phrunt

I'm sure it's people confused by it's Pulse audio option and that snowballed into it's a pulse pinpointer.

I'm pretty confident it's not as good on very small gold, in milder soils these things are more evident than in hotter soils as the detector is already hindered so much by the soil. I'm not overly fussed as I can't imagine I'll be using it for prospecting much. Now with the GPX and GPZ being so competitive on small gold and often deeper once the gold gets to the 0.05 of a gram mark there really isn't all that much point using a VLF anymore for gold unless specific circumstances like a lot of junk around. If they can verify that it is worse on small gold it maybe in a firmware update as an improvement, so that's cool, I can't think so far of any other firmware updates it would need, no issues, so glad they've fixed the annoying pinpoint bug of the Nox 800, I wonder if that's fixed in the 900. In every other way so far I can't find a reason I'd pick up an Equinox 800 over the Manticore, oddly though I can still find reasons to pickup my Vanquish, it's rock solid stable target ID's in my soil and better EMI handling than the Nox 800 makes it great for cherry picking certain coins.

Don't tease my gold 😛

Some old comments by Geotech about the F-Pulse, I suspect the XP Pinpointers are the same as the Pro-Find being loaded oscillator pinpointers.

You make some of the best "real" gold videos out there. Congratulations on the nugget. https://www.youtube.com/@abyssdredging

I believe most of the non-ground balancing VLF's like the Garrett Ace series and Minelab Go-Find series are lower frequencies as it will work in more ground types without the need for a ground balance. They tend to hang around the 6khz to a high of 10khz, mostly towards the lower end of the frequency range for most models.

Outstanding, congratulations on the success of Nokta.

I think it's more a case of quality has gone downhill over the years, mine was a recent purchase, they were great replacing it under warranty as it bent so quickly, but the replacement was no better. The tube is super thin. I put photos up on here, I can find them if you want to see them but the first bent easily, the second snapped on the shaft. Maybe you're lucky to have an old one

I think before assuming it is Pulse you contact XP and ask, I'm confident it's not. 12 kHz is a giveaway, the most popular VLF frequency there is for pinpointers. I think it may get confused as it has Pitch and Pulse Audio 🙂

XP Pinpointer MI-4 Can be used with any detector! The MI-4 is for those who do not need / want to connect to the Deus because they are looking for example with another detector. Otherwise, Mi-4 and MI-6 are technically identical. TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS Search frequency 12kHz technology VLF service Easy one-button operation Sensitivity Yes, 3 levels Waterproof Yes, up to 6 m under water Headphone jack No Built-in wireless module No Audio as a metal detector signal Yes, along with vibration Vibration as a metal detector signal Yes Audio and vibration simultaneously as a metal detector signal Yes LED lighting Yes Ground balance Yes Type and number of batteries Rechargeable lithium polymer battery Battery life Up to 30 hours Battery warning function When switched on, the LED flashes to indicate the current battery status. (3 x is 100%, 2 x is 60%, 1 x is 30%) Discrimination of unwanted objects No Loss alarm No Object identification by audio tones (metal type detection) No Weight pin pointer 177 g Dimensions pin pointer -24 x 4 x 4 cm -recognition tip is 11 cm long 360 ° detection Yes Depth scale No Attachment eyelet for safety cable Yes Suitable for diving Yes, but only up to 6 m under water Additional tools - High quality rotating (adjustable in inclination) holster - Safety cord with ring and carabiner for belt attachment Other additional functions - Ergonomic, non-slip design - All parts interchangeable - Choose between 2 different tones. Audio pitch and audio pulses. Scope of delivery XP Pinpointer MI-4 High quality rotating (adjustable in inclination) holster Safety cord with ring and carabiner for belt attachment USB charging cable Operating instructions and 2 year guarantee

VLF! It's a damn good pinpointer too, well the Mi-4 which I have is. I don't need any of that wireless connectivity mumbo jumbo.

