UKD2User

11 minutes ago, longbow62 said:

I guess I don't understand how the manufacturing, shipping and the storage process works. Take the CTX for instance. Surely they don't sell a lot of them these days. So the one someone does buy might have been made several years ago? I surely didn't think Minelab had CTX lines continually churning them out. The same could be said of any of the detectors they manufacture. They make a run of a model then switch to another model in some type of rotation. It seems like Minelab would not lower the price because they were overstocked. At least not this early in the Manticore's existence. I don't think it was a poor sales or overstock issue.

On another note why Minelab thought it was a good idea to make the 900 is beyond me. They could have done the whole fixing issues thing and not changed much and still called it an 800. I would have understood it more if they dropped the 800, but they still manufacture it. A lot of people had they not had the option to buy a 900 would have instead probably have bought the Manticore. Maybe I don't understand marketing and maybe Minelab would hook them into buying a 900 and then reel them in to purchase a Manticore later.

I think part of what we're seeing is simply competition in action. What's interesting is that Nokta has just announced some sales promotion activity. Minelab's pricing power is being eroded.

1 hour ago, Flavius Titus said:

.......you definitely need an emergency power bank.

Or a spare coil - I keep the 9" coil in my backpack, while hunting with the 13" coil usually.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that people who live in remote places often tend to be more self-sufficient and better at make-do-and-mend (a bit like our grandparents and the generations before them).

By comparison:

Nokta Makro LiOn batteries: 6 month warranty

XP LiOn batteries: 2 year warranty

2 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Nice link. Having run a business it does not work like that. I ordered a bunch of stuff on a guess thinking it would sell. Then the day came where I went “oh ####, I ###### up and ordered too many. What to do? Ok guys, let’s have a sale. Let’s see, Sunday is coming up…. We will call it the Super Sunday Sale! We need to blow these things out. What price will work? $200 off. Maybe. $300? Ah, screw it, I’m busy and need these things out of here, need some cash for a new forklift I want to buy. Let’s bite the bullet and go $500 off and get these things gone!

The basic flaw of economics is stated in the first paragraph of the link “In neoclassical economics, which is currently the mainstream approach to microeconomics, the firm is assumed to be a "rational agent"”

 

Rational agents - ha! The business world is made up of human beings and has all types. As humans mistakes are regularly made. Petty politics is rampant in any large organization. Important decisions get made with a hangover from last night. Big egos everywhere trying to make a mark with a wild gamble. Rational? Let me hold up Elon Musk as exhibit A. Brilliant? No doubt. Rational? Depends on the moment and it has been my observation that genius is the tiniest step away from madness. No, people try hard, but trying to reduce people or companies to equations based on an assumption they act rationally is an exercise doomed to failure. Emotion and human frailty are a large part of the equation.

I agree that most of us are not 'rational' most of the time. Someone "important" at Codan's sales projections have proven to be over optimistic! I like the old saw "Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is king".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization

In the UK, dealers are offering a "free" M15 coil (previously a "free" ProFind 40) with a new Manti, while keeping the same selling price. From this I infer that Manti sales have been ok but have slowed down a lot, and sales of the M15 and ProFind40 have been very sluggish!

I don't expect to see price reductions, but who knows what the future holds? Prices of used Noxes are going down still.

14 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

 

... It is interesting they went USB C on the new Xtreme Hunter coil....

 

 

I think the main reason they did that is EU regulations that are coming into force mandating that consumer electronics gear has a USB-C charging connector (and USB-C is just better!).

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220930IPR41928/long-awaited-common-charger-for-mobile-devices-will-be-a-reality-in-2024

3 hours ago, Ferrous Grump said:

I'm looking to buy a pair of great sounding wireless headphones.  Something close to my water hunting Aqua-Teks would be great.

UPDATE:  I found the WS5 are a stand alone interface with the coils where the WSAII-XL requires the remote or "puck"

 

 

For Deus 2 there are three basic wireless headphone options:

1) WS6 - backphones (allow you to wear a hat/glasses easily, but not everyone finds them comfortable. Only slightly rain-proof, lightweight and comfortable in warmer weather. A certain amount of sound can get round these phones in both directions - useful if situational awareness is helpful e.g. in a park. The 'puck' is detachable and is all you need, besides a coil and shaft, to create a functioning Deus 2. An adapter can easily be attached to the puck to allow use of wired phones/plugs of your choice.

2) WSA2 - exactly like the WS6 but 'dumb' wireless phones. Cannot be used to create a full detector without either a WS6 puck or a Deus 2 Remote.

3) WSA2XL - The same functions as the WSA2 but fully rain/puddle proof. Over ear conventional design, comfortable in cold or where there is a lot of external noise. Arguably provide best quality audio.

For fully submersible phones, they need to be plugged into the Deus 2 Remote. XP offer bone conduction headphones. Conventional over ear phones are available from Gray Ghost and Thresher, among others - these options mostly use piezo transducers to provide the submersible features.

