phrunt

I'm impatiently waiting, it's a slow process that is for sure. The next detector Minelab release they should keep their trap shut until it's almost ready to release and hold off releasing it until they're actually ready, coils ready to go, detector ready to go and plenty of stock availability and they'll find they have a much smoother release with happy customers rather than upset ones. I'm aware some of the suggestions we as end users give would just not be suitable for them or make business sense in their situation but their current methods are just not working so management really need to try take another approach. They're upsetting far too many potential customers and in turn encouraging them to buy other brands. I expected a wait for the coils, but seeing them pump out other model detectors is a bit irritating especially when the Manticore was highly anticipated and marketed for some time before release and it's right up there as a flagship, the other models were sprung on us with no notice but still seem to have the stock available issues too. At least coils are available for the Nox 900 by using the older model coils. I'm really liking my Manticore, a bit disappointed at the start it was a step backwards in Target ID stability especially when marketing says its got more stable ID but I've calmed that down lowering sensitivity, still not as good as I hoped but not too bad now, it may improve with the 15x12" coil as I am talking about stability on deeper targets. I can't wait to get the 15x12" and 8.5x5" coils, they're the coils I'll use not the 11", I rarely used my Nox 11", same with my CTX, 11" is just a size I don't need, I only want small and big 🙂 Chase is right though, if Minelab collaborated with Coiltek in the background and Coiltek had coils available for the Manticore at release it would cause a flurry of buyers by having more options, one thing Minelab can have over XP and their Deus 2 is coils, coils that are not going to be available for the XP can easily be available for the Manticore such as small coils, yet they just don't seem to want to take advantage of this as much as they should.

Yep, I've been running 18 and been happy with the results, keeping my sensitivity lower has improved my Target ID's too so I'm happy with that. I was just so used to cranking my detectors up as high as they would go and stay stable previously so it felt weird to run a lower sensitivity, I can run on 26 and keep it stable in this particular spot I'm doing at the moment but by dropping back to 18 has improved my Target ID stability so I'm sticking with it, I've done plenty of experimenting now on deep targets, by having lower sensitivity I'm not missing anything that I can see. I've been running as low as 14 and still hitting the deep stuff.

It's pretty weird, still like that now over a month later from when I noticed it. I wonder if they even know, perhaps the person maintaining it stuffed up. A little update went on recently changing the wording of the 6000 coil regarding its waterproofing but the website didn't get fixed then.

People often say their detector picks up planes going past, yet two GPZ's can detect quite close to each other with no interference at all, it takes you going within something like 50 feet of each other to have an issue. The same with the GPX 6000's, can detect right near each other no problems. I used to have a little more trouble with my GPX 4500 picking up JW's GPZ from a good 100+ feet away and he was blind to my GPX with his GPZ. So they can pick up a plane from a great distance but can only pickup EMI from another detector from a very close range, kinda shows the detector EMI doesn't travel too far I think.

They said the lack of stock over the past few months was only part of the reason, I guess it was the final decision maker though. This appears to be the network of dealers that they supply so it's pretty far reaching. That's right Mitchel, nobody is the winner here. We want Minelab to do well, the better they do the more they'll spend on making new products and improving technology which in turn we can buy if they have stock to sell 🙂 Bad news for Minelab is bad news for us too, at least their share price has clawed back a tiny bit since the Manticore/Nox 900 release, still very well down but no longer in free fall. IDC are a multi line distributor selling Nokta, Quest, Garrett, C.Scope, Bounty Hunter, Fisher, XP, GDI and Groundtech along with lots of smaller accessories brands so who knows if their association with Nokta is anything to do with it, I highly doubt it though but I guess they'll be pushing Nokta brand from now on more so than ever. It could be the fact Minelab are including a distributor in the US in the court case with Nokta.