Avoid the Lesche Samson T-Handle like the plague, absolute rubbish, Imported one myself from America, broke in the first couple of weeks with it bending backwards at the join and snapping, got a replacement, it broke a couple of months later in a different spot, the shaft snapped in half lifting out a plug and I'm in soft loamy soils. Since then I've used a $9.95 Chinese made mini camping shovel from the local hardware store, well over a year now and not had an issue. Previously I was using a 10+ year old cheap junk camping shovel which I retired as it's handle went pink from old age when it used to be red and pink wasn't a colour I wanted to be prancing around the fields with, the Sampson was it's replacement that I expected to be an upgrade, huge mistake. Absolute junk.

It is pretty impressive, I'm with you George, the v80 looks fantastic. Competition is heating up so much in the VLF Multi Frequency machines now it's really hard to know which is the stand out winner, there isn't one.

I like how Nokta on their website say NO, we are not releasing a Legend 200 or 300, showing they intend to stick with the Legend platform as it is for a while now, perhaps just continuing with further updates and improvements. They're obviously in business to make money, but they're certainly not acting greedy and taking advantage of their customers like some other manufacturers.

The Ukranians some time ago made aftermarket coils for the Equinox, they removed the chip out of a coil and made an adapter, very similar to how X-coils do it for the GPZ, then then made their own coils that ran using the adapter, they appeared to work very well, it never took off as the difficulty involved in the process, not really a product you can market having to remove a chip from a coil to do it.

I'd have to agree us mild soil people speak a totally different language, throw the biggest coil on you can, that's how we achieve depth, except the 15" coil on the T2, that things a shocker 🙂 11 to 13" round seems the sweet spot for depth on the T2, I've never tried a really large Nel coil though as I couldn't justify the expense for a detector I wouldn't be using.. I get 1 bar on my T2 in my areas and a ground phase of 64, from memory the gold areas were even the same, it's been a long time though I might be slightly wrong. I did find a photo of my Gold Bug Pro in a gold area around here, and it had 0 bars on fe304 and a ground phase of 48. and according to the GBP manual A thread like this is good insight into how the other half live. I'm not at all surprised about the T2 and depth, it's always been a deep machine, people in high mineral content probably laugh when I keep saying the Ace 300 is a deep machine, but it truly is a very deep machine in mild soils, keeps up with or often exceeds others once it's outfitted with a big coil.

The problem with this is modifying the chip is where it becomes super illegal and Minelab would likely go after you, this is why for example I think X-coils has decided using the existing chip with adapters and not having chips cloned and selling coils with a chip in them already is the right path for them. The GPZ chips can be cloned, but it's just not a legal thing to do. China of course have businesses dedicated to cloning chips, you send them one, they clone it and send them back to you, you test it all out and then you can bulk order chips. It's not even all that expensive to do. I know a guy that had a chip cloned for some equipment he was repairing and couldn't source the part, $186 USD to get the initial one done, he only needed one but they're cheaper after the first one as the works been done. Most DOS games it was quite simple, some were as simple as using a Hex editor and changing a few things, the easiest ones were completely text based protections and they asked questions out of manuals what's the 5th word on Page 9 of the 3rd Paragraph etc, so easy to defeat and you could just take the lazy way and make every answer blank by removing the answers and you could just press enter to go past the question, times have changed though and it's a lot more difficult now 🙂 It was obvious all along the coils were all the same I thought, they were sharing the same multi-IQ in different variations some with more features some with less but essentially the same. I think the best path is for everyone to show their displeasure at Minelab locking down coils, even contacting them expressing your displeasure and hopefully encourage change. People who buy an Equinox should not be restricted from using the cheaper Vanquish coils, nor the X-terra coils. You pay the premium for the better detector, you should then be able to buy the alternative coils for it from other models. The X-Terra using Equinox coils is a real kick in the face to every Equinox owner when their Equinox can't use X-Terra coils. Their reasoning may well just be they want to be able to charge Equinox users more for the Equinox coils, as the Vanquish and X-Terra coils are cheaper, being for cheaper detectors. The coils cost no more to make, are essentially no different but they would never get away with charging Equinox coil prices to a Vanquish 340 owner. Coils would start costing near the price of their detector that came with a coil, even more than it. I'm not looking forward to seeing the price of the Manticore coils, no doubt they'll be more CTX coil pricing I guess.

