000 at least is still current and can be serviced and repaired if faults should arise. With a small coil or smallish spiral coil it's also very sensitive to small gold which is the most common out there, not quite GPX 6000 level or Axiom level by the sounds of it but pretty good none the less and you have your GM1000 for the tiny bits anyway.

I think you made the right decision, you're at the cutting edge of technology rather than a decades old design. Both are great detectors but I think it's best if you're investing a large sum of money to get something modern, just because the AT Max is priced as high as it is doesn't mean it should be. I only have the AT Gold not the Max, and I really like it but I'd rarely pick to use it over my Equinox (Legend's twin brother with brittle bones and incontinence). The Multi freakers are just like having multiple detectors in one, so you really bought a few different detectors with the Legend rather than boxed yourself into a single frequency.

That's interesting about the 11" and not a surprise, many arguments were based upon people loving and struggling with that coil. I don't think anyone was wrong it was their coils causing the discrepancy. It's truly sad their quality has gone to these levels. The 11" is a good coil when it works, it's super sensitive but it seems you can't trust it. The day JW's died was a shock, he was just detecting away near me and his detector went erratic like EMI, this was certainly not unusual at the time as the EMI fix didn't exist then, so he turned it off to do another of the many factory resets we had to do at the time to keep it stable, and then it came up with a coil error, and never worked again. Mine was just erratic from the start and I hated my 6000 until I bought a Coiltek coil and worked out my 11" was faulty, then had my 11" replaced and was happy with the 11" after that. Putting manufacturing into the hands of the lowest bidder isn't the best way to get a good product. NF and Coiltek appear to have done a great job on their 6000 coils, and NF in particular judging by stricks comment above have made an outstanding coil when it comes to construction quality. It's interesting they dropped the warranty from 3 years down to 2 years on their GPX 6000 coils though. the GPX 5000 coils were all 3 years, not sure what the Z-search has, I never intended to use the warranty on mine as I gave it the snip a week after getting it, the sacrificial lamb. In this case we are fortunate Minelab allowed aftermarket coils so early on with the 6000, as it took many years for the 7000 to get its first aftermarket coils. Maybe Minelab knew their coils were bad, if people move off them onto aftermarket there is less chance they'd need to warranty their 11" as they won't use it. I'm looking forward to the Sadie size, I may even buy the 16x10" too so I have a good range of sizes and I think that's a great size for doing some patch hunting on the 6000 and really patch hunting and tiny gold are the detectors strongest points so may as well take advantage of that.

That could well be my problem and also why I'm seeing bouncy ID's a lot even though I'm in mild soil, rarely do I find a decent coin shallower than my Carrot depth. The Nox 800 was able to ID them fine with great accuracy, the Manticore can't, usually 10 digits range if not more. The Nox was lucky to have 2 digits variation. Perhaps I need to experiment more with settings and try clear it up more, sensitivity lowering certainly improves it.

I would like to say in the same time frame you're talking about your detectors I'll be talking about mine the same way, a couple of which I've paid almost 10 grand for, yet I honestly think they'll not even last much more than 10 years if that and one of them I'd be surprised if it lasts 5 years let alone a few decades or more. These White's machines are high quality troopers as evident by the age of them and the devoted users still swinging them. Electronics are becoming more and more disposable every year so I would say keep them if you enjoy them, you know them and love them and you'd struggle to get them back if you sold them. A new detector will have better features and be lighter and possibly find more. If you're struggling to find stuff then maybe a new detector may help, if you're doing fine and are happy I see no reason to change and start learning all over again. I can have a great time with any detector you throw into my hands, and that's what it's all about. Depending on where you are (soil type) and what you do with your detectors even perhaps just selling one and buying a modern entry level detector like a Vanquish, X-terra Pro or Simplex or even the crazy low priced relatively high end Legend might give you a boost into the new modern detectors without paying too much money.

that's awesome, I'm always on the lookout to buy an old detector, they just don't seem to exist in New Zealand. I just want to experience what people did in the early days of detecting long before my time and I must admit I'm a bit of a collector 😛