I have difficulty believing it could possibly be on purpose, they lose a lot of sales because of lack of stock. When detectors come out and people can't get them they must lose sales from people giving up buying another detector that's more accessible. I've got a grand or so sitting aside now waiting for Manticore coils, money they could have if they wanted it yet its sitting in my account not theirs. Many are in the same situation with not only coils but detectors too. As for coils the situation its crazy and what that distributor pointed out they can make a new model detector yet they can't even supply the current one with a big back-order list around the world. The X-terra that they are releasing at the end of this month has coils, they must have been able to make the odd coil to package up with it which could have been coils for the Manticore they were making. They can't even release one detector smoothly so why are they releasing a Manticore, Nox 700, Nox 900 and X-terra all at once? Desperation? It just makes little sense. By locking coils down so they only work on certain models it's likely made the situation worse as they have to make even more coils. I can imagine it makes life very difficult for dealers too, I thought they were just making the small dealers suffer but this place is big and the smaller dealers seem to get stock off them all across Europe. This means Manticore waiting lists are going to be reset as people will now have to buy elsewhere, and the little dealers that feed off this distributor will also be in a muddle as they're no longer getting their orders from them. It has to lead to more lost sales for Minelab. It seems they had a waiting list for the Nox 900 too at this place so those will be in a shambles too now. It's little wonder their detector sales are slow, they can't provide them to sell. This outsourcing manufacturing isn't working too well for them or the business is just so poorly run that that decisions are causing problems to be worse than they could be, or a combination of both which is most likely I think. Nokta scaled up easily for the Legend, it's selling like crazy yet they're not having big supply issues and my impression is they're a much smaller company than Minelab. They make detectors I love, but it's hard to feel the same way about the company behind them.

Here is the direct link to IDC confirming cutting all ties with Minelab. I think many of us can relate to their gripes. https://www.idc-detektor.de/magazine/Wichtige-Informationen-zu-Produkten-von-Minelab and a translated version of their notice: Important information about Minelab products We regret to inform you today that we have made the decision to no longer offer Minelab branded products. There are various reasons for this decision. The catastrophic or non-existent communication about the availability of the new models is only part of it. Our policy has always been to offer our customers the best possible experience. This not only includes honest and competent advice, but also professional service and respectful communication. But this is only possible if we have an equally respectful and trusting relationship with the manufacturers we work with. Because we will not sell any products to our customers if we do not also stand behind the manufacturer. Unfortunately, Minelab has disappointed us greatly with their behavior over the past few months and has made it impossible for us to stand by them and continue our relationship. We did not take this decision lightly, but further cooperation is not compatible with our principles. We are ending all cooperation with Minelab, which means we are stopping direct sales and distribution to all dealers as general agents for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition to the products, we will no longer offer technical support for Minelab products in the future. We always strive to act in the interest of our customers, so we hope you understand our decision. Even without Minelab, we still have an extensive range of products from fantastic brands for all explorers and outdoor enthusiasts. We look forward to continuing to offer you the best metal detector experience and our beautiful hobby. Important information for you: Repairs, warranty and guarantee cases If your Minelab device is currently being repaired by us, we will continue to process the case as before. If you have bought a Minelab tool from us in the last two years and are having problems with it, you can of course also contact us about the warranty. However, if you have an out-of-warranty problem with your Minelab equipment, or you did not purchase it from us, please contact Minelab directly: Email: service@minelab.ie Minelab Service: www.minelab.com/eur/support/service-support pre-orders For the Minelab Manticore we had set up a waiting list for customers. Unfortunately we have to cancel these pre-orders or reservations. If you are on the waiting list, you will receive a separate email. This also applies to the Equinox 900. Availability We still have a few Minelab products in stock that are available in our webshop. These will be sold off and after that we will not receive any new products.

What's laughable about this is you just don't have to care on most other detectors,when has someone ever broken an ear on a Minelab GPX coil or any of the aftermarket coils for it? a GPZ coil or any of it's aftermarket coils? So many VLF models it's unheard of breaking coil ears, even really cheap entry level type detectors, it's really a VLF problem and most noticeably a Minelab problem. Hopefully they have solved it on the Manticore as it's gone on far too long with too many models... CTX, Vanquish, Equinox 600/800, all the same pitiful ears, the 900 only has improved ears on the 11" as it's the highest risk being the most owned coil, the 6" is safer being small but the 15x12" is at high risk. Having customers having to care about a millimeter being worn off their coil ear rubbers is a joke, it should never matter, over tightening the ears should not matter, and the fact people do that is because they need to as their coil flops around if they don't as their rubber wears. it's a design problem simple as that. If they think it's acceptable they need a big warning section in the manual and a sticker on a new coil saying to be careful not to over tighten and get out your calipers and measure your coil rubber weekly otherwise most people unless reading the internet will never know just how bad the design is until it breaks. It's not like people are going crazy tightening them up, just slightly over tight bending the ears a bit and snap! Plastic just like metal has fatigue..... You know how if you bend a bit of metal enough times it snaps? and metal is a whole lot stronger than plastic.... Plastic fatigue It is the progressive and localized structural damage that occurs when a material is subjected to cyclic loading. The exposure of plastic materials to dynamic stress can produce several different responses, and will certainly alter the mechanical properties of the material Why is fatigue important in plastic product design? Fatigue occurs in plastic when stress is repeatedly applied to an area. The load does not have to be very great as to weaken or break the material immediately but over time a repeated action, each time applying a small load to an area, will break it down and cause it to fail. Design fault, NOT an end user fault. Toughen them up Minelab.