I've been digging good coins off the center line, silver coins and NZ $1 and $2 coins at depth are coming just above the center line quite often, doing a nice blob but not necessarily on the center line, the shallower easier coins are generally always on the center line.

If it's just a beep on the target not caring about identifying it then the challenge is really there for one to come out on top, they can probably all do it equally well. The stock T2 coil is a bit of a let down though, although probably still capable, and I would guess it would come down to coil size first and foremost. If it were a coin and the challenge was identifying it that's a different matter. In my soil I'd not bet against an Ace 350 getting the same depth as a Manticore on a coin if all it had to do was beep or in the Ace's case ring the door bell.

I believe it was a device designed to fix the Simplex target ID instability.

The Makro looks good and easy to operate, very different to the Simplex that is an absolute mess to navigate around and I believe the Legend is even worse. The Manticore is nice and easy, significantly better than the Nox. It is truly odd they've left the side buttons on there when the Ukranians showed with their Sea Ghost how much better buttons all on the front would be. I would guess it's cheaper to stick with the design they've already done with being able to share PCB's easier between models, keeps manufacturing costs lower.

Are you talking about this?

The thing with gold is it's a different game to coin hunting, it's a much bigger challenge, especially here with coins being relatively easy by comparison. Finding the micro specs of gold is the ultimate challenge, obviously the smaller they get the harder they are to find. The added bonus to becoming really good at finding tiny gold is it improves your ability to find larger deeper gold that others may miss as a big deep on the edge of detection nugget behaves the same as a tiny little flake nearer to the surface. It's a way of honing your skills chasing and recovering these tiny bits. The better I get at doing it the better I will get at finding gold overall. Finding a tiny spec can be very exciting as long as you're not detecting for money which I never do anyway, never will I sell any of my gold, not a chance. Gold prospecting often involves getting the most faint of hit, something you could very easily miss, so much so you don't think you ever heard it but just in case you go over the spot again and you try hard to find that signal, circling the spot you thought you heard it and these can be the times it was a deeper bigger bit, or just a tiny spec near the surface but that faint signal you were questioning yourself if you even heard was the indicator you needed to find it. You really have to have your brain locked onto the job and if you don't you'll miss a lot especially on ground people have been detecting for years. You need to rely on either having better equipment than the previous people who detected it, or you have to have better skills, I've been replying on equipment, and working on improving skills 🙂 So this may go somewhat further into explaining why I'd like the Manticore to have the small target ability of the Equinox and hopefully it is something they can resolve, it's so close but just not there yet. As for coin hunting the Manticore so far is I believe outperforming the Equinox 800 11" vs 11" on small silver coins, the bigger silver coins in my area are getting very hard to find now but there is still some smaller ones (threepence) that didn't give a clean enough ID on my first rounds of going over the areas or perhaps so deep they were giving me iron indications which preventing me from digging. The threepence also target ID's the same as common pull tabs so my method there has always been dig deep pull tab numbers leave the more shallow ones, I'm hoping the Manticores target ID range expansion may help sort the tabs from the silvers, still yet to be determined there the CTX appeared to help a bit with this. I just can't dig enough holes to get every pull tab as they are in abundance especially around the club house area. The CTX steam rolled through quickly with it's 17x13" coil and found quite a bit of silver I'd missed with the Nox and now I'm planning to use the Manticore to find anything left that was potentially masked by bottle caps or pull tabs or whatever with me using such a big coil, it's too dry at the moment to do much digging so I've not dug a lot of targets yet unless I was pretty sure it was a coin which is why I was quite upset by the Manticore jumpy target ID's until I lowered sensitivity and they cleared up to be quite good. I'm currently 90% satisfied with the Manticore, that extra 10% is if they can fine tune that small gold ability then it will be my favourite VLF detector surpassing the CTX and Nox 800, it's currently ahead of the Nox 800 already.

Yes, that was my main confirmation as the depth difference was the most noticeable. I have asked Minelab do that same comparison so they can see the difference also.

