phrunt

While I haven't used a F75 it's cousin the T2 is a similar animal and I have two of them, a DST one and an old Greenie. The old Greenie is much more unstable and ratty, but appears to have better depth. The newer DST one runs really stable but doesn't have the same depth performance from what I've seen, regardless of DST settings. I think more was done to make the detector run stable than just DST, perhaps as the T2 was famous for being so unstable and the improvements with the newer DST models certainly sorted that out. It's party why I did the shielding paint on my old model T2 to try improve it's EMI handling which I felt it did help a bit. I don't think it's sensitivity that has the weird stepping in it, it's the disc, my T2 is good on deep targets on something like 40 sensitivity, cranking it up in the 90's doesn't really change the depth all that much, maybe the higher sensitivity settings are more for tiny targets, I don't know it's been a long time since I've bothered using the T2 for prospecting and back when I did I was rather clueless. On the T2 having the disc setting below 10 seems to have some sort of extra power, go above 10 and the power drops off, then again at disc 50 there is another sort of extra power kicking in, yes in these levels the detector is more unstable but also deeper. Under 10 it can be rather ratty but at that point has the most depth, For the most depth I run at disc 0. Running these disc numbers gives the All metal performance while having some disc involved. Not sure how this translates over to the F75 but it's rather dramatic on the T2, the T2's iron range goes all the way up to about 40 though and you would think would be the better relic and gold prospecting machine because of this finer iron adjustment.

The sales are only in the US though, the one with the crazy high dollar 🙂

yea, I use an electronics contact clean and lube on all of my detecting gears plugs, not only does it clean them and prevent corrosion it makes them connect easier with less friction especially if you're plugging/unplugging a lot. People in salt water are especially crazy not using a product like that, it washes out any salt/sand as well as putting the film on there to help stop corrosion. Just get one that specifically says won't damage any plastics etc and you're good to go. The brand I use doesn't seem available in the US but there are many brands. It can turn grotty old blackish connectors to looking new again in no time.

I really like the idea with the staff, staff are the business, happy dedicated staff is a sure way to success, and a brilliant method of really getting the staff onboard and highly motivated, it's their baby as much as anyone else's. Every sale, every happy customer, everything is all in their best interests. A sure fire way to success. Plenty of owner run businesses do well, until they grow so much the owner can't run them on the front line anymore and then staff come in and the growth is stalled or fades away.

That's what happens when the AUD is 67 cents to the USD, when I moved away from Australia the AUD was higher than the USD, imagine if that happened again, you US guys would be paying even more than the inflated prices you are now for Minelab 🙂 They should try keep your prices low as long as the dollar exchange remains in the US's favour.

This Tailgate Talk brings us to the Australian Outback with Detector Prospector, Steve Herschbach. Steve shares his tips and the success he has had over his 50 years of gold prospecting. Everything said in the video makes a lot of sense, totally agree. I had the help from JW that gave me the shortcut to finding gold and giving me the confidence. A huge shortcut to success. That's where the training courses would help people too I guess. The old saying the first one is the hardest is really true.

That's incredible. A monster shop of goodies.

I would need to superglue my GPZ, GPX 6000, GPX 5000, Nox 800, 24k and Gold Bug 2 together to get my ideal gold detector and I'd need to be able to plug in any damn coil I want to. As for coins I'd need to glue my CTX, Nox 800, Manticore and Ace 300i together to even come close to my ideal coin detector, it's not going to happen so at this stage there is no perfect detector and I'm quite happy to own quite a few. You know why the Ace is in there? It's crazy deep when outfitted with a Nel Tornado coil, and it can run a Nel Tornado coil and any other aftermarket coil I want on it, the others can not.