0.026 at 4" is quite the achievement.

I guess it's not only Minelab's customers that have been a bit disgruntled of late, with a terrible launch of the Manticore just not being able to supply stock while pumping out other new models they also could barely supply it annoyed more than just their customers, add to that the terrible warranty issues with faulty detectors and abnormally high numbers of warranty claims Europe's largest metal detector distributor and Minelab service agent has given Minelab the boot, no longer wanting to deal with them, I would imagine quite a big blow to Minelab. You can read the article here https://treasurehuntingworld.com/2023/03/17/international-detector-center-idc-part-ways-with-minelab/ Now Minelab should heed this warning and get their act together, release detectors they can supply and focus as much as possible on delivering a quality well tested product.

PCB's aren't human Chuck, it does not care how often its turned off and on 🙂 In fact it's better for it, many components have a powered on life expectancy such as capacitors, so having it turn off when not in use could potentially be beneficial.

It's a great time to be a buyer of detectors, Noxes going cheap as people upgrade to newer model Noxes or Manticores, models like the X-terra hitting the market killing the value of other detectors, even the old model Simplex people here are near giving away knowing the new ones are coming and the likes of the X-terra has destroyed their value. People can buy a second hand decent detector for so cheap now, I don't know if this is happening in the US too but it sure will if it hasn't already, the value of second hand detectors will dive when you can buy a new decent detector for such a cheap price.

If they factor in the high repair costs of the 6000's out in the wild as the new expected failure rate % for the 8000 they're going to be asking $15,000 for it. 🙂

That seems simple, it's still a park mode, use park 3 when comparing the Legend, you're still in default modes of the same type, it's not difficult to explain why park 3 was selected. The Equinox has park 1 and park 2 so you've still got to make a choice which to compare, to be complete ideally you'd compare all stock modes.

I find the original question to be a good one, yes the detectors have extra capability in some situations when you mess with settings, they can also be hindered if you mess with settings so people messing with them really need to know what they're doing. The earlier GPX series with its crazy number of settings was a primary example of this, people could really mess themselves up and because of it find a lot less, I guess Minelab thought that too as the next model GPX is basically settings free, they went from too many to too little 🙂 Jeff also had a decent example above. Now, as it stands if detecting basic targets with no obscure issues like a bunch of nails next to the target, a simple coin at a reasonable depth then every detector in it's equivalent default park mode or beach mode depending on location with whatever suitable coil on offer from the manufacturer as close as possible in size should be able to hit it equally well, if they can't then one is clearly better in it's default settings and this to me is a big positive, the defaults are the settings the designers of the detector thought were the best settings for that common situation and the adjustments are for if you strike a situation you need to change settings, So for general use in a standard situation like a normal park, a run of the mill beach or a typical gold field they should be the best settings to use aside from things like sensitivity obviously for finding standard targets. Adjustments are done if the situation is out of the ordinary for whatever reason. I quite like my Nox's default settings, it's served me very well entirely in defaults, some small changes sometimes when conditions dictate it but mostly I'm a defaulter and proud of it. If I have to fiddle with a detector to make it hit targets others will hit in the default settings that concerns me. For beginners they mostly just want to switch on and go so if they were to buy Detector A that performed great in its default settings in their environment they'll do much better than if they had of bought Detector B that needs fiddling to get the performance of Detector A. Some might say just get them to buy a beginners detector with virtually no settings on it, that might seem sensible except then they've got to buy another detector later on as they grow out of it, for some that can happen very quickly, they also may miss out of many of the benefits the higher end machines provides even in default settings.