I have confidence they will fix it, especially on the 900, it's just a blinged up 800 and includes extra Target ID's with the same software tweaked a bit, it's instability should only be jumping around an extra three or four numbers over what you'd expect with the 800 with it's larger ID range. Something more is going on by the sounds of it, the Manticore with less ID's should be even more stable than the 900 but it doesn't sound like it is. I'm sure all these detectors share a lot of the code and hardware with each other. If anyone recalls I was constantly commenting how stable the Nox 800 and Vanquish are in my soils, to the point I cherry picked almost constantly and was rarely wrong with my prediction of which coin it was going to be that popped up. I can't do that with the Manticore, I can't have that confidence. Some may say I need to learn the Manticore, I didn't need to learn the Nox or Vanquish, I turned them on and found coins with great success based off the target ID's alone. I don't need 100 hours to see that a coin in mild soils with no junk is not as easy to find accurately as it once was, I've done side by sides with the Nox 800 and Vanquish on targets against the Manticore, I know which works best at identification in my conditions, in saying that I've had a lot more than 100 hours now but I knew long before 100 hours, in 10 hours perhaps. I hope they can improve it, but I fear with detecting there seems to be a bit of give and take, they gave other improvements maybe at the detriment of Target ID's. The thing that bothers me the most about this is they were and are still marketing the Manticore as having improved Target ID's over the Nox 600/800... and that to me in my conditions which for most detectors are the easiest conditions around is simply not true. I would not trust accepting and rejecting targets with such unstable Id's. I could do it down to the notch on the Nox. If they can just fix this the Manticore is near perfection for me, it's the only gripe I have with it although a rather big one, if they fix it I'll be happy as can be. Everything else about it is fantastic, they just weren't capable of hitting a home run on this one and the original Equinox is the detector that was the real game changer. I believe the Manticore is very overpriced considering its shortfall. Please fix it Minelab, at least acknowledge it and say you're working on a firmware update to resolve it, give your customers some indication that you care. At the moment those singing loudly with disappointment are damaging your sales far more than saying we didn't quite get it right and we are working on a firmware update to fix it.

I'm sure I've been able to replicate my Simplex sounds on my daughters Whoopie Cushion.

When I first started detecting I detected a section of land behind my house, it had a house on it that was knocked down as it had a fire, the house wasn't destroyed by the fire but the house was old and really not worth fixing so it was disposed of, when I went detecting there I found some old coins, quite a few of them, they were in great condition and coins that shouldn't be in such good condition and should have had corrosion, they'd only been there about a year at most I guess, copper coins and so on, none were particularly deep although once the house was removed the land it was on became a paddock for the surrounding farm and they had plowed it and put in grass seed to feed sheep and just connected it onto the rest of the paddocks that surround it. I found some really great condition coins, I suspect someone that lived at the houses coin collection, it was well over a 100 year old house, perhaps it was hidden somewhere in the house the current people living it in did not know about and when they used the excavator to smash up the house and take the rubble away the coins remained in the long grass surrounding it. I ended up buying the land and haven't found anything else decent there since except some lead toy figurines and a few coins, nothing to match the coins I originally found near the old house site. Either way, long story short if someone found those coins in the condition I found them I'd think they were lying.... but I found them, many were from overseas, they were in that condition so I know it was real. Sometimes finds may seem unrealistic but there maybe a reason behind it even the finder doesn't know. In saying that, I'm sure there are tonnes of fake finds out there, people may like the attention or think people will like them better if they find good stuff, who knows. I thank those coins for getting me hooked on detecting 🙂

There was a rumour for the Manticore at least a software update is coming to calm the stability of ID's down, I hope it happens as my intention was to stop using my 800 and migrate onto the Manticore. If they can do it for the Manticore you would think they could for the Nox 900. I guess we wait and see, I'm all good though, I'm very happy with my Manticore other than the ID stability being a backwards step from the Nox 800. In every other way so far I'd prefer it over the Nox 800. Tiny gold is not yet determined without the smaller coil. At the moment my best method of having more stable ID's with the Manticore is lowering the sensitivity right down, and it does work, in lower sensitivity it's far more stable with ID's, a little worse than the Nox but not too bad at all, and still maintains the depth very well, I have no fear running sensitivity of 16 out of 35 that I will miss deep silvers, I'm not sure if the Nox 900 works the same way on the sensitivity scale where lower sensitivities are so powerful by comparison to the Nox 800 where if I tried lower sensitivities like that I'd loose the deep coins quickly. Beach mode in a field situation also improves ID stability for some reason and again, still hits the deep stuff fine but can be run at higher sensitivity levels without going unstable on the ID's.

Lower the Impact price to the X-Terra price! Job done. I guess the X-terra will still win on weight and beach performance but other than that...

Likely too late in the cycle to adjust the production run, what they can adjust and I expect they will is the pricing.

Sometimes I wonder if some of these reports of the 11" being unstable are due to slightly faulty 11" coils, my first one was like that, I hated it, it put me off using the 6000, then I had it replaced under warranty and it was like I had a new detector. Yes my old 11" worked, it found gold and did what it was meant to but the detector was much more unstable and noisy than my new 11".

I think you're misunderstanding, it has to be able accept the EMI, even if it causes an undesirable effect, but that doesn't mean they can't shift frequencies within their permitted range to avoid it causing detrimental performance.

All good, we have the X-rays now from Strick and his mighty X-ray machine, turns out NF, Coiltek and Minelab have done all the same windings, this is the 12x7" NF 🙂 I had forgotten you told me, sorry, I'm getting old.