The purpose is to make access to the products easier, and a business decision to increase sales, Amazon gives them massive exposure to a big market of customers, a little dealership running out of their little shop or even garage is hardly comparable and not going to give them near as many sales and can't even be compared to the exposure they could get from Amazon. As someone that lives in a more remote place with harder access to many products Ebay, Amazon and the likes have been vital for me. Dealers in the US have been able to ship me product they otherwise wouldn't and I simply had no way to buy any other way as they joined Ebay's global shipping program, they just ship the product to Ebay who takes care of getting it to me, not another worry in the world about the sale for the seller, if they get it to Ebay, then that's their job done. It also helps with the costs of shipping with the bulk methods of shipping they use. "The Global Shipping Program makes your items available to more than 60 million buyers worldwide. You're protected from negative / neutral feedback, and have control over which items you want to ship through the program. Send your eligible item to our domestic shipping center, and once it reaches us, your job is done: We'll manage the international shipping and customs process for you." I don't know as much about Amazon but they appear to have a global shipping program too and a fulfillment option where businesses send products to Amazon fulfillment centers and when a customer makes a purchase, they pick, pack, and ship the order. They can also provide customer service and process returns for those orders. Yes, it's all part of the slow death of the dealer, it's been slowing happening over time, but the best way we can ensure our local friendly dealers survive is to buy from them when we can, although most dealers internet buying options are pretty basic and amateur so they're more targeting their local market with the retail stores than taking advantage of the huge customer base that is the internet. Many need to take a good look at their online stores and bring them up to be modern and easier to use, and more like the big players if they want more internet sales. It's really not difficult to make a good online store and if they can't do it they should just pay someone to do it, it's not a massive job. The internet is the biggest customer base in the world, take advantage of it!

I contacted XP customer service on their website to ask about their XP Pinpointers and if they're pulse or not, they never replied. They don't appear to have fantastic customer service.

I wonder how many Manticores are in the wild right now, it seems not all that many with them being so hard to get and dealers getting so few, with maybe a few thousand of them out there if that and one leaker the odds so far are pretty low of having problems, it's not yet the plaque the Equinox had.

I was thinking about the videos above, and beach mode runs the same level of coil power as the original Equinox runs in it's normal modes. All other modes have higher power. Beach mode is the mode I was reporting as having the most stable target ID's in higher gains, I had to lower sensitivity levels in all other mode to get my ID's as stable as Beach mode in higher gains and to get it similar to the Equinox ID stability required rather low sensitivity of about 16. I wonder if the stability with ID's is related to this new 50% more power to the coil stuff.

They've had a lot of problems with their flash tool from it not working for many people, to all these concerns about it not flashing properly. It all seems so weird, the fact they tell people to factory reset before and after rather than the flash tool just doing that as part of the process and eliminating all these problems for the end user I don't understand. Here is an example of a typical motherboard for a computer being bios flashed which is the same thing as firmware, I had to display it on an older motherboard being flashed from DOS as it's the easiest way to show the process on the screen at once with the details of the steps. The process is simple, it checks the checksum to ensure the firmware it's about to flash is correct and not corrupted. It erases the boot block which is a separate part of the bios rom that does the initial stages of starting up, then writes to it, verifies the write matches the expected checksum then moves on to erasing the main flash rom where the bios software is stored (the main firmware), writes it and verifies it to ensure it's correct, then moves onto the NVRAM which is where the firmware's settings from the user are stored along with time/date etc, now this is the part Nokta's firmware tool should be erasing if they feel it necessary the machine gets a factory reset as part of the firmware update, I don't get why if it's so important their firmware tool doesn't do it by itself thereby getting rid of all these problems end users get. All they'd need is a "I agree" prompt that informs the user any previous settings will be erased as part of the firmware upgrade to ensure the upgrade works properly. Their engineers are a bucket load smarter than me, but it seems a simple thing that they should be doing and is common practice for firmware upgrades to ensure smooth operation after them. This seems especially logical on a detector that gets regular updates and users having plenty of issues getting them to work as they should.

Well you can certainly see the "more power to the coil" in the amplitude in his videos in all but beach modes with the Manticore, vastly different to the Nox, not surprisingly the Nox 900 is the same as the 800.

I tend to agree, put the same coil size on each of the current high end SMF detectors and they'll find 99% of the same targets if the users know what they're doing,especially around my area. It's only extreme circumstances one would outperform another significantly but most everyday targets they'll all get, so will many of the much cheaper detectors on the market, the % may drop a little but nothing hugely significant. There are a lot of detector snobs out there, I'm happy swinging a very cheap detector if it's doing the job for me, it doesn't have to be the best most expensive machine on the market. The challenge while interesting is likely to get some people planting targets that they can manipulate so that one detector does better on them than another, yes this too may happen in the real world but the occurrence of it is likely very rare but I would expect these videos to pop up pretty soon from a certain crowd. Perhaps some people in extreme circumstances like heavy iron contamination may benefit somewhat from one detector over another, but if you think of worldwide sales of a detector that's probably a small number of people and the problems they have could and very likely would be insignificant to someone living elsewhere.

