phrunt

I see that snow and I'm terribly jealous, I'd be skiing while the snow is there and detecting the rest of the year, problem solved!, never hurts to have more than one hobby 🙂 I'd certainly be making the most of the seasons.

We have all been thinking of the Simplex with this new X-Terra Pro, but more importantly perhaps is what it's release will do to the other brands that had their top of the line machines lagging behind the Simplex, what about Garrett and their AT Pro/Gold/Max. What about First Texas and their lineup of Dinosaurs? This could be extremely damaging to them. Yes they will have their fans that say my "whatever detector" is so much better than an Xterra but how about the general shoppers. I personally would pick the Xterra over my T2, or my AT Gold. If they put 20kHz on the X-terra it would be fantastic though but I guess a lot of thought went into giving as much bang for the buck without damaging existing detector sales in their lineup too much.

Different generation Chuck, some people who aren't even interested in detecting would buy this thing if it was in a shop they shop at as a phone accessory. They'd think it's a neat idea, people that are not at all interested in metal detecting. It opens Quest up to a different market of people entirely. Maybe they just want to have the tech on hand for the day technology improves to make it even more viable, lock it all up with patents like Minelab would do.

I am incredibly jealous!

The Axiom is sitting there with nothing more than standard coils at the moment, where as the 6000 has a few after market options, that should soon change in the Axiom's favour. While I haven't used the Axiom I have the 6000 and find it a nice detector now they've sorted out a bulk of the problems with it and there is no doubt it has some heavy discounting on it at the moment. If buying one new I'd be ensuring it's a new build and not an older one that's been hanging around in the warehouse or on the dealers shelf, not only have the coils been improved on newer ones with their cracking plastic but they've also got the audio EMI problem resolved, and who knows what else in the background, such as the high failure rate of the stability of coils on earlier builds, no one knows if that's improved but it possibly has. At the moment I'm guessing most will reply to get a 6000, in 12 months time that could change if the aftermarket come through with some excellent Axiom coil choices.

Not even remotely, I don't want it to be my future but that doesn't mean it won't be 🙂

I think time will be the solution to this, phone hardware is improving in leaps and bounds, Bluetooth has had dramatic improvements in data transfer rates lately and the new Bluetooth quickly becoming standard, phones often have a limited life and people are upgrading often from broken screens, dropping them in the toilet :), the battery dying or just because they want the new fancy models. They could set the minimum requirements via the app to make sure it only runs on suitable hardware and advertise it as such. They could run the app with high priority set by the operating system to ensure the apps not lagging because of other apps on the device. Time will tell, technology is improving all the time, what may seem like a crazy idea now may become the norm in the future. Never say never, as it's quite possible this will be the future of detectors.

The X-Terra Pro supports the ML-85 headphones, not the ML-80's. This means its not aptX it's Bluetooth LE, the new Bluetooth the same as the Nox 900 and Manticore. It should in theory work with any Bluetooth LE headphones, just very few are on the market yet being new tech and so far I haven't heard of anyone getting their hands on another brand and trying it. If they will work on generic stuff headphones and especially ear buds will end up quite cheap for it.

Well, it's all about profit margins, I'm sure we all know the cost price to make a Simplex would be hardly any different to a Legend, and the Equinox 600 wouldn't cost much less to make for Minelab than a Manticore. They have plenty of room they can move on prices, Nokta has made Minelab worried, that's clear. XP kept the pricing high with the Deus 2, if they came in lower on that the Manticore would be much cheaper so to bring the prices down on the top machines Nokta really need to get to making one, they've been the ones driving down the prices, thanks Nokta, love your work 🙂 I am thinking even before release Nokta may adjust their Simplex models pricing, they didn't expect the X-Terra to be coming out when they were doing these Simplex models. I wouldn't be surprised at all with a last minute price adjustment on them all as they now seem overpriced.