If they keep the 800 alive and kicking after stock runs out they may build it into the 900 body and provide the new model 11" tougher ears coil with it, if they do that I'd seriously consider buying a new 800, especially if it remains cheaper than the 900.

I'd just go the 800 myself in your case Jason, pick up a cheap one from someone "upgrading" to the 900 😛 You don't go diving, you look for gold and if you want ID accuracy for cherry picking the 800 is great. I'm not at all surprised about your report Jeff, I've been saying the same about the Manticore ID's since I got one, a big disappointment there, especially seeing they advertise it as having better ID's, that's a blatant lie if you ask me. I like everything about the Manticore, in fact love it, the ID's are it's let down, of course with messy ID's comes messy tones. It's certainly a step backwards when it comes to ID's and for that reason alone I will still keep using my 800 for situations I need that accuracy. The CTX is well and truly still king for ID.

New and exciting coils to come in the future! YAY! Thanks for explaining it Trevor! There was some confusion as to terms used and bunch was confused with bundle 🙂 I'm very happy with my 10x5".

I thought I'd re-post stricks excellent X-ray of the Coiltek Goldhawk 10x5" here as there was some confusion around the windings inside the Coiltek Goldhawk coils, it turns out their windings are the same style semi spiral as the 11" Minelab stock coil so good news, they've managed to keep the same winding type while making a more stable quieter running coil with no difficulty being tilted on it's sides detecting piles and so on.

Wow that's amazing, Rutus are well ahead of the pack when it comes to having a user friendly method of EMI mitigation. I love that its live showing EMI so you can sit and watch it for a while and mentally work out where is best too not just relying on automatic noise cancellation that may have found a good spot at the time but moments later it changes. This detector really shows how much further they can take the noise cancellation process. Targets won't go away while EMI will as you slightly shift frequencies so you would think some smart person would be able to come up with a way to automatically shift away from EMI while you're detecting. It won't see targets as EMI as targets will come regardless of if it's trying to shift away from them. It'd probably take quite a lot of processing power but there is nothing saying a detector can't have multiple cores or CPU's.

I had a few people think my silver finds were fake, sometimes my coins come out of the ground looking like they were never in it. Especially silver coins. It must just be my soil type. Here is a quick example, I just pulled up the first photo of a days hunt to find a coin that looked like it was never really lost. Look at the 1940 threepence second from left, looks near new. The others look pretty good too, all I do is wash the dirt off under the tap with a bit of water. I always clean my coins before putting the photos up so they can be seen better, no point putting up a dirty coin photo. I was even accused of this photo being fake having coins I didn't find on it, I found every last one of them and have photos of each ones dig hole 🙂 So while I agree it's sad some feel the need to put up fake photos of finds, and the dodgy Youtube channels and so on that are doing it for some sort of hits financial gain are terribly wrong sometimes people get false accusations too which can be a bit frustrating. It's when you put up photos like this some start to understand it's probably not fake. This was all from one small field, and it's had all the spendable cash removed before the photo being taken, so another hundred or so coins taken away and spent 😛 Successful nugget finds sometimes get accused of being fake too, perhaps because they may seem too good to be true. Sometimes it's jealously I guess. But it goes both ways, yes people fake finds, but people also find stuff and get accused of it being fake when it's not.

Yea The X-Terra took everyone by surprise, many here even thought it had to be a Chinese knock off as it just didn't seem realistic. And here we are 🙂 I can buy one today. It did serious damage to the new Simplex rehashes before they even got a chance on the market. Other than the slight frequency change to move off the problematic frequency (especially with pin pointers) they were a bit of a First Texas move anyway.

Sorry, yes it's confusing, spiral is another way of saying flat wound where the windings (wires) are laid out flat with each wire next to the other, and semi spiral they layer one layer of windings on top of another laid out flat but taking up less of the coils surface area being doubled up, a few reasons for this and I guess having it fully laid out flat could make the coils hyper sensitive and saturate on ground too badly for the GPX 6000 being such a sensitive detector, they worked very well on the 4500/5000 though. The GPX 6000 coils such as the Coiltek 10x5" are traditional mono's with just one winding transmitting and receiving and laid out flat with multiple layers, a compromise between fully flat wound and bundle wound. Bundle wound the wires are all bundled together like a rope, a little less sensitive but bundle wound coils tend to have hotter edges with the field of detection concentrated at the edge of the coil. Concentric has an outer transmit winding and an inner receive winding in loops, some cases two inner receive windings depending on the detector. Concentric coils can be (Spiral) flat wound or bundle wound too. I'm sure someone could explain it better than me and hopefully will, I hope this helps clear it up a bit though. Each coil type has its advantages and disadvantages.