No, but rumour is floating around it's going to be priced along side the Simplex somewhere, and it will hurt Simplex sales significantly if this is the case, I'd much rather it than a Simplex.

I expect very little performance difference, for me it's all about size, I just want a tiny coil to get into places and the 6000 being such a hot machine should perform pretty good with such a small coil. If it gives any tiny gold advantage that'd be greatly appreciated but I'm more about size than anything. It should also handle EMI better being smaller. I think the Sadie will be thick too. Having the little Sadie on the 6000 should get rid of the need to use a VLF almost entirely for me unless I'm specifically hunting very tiny gold or creek detecting where I'm worried I'd get the control box wet. The 10x5" is a very good coil.

Sorry they were not my finds, it was a friend so I don't know the finer details. They were found high up on a mountain range. I haven't been up there, one of my 4x4's wouldn't make it with not enough ground clearance, the other probably would but I'm not a confident enough off road driving to take it on, the dirt track to get up there is pretty wild. I've been considering trying it one day soon but I fear I'll get stuck, and if the weather changes I'm in real trouble, the soil turns to glue if it gets wet. The GPZ outfitted with the 15" Concentric coil he was using is just a very deep coil on smaller gold targets, a 15" transmit outside flat winding around the circumference of the coil with the inner receive windings really push the GPZ's depth on smaller gold at depth. We are in a very mild soil environment here which also helps being able to crank the detectors right up. I believe we've both found over time the GPZ with that 15" coil is just the deeper detector than the 6000, the 6000 is great at what it does plucking the smaller bits out of the ground but when depth is required it's always the GPZ doing the heavy lifting. He could have just started with the GPZ and got virtually everything except the very tiniest bits the Gold Monster was used for but it's nice to use different detectors and the 6000 is just a nice light fun detector to use and because he wasn't expecting to do any serious prospecting he just took the GM1000 along on the first day for a play around on some bedrock, then it found the patch and it was all on from there 🙂

Yup, all the Pulse pinpointers on the market I've tried are gutless on small targets, a side effect of being Pulse designed to tune out salt water and bad ground. VLF's can run hot on smaller targets, especially ones like the Mi-4/6, TRX, Pro Pointer AT and the Pro-Find35. The Pulse pointers are certainly deeper on bigger targets. Remind anyone of detectors? 🙂 Think Gold Bug 2, GPX 5000.

It's nice they attribute a lot of the performance enhancements and benefits to the latest hardware it's built upon, credit where credit is due. I wasn't going to buy anymore detectors in the near future if at all, I am seriously over buying a detector for minuscule improvements if any, and often even worse performance than older models but this Quest v80 is really perking up my ears, I may not be able to resist, they even have a local dealer.

So what is the go with Nugget Finder? have they discontinued GPX 4500/5000 coils including the DDX DD? Even the GPZ coils have disappeared off their website. They had their website under maintenance for some time and now its back not saying under construction anymore but now it only has the Xceed coil on it. https://www.nuggetfinder.com.au/ I understand they're "technology challenged" with the extremely basic website but it does seem odd the GPZ coils have disappeared off there entirely right after releasing another one, and with only one Xceed coil for sale according to the website they sell only one coil. Hopefully it's some sort of issue that they need to resolve with their website. I can understand discontinuing the older model GPX coils, Coiltek have been slowly winding back the models there too and X-coils discontinued them entirely some time ago, but the GPZ coils not being there seems weird. Sales of older GPX coils would be super slow with the second hand market dominating that and many moving off it onto newer detectors but surely the GPZ coils are doing OK. Hopefully all is well at NF, they've had a rough year or two by the sounds of it and selfishly I really want the GPX 6000 Sadie!

That explains the 12kHz all over their marketing. I thought the small gold sensitivity was the giveaway, it's pretty damn good on small gold, not the best but up there.

Happy Birthday klunker, always look forward to your posts and this one was a doozy. Where you live sounds a wonderful place, you won't catch me complaining about snow, quite the opposite!

They don't need to send anymore to NZ, they're sitting in stock on the shelf to buy now, have been for a few weeks More product than customers here.

haha, they've genuinely called it the "tormentor" metal detector on the test reports, as no doubt they're tormenting Nokta Also they went Bluetooth LE, gone is atpX Low latency. Sucks to own a GPX 6000 with LL when all the cheaper newer detectors have superior wireless audio.