That's true, everyone knows it however there are times its not viable, for me at least. Be it hot rocks or trash that just chase you out of an area, you think it's easier to go look somewhere else. Many of the heavy trash areas are left unexplored or at the most quickly gone over. The only ones hit hard are where someone stumbled on good gold in them before the trash scared them away 🙂 I walk into a heavy trash area, my detector goes crazy I back off and walk the other direction 🙂 Someone that digs every bit of trash in a heavily junked area without even knowing it has gold is my super hero, I just could not do it. If they could ever achieve VLF like discrimination on a PI it would be a great thing and put a lot of gold into pockets that's been missed or ignored. With VLF's performance got pretty close to tapped out, so they focused on improving features, if the same is happening with PI's then discrimination is a feature that would be a very positive thing to implement and improve.

Common sense wins in the end Geof 🙂

You're not it's target market 🙂 It towers over the machines in it's price range I think.

I like this post by Coiltek on Facebook, and figured I'd put it here for those that don't use Facebook, it's really nice to see the team behind the coils. Here is their post: Something you may not know is that we're an independent family-owned business – and all our products are produced and quality checked by our dedicated close-knit team in South Australia. So while we have a valued collaborative relationship with detector manufacturers, we are 100% independent and committed to bringing you the performance and quality you've come to expect from Coiltek. Trevor is a good boss, hiding up the back there not wanting to steal the limelight 🙂 You can tell the good sellers, the Nox and 6000 coils!

That and you can use your Equinox coils on it, it's a great deal. It has been confirmed by Iffy Signals that the X-Terra coils will not work on the Nox though, he's tried it.

The way I see it is they're chasing tiny increments in performance improvements with new models now, VLF's are really struggling to improve over previous models for some time regardless of what marketing says. The PI's and GPZ could well be the same. The GPX 6000 is an improvement over the earlier GPX for some tasks, especially the smaller gold side of things and worse in some areas like hot rocks and trashy areas (lack of discrimination) and a lesser jump over the SDC on smaller gold and obviously hot rock handling it seems but it's not a giant leap over the GPZ for those that have smaller coils. I look forward to seeing what a GPZ 8000 becomes but I don't have high hopes for a dramatic improvement in performance, I'd love to be wrong but I fear we are stating to see with PI's and possibly the GPZ what we have been seeing with VLF'. The price is too high on them to throw money at something with small improvements over the older models though. What do we hope for in the new GPZ? A lighter package, yes, happy to pay another 10 grand and sell your GPZ at a low price as the old heavy model to upgrade to a lighter GPZ though? Some people may, a bulk probably not. What else can they do to improve it? Give us more coils would be a start, but that will only work on some people, others have plenty of options there on their GPZ already. You can only impress people with fancy features and better designed housings so much when really it comes down to performance and the aim of a new model is to get buyers, lots of them. Adding a feature like discrimination back onto a newer GPX or ideally a GPZ would bring in a new market for them, people who hunt in different areas that require this sort of feature and open them up to the coin and relic hunters again, along with some beach work, here the older GPX models are the best beach detectors as they work best in our black sands using a DD coil, and then you can use the discrimination and it does work reasonably well, not VLF discrimination but with shallower junk and deeper good targets it's fine. I've been quite impressed with my GPX 5000's discrimination, up until about 8" it's pretty good and will certainly let you know it's a nail. Of course they can continue to use the Equinox with its limited depth in mineralised soils and earlier model GPX for discriminating and now the Axiom which is what they're using now but it would be nice if discrimination can be improved and added onto a detector like a new GPZ. We don't know how well they can get it to work, if they invest the time and money into it perhaps they can get it working much better than we think, it's never been a feature that was highly developed. With the manufacturers struggling to make detectors better than previous models everything they can add on to bring in buyers counts. Everyone now is trying to find the harder and harder gold as the easier stuff is getting harder to find, discrimination is a way to get some of this harder stuff. I'm not saying they can do better discrimination, I have no idea, but if they can it may help people find way more gold than any other improvement they can do.

This is not my gold but a friends gold, this was found because a detector that had discrimination (Equinox) was used in a very trashy area. No it's not NZ gold unfortunately. The GPZ was useless here, as of course the 6000 as there is just so much trash, however now the person who found this using the Equinox will be taking advantage of the Axiom and it's discrimination and increased depth over the Equinox to hopefully find more. In times like these even rudimentary discrimination like the GPX 5000 has is better than a detector with none at all so the Axiom may end up very valuable. Having the option there is much better than not having it at all, even if it is rather basic.

Makes no sense to me either, I'll video it and show you.