2 hours ago, phrunt said:

I recently decided XP is not for me due to their warranty/service in New Zealand.  I had a battery problem with my HF Deus 1 coil, I contacted the NZ dealer it was purchased from, although as I bought it second hand I didn't have the receipt for it.  It was still under warranty technically but without that receipt it wasn't as I had no proof of purchase although if they cared enough, they could have offered to looked up the previous owners name in their system and recovered the invoice, I didn't care, I just wanted to buy a new battery for it.  They were unable to sell one to me, they were unable to get batteries as the shipping of batteries is all too difficult from XP so it just couldn't happen in their mind, I'd have to buy a new coil to get a cheap little battery.

So basically, anyone in NZ with a Deus 1 once the batteries are stuffed have to throw it away, there is only one XP dealer and they're not interested in bringing the batteries in.  

I appreciate the problem you illustrate, but the batteries are commodity items and changing them is a relatively straightforward task for someone with even fairly basic technical knowledge - considerably easier than changing a cellphone battery I would say.

3 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

......Unmasking" is a myth that only appears in air tests.....

This is the only thing I disagree with/understand differently. Adjacent iron does make a non-ferrous target look/sound worse (more ferrous) than it otherwise would. 'Masking' is the term I (and I believe the majority of other people who think about such things) use to describe this effect.

Whatever techniques you use, and whatever they're called, some will be better, and some will be worse at winkling out 'masked' non-ferrous targets in the ground.

Do we agree on the above?

On 3/16/2024 at 9:14 PM, Rrnp said:

I tested 50 gold pieces, rings, pendants and anything gold, with the Equinox 800 and the Deus 2. The Dues 2 numbers were jumpy just by two or three, but it did sound good on most. The Equinox hit strong on everything with a solid number. On odd shaped and small objects of gold even a small gold chain the Equinox sounded much better.  Both were in Park. Why?????

If you were doing air tests then it's difficult to make any meaningful inferences. I find that - in the ground - on good targets in benign conditions at least - the D2 TIDs are every bit as stable as the Nox800 ones - even taking into account that the D2 has two or three times more numbers to choose from! 👍

PS Park mode for the D2 is not super-sensitive to small low-conductors, by default.

16 hours ago, phrunt said:

I don't know if I'd want a powerful magnet that close to the electronics.

I don't think that it's a problem in this case. A magnet moving relative to the ferrite rod antenna would definitely be a question mark though. 👍🙂

12 hours ago, NCtoad said:

Hmmm, I remember watching a video of his where he modifies the mi6 to be louder.  He said the volume was too low.  Maybe you’re onto something with the red disc.  

Yes, I think he actually drilled a couple of small holes in the red disc - letting more sound out but letting dust/mud/water in - I wouldn't risk it myself!

The only reason I can think that they made it the way they did is that the red disc acts as some kind of resonator to amplify/transmit the sound more.  I thought Paystreak had a magnet epoxied into his.  The thread on the cap is easy to damage, but so far after 18 months I've not spoiled mine yet.

41 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Y'all may not believe this, but something clicked on the number "42" for me, I looked it up and I was right. 🤣

Remember the Douglas Adams series:

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

The answer to Life, the Universe and Everything...

Is 42.

Take it or leave it. 😏 

The meaning of life - because beer was 42 pence a pint at that time. It's about six hundred pence a pint (in a pub anyway) these days....

10 hours ago, iron_buzz said:

Gary,

 

I don't think I've heard how you came to hear about Tekkna.  You are certainly the one that has made it a household word but who put it together?

 

Also, (and more importantly) do you know why discrim was set to 42, and not 41 or 43 or some other number?

I'm not Gary (😎😁) - and I'm sure he can/will speak for himself(!) - but I think it's interesting that if you look at PaystreakSuperfreaks recent YT videos he shows his 'VCO' program which he uses with Disc at 44. Paystreak has clay soil with a lot of iron mineralisation in it - probably a lot more than in most of our soils here in southern England, he also seems to hunt in parks with loads of modern trash and a fair amount of EMI (you could imagine he would want to give his ears an easier time!). He says he uses it as a way to ignore most of the foil and other nuisance signals as a first pass - he then goes back using more 'conventional' Disc settings to find the stuff he missed the first time (ie 'cherrypicking' as I said upthread).

Basically, I don't think there's any magic in a specific Disc number - just a choice based on experience and local conditions (just like everything else in detecting!).

9 hours ago, iron_buzz said:

Silencer is only supposed to reduce falsing, isn't it? 

There's a big difference between falsing and (un)masking.

1) Falsing = iron sounding better than it should (usually because of size/shape/holes/corners/rust).

2) Masking = iron making an adjacent nonferrous target sound worse than it should.

Increasing Silencer will move the decision-point towards iron in both the above types of situation. Silencer will help to reduce falsing but effectively increase masking (a trade-off as per usual). I nearly always use Silencer=0 and use other methods to spot falsing.

12 minutes ago, F350Platinum said:

Thank you! 🙂

I see that we are closer to what I'm getting at, excellent reply. 🏆 This forum is the last place we should be posting discouraging disinformation.

I did a little digging and found this video by Jack the Templar, very good in-ground test that makes way more sense than any I've seen yet, and it is clever:

It's not captioned but I am going to try and pull the settings from it. Luckily his D2 is set up in English 😀

I think this is the closest to "unmasking" as one can get.