We mostly have lead pellets around here, if you get the magnetic steel ones I guess it's a different story. The #9 Pellet comes in at 1 -2, and 7 1/2, 6 and 4 comes up between 1 and 4 with the numbers creeper higher the bigger the pellet, so I'm dodging 1-4 essentially. For example, this tiny little guy is coming up a 5-6 So at 0.05 of a gram or higher its moving away from the common shotgun pellet target ID's around here and that's a very beneficial thing for cherry picking gold in the worst case scenario of a place with too many pellets. Of course it's a high risk game and I'd not recommend anyone do it all the time but in some situations this is a very beneficial side to having the bigger target ID range. I wonder how the 900 goes with this as it's ID's are different again to the Manticore.

that's correct, and gold is always different so on the Manticore at least it's moving away from the uniform pellet consistency. The Nox 800 with a much smaller ID range was more likely to lump gold in the 1-2 range where as the Manticore is moving it away from the pellets, not 100% reliable but certainly an improvement over the Nox 800 in this regard as it did the same, but not on near as many nuggets as the Manticore does with a majority of smaller nuggets coming in the pellet range on the 800.

This seems to link in a bit with what I'm talking about here

I've been experimenting with my Manticore as a nugget hunter, kinda difficult with only an 11" coil as I can often have more than one pellet under the coil at once so I'm desperately waiting for a smaller coil but with the Nox 800 in highly contaminated gold areas with shot gun pellets I used to try take advantage of the Target IDs, the pellets almost always gave a 1 - 2 Target ID as most are on or near the surface and consistent targets, if ever I was getting numbers above that or even below it like a 2 - 3 - 4 -6 or something more bouncy it was far less likely to be a pellet that tended to just bounce solidly in the 1 -2 range and was more often than not gold, I always get excited when the numbers moved off the very solid 1 - 2 it was giving on pellets. The Manticore and I'm sure Nox 900 are doing the same thing with pellets but giving a broader range of targets off that pellet range thereby separating possibly more gold from pellets. Of course this only works if the area has all similar sized pellets of the smaller varieties which fortunately my areas mostly do. Very early days on this yet and no matter what you will miss gold by doing it, probably a lot of gold but if you just have so many pellets around that you spend all day recovering them it does give you an option whereby you can pull some gold from the pellets and waste far less time recovering pellets. The old pick or boot scrape method is fine when using something like the GPX 6000 that misses something like 60% of the very small lead pellets like the #9, but when switching to a VLF and it finds every single pellet known to man life gets more difficult in these crazy pellet areas. My previous method for dealing with this was using a less sensitive detector to the very small pellets like the GPX 4500 and gliding over most tiny pellets with no response but like the small pellets it missed some of the the small gold too so I prefer the Nox/Manticore method. The Nox 800 lumped a lot of small gold in the 1-2 range, the Manticore has spread those same nuggets out further making them easier to identify away from pellets. I also believe I can take advantage of this more than many because in more difficult soils the numbers are far more wild, in my milder gold area soils the target ID's remain good, think a coin hunter in mild soils vs a coin hunter in bad soils, the mild soil coin hunter is using and relying on target ID a lot where as the bad soil coin hunter can not rely on target ID's much at all.

Sorry to burst your bubble Norvic but the GPX coils will not work on the Axiom even with the talents of a rocket scientist, Axiom coils even the mono coil are very different, on the plus side good things are happening for the Axiom.

I can understand that sentiment, the 6000 really is useless in difficult hot rocks, I can imagine the same in certain ground types. It really is a step backwards from older models like the GPX 4500/5000 and by the looks of it SDC in difficult ground conditions.

You don't need another toy Mitchel, all you need is a good location to use your existing ones, it's the same problem I've got 🙂 I sometimes wish I was prospecting in another country, then I maybe able to find gold like these

Yes, I did it to my 17x13" CTX 3030 coil, the ears broke and I suspect it's a coil that's at very high risk of breakage being such a big heavy coil on substandard ears.

A small elliptical... with the Manticore coming with an option of an 8.5x5" would it be sensible to stick with their 10x5" size like the Nox coils? I hope not as I'd just stick with the stock smaller coil in that case. Would the more Snake like 6.5 x 3.5" make more sense? I think so, it's different enough to the stock coil offerings and would bring a multi-IQ detector to an entire new level of sensitivity to small targets. The Manticore would likely become the gold detector of choice in the VLF world with it's coil options.

It might be best to do a lot more research, by Fisher I assume you mean Gold Bug 2, it is not even a remotely deep machine. You're after depth, for this you have little choice, it has to be a Pulse Induction (PI) or ZVT, the GPZ 7000. Seeing you already have the GPZ 7000 in your toolkit you'd be wasting your money buying anything else especially a VLF detector.