I can understand the UK people in mild soil not wanting to ground balance, for me at least in my mild soils I find on machines like the Equinox and Manticore, even the CTX I get more stable better Target ID's if I don't ground balance.

The GPZ with a small coil like an 8" or 10" to me is a light machine. The 6000 with a big coil even the Coiltek 14x9" or 14" DD is a heavy machine and I find the GPZ much lighter to use than the GPX with one of the bigger coils. A lot of the weight problems with the GPZ are due to coil restrictions. Put an 8" coil on the GPZ at 835 grams for the coil, a CTX battery and the machine is so light. If you don't use the CTX battery you work harder to keep the coil on the ground 🙂

So the only difference is the frequency has changed to 15kHz on all 3 of the new Simplex models which is probably to move it away from the 12kHz area which is prone to EMI issues for many, especially because of pinpointers. 15kHz for me is generally good for EMI, they have a new membrane to make the keys easier to press as that's been a known Simplex problem and one with no wireless, one with the traditional green wireless and one with Bluetooth being the Ultra, then the Ultra having the full carbon shaft, the mid rage having the lower carbon shaft and the cheapie having the bendy shaft. The mid range Simplex costing the same as the X-terra, yet all Simplex models being single frequency. They may end up rethinking their pricing, the Ultra is far too expensive for what it is, and the others seem a bit pricey now too that there is competition with more frequencies.

i'll beat that, someone can have mine for $450 😛 Any when that sells, I'll sell another one for $450 🙂

I've been following your T2 journey with interest as I own two of the things and old one and a newer "classic" variant. They seem to work particularly well in your soils, not quite the same here where I could show my Ace 300 outperform one at identifying a small silver coin at depth in clean mild soils. But yes, I agree the T2 platform is good, it would have been a lot better if they kept developing it over the past decade though and used the base technology to make actual new models. Even current T2/F75 fans would be happy if there were real new models of it with modern features, I basically saw the Simplex+ as the new T2, both behave very similar in my soils too but a T2 in a Simplex control box would make a nice rehash, waterproof, torch, vibration, wireless etc, all the modern features that are now becoming virtually entry level features. To a customer in X-Terra market buying a detector with little knowledge looking at detectors would they even spend a couple of minutes reading the box of the T2 when they have just finished reading the box of the X-Terra? Not likely, specifications wise the X-terra kills it. The T2 is a very basic machine with it's features. A quick google will show them the T2 came out in something like 2007 and the X-terra came out in 2023.... that would sway more people who buy anything electronic.

Is that the Nel Superfly? I bought that coil once from Ukraine, it never arrived, I'm not all that bothered as I bought it for the Simplex which I never use. Ebay gave me my money back so no big deal, but I'd still like to get that coil for my Gold Bug Pro.

yea, here its all about they're targeting a completely different market, the Go-Find market isn't the usual metal detector market, it's people that have no idea and are buying a retail product at a retail store with no knowledge about their purchase, maybe a kids present, maybe just some toy to play with when they go to the beach or on a holiday. I always thought the much better Simplex in that market would smash it, so much better of a detector and being waterproof with Target ID's, but they'd need to get the Simplex into that market, into those shops and I'm sure a lucrative move if they did do so, being waterproof really sets it up and above the Go-Find and Vanquish to these customers that know little about the purchase. To them nice features written all over the box sell and the Simplex has them, and a lot of them.

They sell well here, they're quite popular as they put them in all the hunting and fishing stores and the sports equipment type of big box retailers, the most accessible detectors you can buy. They're even in the National Geographic type shops rebranded as their detector. I would not be surprised if they're one of the most sold detectors in the country. I guess the similar detectors in the US would be the First Texas cheapies having the same sort of market. I recall when everyone was desperately waiting on ships with the Manticore (the Manticore boat) and were checking containers coming in, there was quite a lot of Go-Finds coming into the US under the National Geographic type branding. If you search Minelab's site for dealers in NZ you get some crazy number of dealers like 100, only 3 of them sell their proper detectors and really only two carry any stock, the others all sell Go-Finds and are just the various sporting goods retailers. It's hard for me to think about the US prices, they're just so different so when I'm thinking I'm never thinking about US pricing.