I tripped fell and landed on the article All that glitters is not gold, the old saying warns, but it may be just as valuable under new government rules for buried treasure. Metal detectorists are responsible for most of Britain’s historical finds, but UK law has allowed hobbyists to sell artefacts rather than give them to museums if they do not meet the narrow criteria of “treasure”. Ministers have long sought to ensure objects end up on public display and not in private collections, and now the Government has redefined treasure as any object that is “exceptionally” important to British history, not merely those made of gold, in a move which will oblige detectorists to hand over more of their discoveries. Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, the arts minister, said: “There has been a huge surge in the number of detectorists – thanks in part to a range of TV programmes – and we want to ensure that new treasure discoveries are protected so everyone can enjoy them. Found by an army veteran on Lincolnshire farm land in 2019, the brooch depicts a horse and would have been studded with bright enamel and used to adorn a Roman’s cloak. The item fell outside the power of the Treasure Act and the Collection Museum in Lincoln depended on the finder’s donation to acquire it Credit: Lincolnshire.gov.uk “Archaeological treasures offer a fascinating window into the history of our nation and the lives of our ancestors. “We are changing the law so that more artefacts uncovered by archaeologists and members of the public can go on display in museums rather than ending up in private hands. This will make sure they can be studied, admired and enjoyed by future generations.” The decision comes amid a rise in metal detecting – partly inspired by BBC series Detectorists – which has been harnessed by museums to acquire increasing numbers of artefacts found annually in Britain, where 96 per cent of discoveries are now made by hobbyists. The reporting and ultimate ownership of these finds is governed by the 1996 Treasure Act, which has defined treasure as over 300 years old, made of gold or silver, or found with artefacts made of precious metals. Detectorists are obliged to report potential treasure to the local coroner, and if they decide it fits the definition, the find can be claimed by the Crown and made available to museums. Roman ‘licking dog’ believed to be a religious object related to healing and the Celtic medicine god Nodens found in a farmer’s field in Gloucestershire in 2017. The bronze piece was sold off in 2019 for £137,000 Credit: Gloucestershire County Council/PA More than 5,000 objects have been added to collections since the passing of the 1996 act, including the Iron Age Havering Hoard and the solid gold Ringlemere cup, which both fitted into the legal criteria. But the narrow definition has allowed some items to fall through the cracks of the Treasure Act, including an extremely rare Roman dog sculpture found in Gloucestershire in 2017, which sold for £137,000 rather than being made available to a museum, because it was made of bronze and not a precious metal. In 2014 a unique figurine depicting a Roman “hoody” was found in Chelmsford, and because it was made of a copper alloy was allowed to be auctioned off. It was only saved after the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport imposed a sales bar. Romano-British sculpture depicting the ‘hoodie’ garment the Birrus Britannicus, designed for the British weather. It was found in 2014 and a sale for the bronze object was agreed. It was only saved for the public by a DCMS expert bar which allowed the Chelmsford City Museum time to raise funds for the item Credit: Gareth Fuller/PA The department has now moved to expand the definition of treasure to prevent significant historical artefacts being lost, announcing that “treasure” can also mean “exceptional” finds over 200 years old, regardless of the type of metal of which they are made. This will apply to these artefacts so long as they provide an important insight into British heritage. This will include items which are extremely rare, or provide a particular insight into a historical figure or event. The copper alloy Roman helmet was found in Crosby Garrett in Cumbria in 2010, It may have been the ornate helmet of a cavalry officer. The piece was sold through Christie's in 2010 for £2.3 million to an undisclosed private buyer Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe New rules will mean more finds will likely have to be handed over to museums, and while some detectorists have welcomed the added protection of heritage the move may offer, there are calls for hobbyists to be properly rewarded. Stephen Aslett, a detectorist, said: “We’re out there trying to find history, it’s the history itself that is the real treasure. In that sense I think it will be good, as we will get more of our finds on display, and we want to share that history. He added: “But what I want is a bit of recognition. So often you go to museums, see a display, and the detectorist who has been out in the rain working hard to get that find is not mentioned, they’re totally forgotten. Meanwhile, archaeologists ride in and take all the glory. “I would like to see some recognition factored into the process, and a fair system of reward. Because there is worry that doing things the illegal way could make more money than being low-balled by the coroner.”