Stay tuned. 🙂

I think his video shows how good an unmasker the D2 is. His way of 'decluttering' the audio is to put iron volume at zero. I've never tried that, as I find it helpful to hear iron tones to avoid being fooled by big/rusty/mis-shapen iron, but I will try it after watching this video. Gary goes to the other extreme with Iron Volume at 10 in his Tekkna.

15 hours ago, F350Platinum said:

I guess I'm equally dubious and curious about this subject of "unmasking". 🤔 It's been mentioned many times in this thread, and yet Tekkna doesn't seem to do that at all. It merely "plucks" a desirable target from an abundance of junk. The goal is to get a consistent repeatable signal.

"Unmasking" to me is the ability to ignore an undesirable target using discrimination or any other filter to locate a desirable target that is either nearby or under an undesirable target.

I have only used one machine with which I was able to do that, literally set discrimination at a level that completely ignored the iron nails placed over a silver coin, by first dialing them out before placing them on the coin. No sound at all passing the coil over the nails alone.

That machine is a Tesoro Vaquero, I'm told that many of the other models made by Tesoro are also able to do it.

However, the machine only indicated a target was there, not what it was. That's less cool than what Tekkna  does in a sense. At least you have the additional ID information. What is under the nails could be anything.

I tried the Deus 2 and the Equinox, both excellent modern digital machines, first by ignoring the iron signal separately using discrimination and then notch, hoping to "see" the coin ID with the nails placed on the silver coin.

Sorry about the detail, but I didn't wish to be thought mistaken in my method. If I am that might be the explanation I seek. 🙂

Both the Deus 2 and the Equinox failed the test at any response level, either generating an iron tone or nothing at all. There might have been a slight chirp but nothing indicated the coin was "unmasked", no steady tone or ID. I would not have made the dig decision.

I performed this test on a board with two very old nails, covering a Barber quarter and dime with them.

All Tekkna does is discriminate one ID, and utilizes fast reactivity and very little filtering, with whatever other unknown advantages Sensitive FT has. I can pretty much get the same effect from other programs by just cranking up reactivity. Ultimately depth is lost, as I don't hear as many targets the faster I turn up reactivity/recovery.

So, I'm curious, what is this "unmasking" mentioned many times here? I watched one video posted in this thread as some sort of truth, but to me it was doing only a "nearby" comparison. 

To be fair I have not tried this under V2 on the Deus, perhaps that will help.

I agree that Tekkna really isn't about unmasking - Gary's version is not particularly good at that, as demonstrated by IffySignals' yt video on that subject.

I understand unmasking to mean making a good target, which is partially hidden by iron, sound like a good target. Adjacent iron makes good targets sound worse (more like iron) than they should. Increasing Silencer (like iron bias on Nox and others) increases the chance of a borderline good target sounding worse than it should - so does increasing Disc but for a simpler reason.

I think that Tekkna is more about 'decluttering' the audio, so that good targets are not drowned out by the audio of bad ones (different from my definition of unmasking).

3 hours ago, iron_buzz said:

As I understand it, there are only a few settings that can really do any true "unmasking"... a lower sensitivity to reduce induced magnetism,  and a higher reactivity to speed up the processing from one target to the next.  And in a sense, I suppose it could be argued that silencer helps with unmasking.  

I'd strongly argue that filters like Silencer reduce unmasking capability in iron.

If I've understood Tekkna at all, it's based around the idea that raising Disc to an unusually high value can sometimes have greater than expected benefits - mostly, I believe, in supressing 'noise' from unwanted targets. I've tried this idea quite often in the past - on the beach and on land - as a way of cherry picking, for example quickly putting Disc up to 85 as a first pass, looking for silver and large copper alloy coins. I think that Youtubers like PaystreakSuperfreak (bless him) have done this kind of thing in the past too. I am perfectly happy with the way my D2 works - there are still some quirks/"features" in the software, though - there probably always will be. I used to write embedded software for a living.

10 minutes ago, Mark Gillespie said:

...They will fix the discrimination algorithms if they feel it needs to be adjusted....

Either by accident or on purpose!

My impression is that software configuration management is not their strongest suit 😁

Besides coils, LCD display panels, batteries, and passive components like capacitors that can age, most recent detectors will contain flash memory - for programs and/or data - which can fail after a period of repeated use. I guess that a 'sticky bit' of flash memory is more likely to create an unpredictable level of degradation in performance.

27 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Tekkna is not really a feature, it's just a custom program utilizing an existing D2 target signal processing base program (Sensi FT in this case) and settings.  Unless you were specifically referring to one of the settings or features used by Tekkna and I misunderstood what you referring to.

I noticed that Gary says in one of his videos "XP don't fix it!". I see on a different YT vid by IffySignals that unmasking is not very good with Tekkna - at least if based on Sensitive FT prog 3.

I think that one of the reasons people like these settings is perhaps simply because it makes it easier to 'see the wood for the trees' in an otherwise 'busy' (audio) environment - psychoacoustics?