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I go to extreme lengths to bring information on new detectors to this website. Many others help. Trademarks are watched, patents, corporate reports, leaks from overseas dealers.... anything that can be found that offers hints to upcoming product. It is a large driver here as many are interested in the latest and greatest. Many experts here add valuable commentary. The volume of information here can get overwhelming when we are on a roll. I try to bury people with early info. As a result, this is the place to be if you like information. Those that only visit the forum, you are missing out on years of effort put into other parts of this website, and you really should look at those other areas. I've never written a book on this stuff per se, but if I did, most of it would be repeating what comes out here a post at a time. I am also a stickler for accurate information. I'm very well plugged into most things metal detecting, and when I see somebody crossing lines with inaccurate information, I take care of it. Not to brag, but after 45 years of doing this every day, the depth and breadth of my knowledge on various brands is rather encyclopedic. I do not want to create fake machine info as is done on other websites just to attract clicks. It either passes my accuracy filter, or I delete it. You can trust what you see on this site as having a very high degree of accuracy, and there are smart people here to call it out if it is not. And then people show up and talk hype. They literally come here to partake of all this information, and then turn right around and call it hype. I guess it is the sheer volume of information and the enthusiasm they see as hype. Some get caught up in it, and make poor decisions. Then they want to blame their poor decisions on hype. I'm calling B.S. This website by and large is for serious adults, not children. I have no time to waste with people who cannot take responsibility for their own actions, and want to throw the hype card out as a cover for their poor decision making abilities. I LOVE INFORMATION and I collect and pour it out here. I AM PASSIONATE ABOUT THE SUBJECT MATTER. I am basically a big kid, these are my toys, and I get all giddy when I get new toys. I've lived for this stuff since I was 14 and I'm 63 now... you sure as heck are not going to change me at this point. If you don't like all that, if it's all hype to you, you are in the wrong place. I'm not sure what you are looking for. A placid site with no information to trigger that credit card reflex? Heck if I know. What I can tell you is I work hard, very hard, for all of you by working hard for me. I gather information and learn things FOR ME, but I am also very happy to share what I know WITH YOU. If you want, and I assume up front that by being here that is what you want. Given the effort I am making, the easiest way to get on my bad side is to bring up the hype thing. If all this information and enthusiastic forum membership is too much for you to handle, just go away. I cannot understand why people watch the website, see all the info, join, and then bitch about the basic nature of what we are doing here. I have watched for years as the best people, the ones who really know what they are talking about, tire of this nonsense and disappear. You don't think we need that crap, do you? It is the craziest shoot yourself in the foot thing I have ever seen. I envisioned this as a place where those people could come and share what they know, to the benefit of all. But in trying to please everyone I lost sight of that mission. No more. That's my rant. We have a new machine into that I am very excited about. There are world class experts here ready to discuss the machine and have fun with a rare gift - a new gold getting beast. If that's not your thing, you do not want to have fun with all that, please take the debbie downer stuff somewhere else. I'm not trying to make everyone happy, I'm not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm extremely cool with that. I'm trying to collect my tribe here, the people that get it, and want to be part of it. I really hope that is you, but if not, there are zillions of places that may better suit. I set this website up expressly because I wanted a place to play with my friends, and I never put a gun to anyone's head to be here. If you are one of those that like to play the hype card, know that I set this place up to get away from you!! One of the very best things about getting older is being able to let my "grumpy Steve" out to play if I want.

There was an article a few weeks ago about a find that needed to be identified. It was a square pendant with some gold flakes inside. Several people had seen them before and there was a link to the item. I have someone that is wanting to find a couple of them, and would like to point them in the right direction. Thank you, Caleb

I just upgraded the forum to the next major release, 4.5.2. This time they did some changes to the overall look and feel. Most of the changes are improvements but the new high contrast colors and bold fonts are almost too bright, too sharp. The header went stark white so I dialed that back to blue. Anyway, I'll be tweaking the look and feel for a few days. A couple of the old add on modules are now out of date so need to deal with that also. For any nerds out there, here is the forum feature change list. One new thing is there will be a new mobile app. If you visit lots of Invision powered websites (like Chris', Bill's, and Rob's) it may be of interest. The old color scheme. Less bright colors, blue text instead of black and white, more of a gray background.....

It used to be blocking spammers was easy since most were automated bots. Unfortunately most now are real people. They used to be easy to spot due to poor English. So they took to copying real posts and posting them as their own. The tip off always comes in the form of links to some totally unrelated site. They now try and get overlooked by joining and posting for a week or two, usually innocuous posts. Then, they later take advantage of the forum edit function that allows you to edit your own posts to modify their old posts to include the stupid spam links. What they unfortunately do not know is I am always lurking and have a nose for this sort of stuff, so their efforts always go to waste. I not only ban them and delete all their content but add them to the Invision distributed spam list so they get nailed elsewhere. But there is always another one who does not know they are wasting their time here so it never ends. Long story short I have limited the edit function to 30 days after posting, so you can edit your own posts now for a month, which I think is good enough, but no more after that. Be aware though these people are hitting the forum weekly, and I do catch them, so don't be surprised if every now and then an entire thread or portion of thread disappears as I nuke these people. At this time however they are only a mild annoyance so I don't think I have to do anything more about the issue for now.

I enjoyed reading the topics under this forum as I have a couple entry level units un addition to my Equinox. But I have not been on this site for a couple of months and can’t seem to find it. It seemed pretty active.

Hi, Here is a short list according to Alexa. The large number reflects the total internet ranking, Google being #1. Other sites you might be familiar with did not make the top ten but you can go to Alexa to see where they rate. This website has been on a tear rapidly increasing in popularity for some time, and I thank you, the good forum members, for making that happen! Updated 8/1/2020 1. treasurenet.com 295,163 2. detectorprospector.com 552,748 3. metaldetectingforum.com (Friendly) 742,426 4. geotech1.com 1,127,452 5. prospectingaustralia.com.au 1,132,307 6. md-hunter.com 1,357,499 7. metaldetectingforum.co.uk 1,429,423 8. findmall.com 1,514,028 9. mdhtalk.org 4,146,397 10. dankowskidetectors.com 8,832,928

OK, I have been involved in a two month makeover and upgrade process for this website. The main goal is to get rid of all the old portions of the website so everything is a common format, look and feel throughout the site. This will insure all pages render properly on any device from a small phone to a large screen PC. This put additional load on the existing hardware resources, and the website has bogged down considerably in the last month. I could count the seconds waiting for a page to load, and error messages were too common. This morning the site was upgraded to a new server with both upgraded software and hardware. For my part I am seeing massively better performance now, pages loading almost instantly and everything just much snappier. How does it seem to you? Better? No difference? Worse? Let me know if you see any glitches starting this morning - anything before today does not matter any more. The process is not quite done. I have about 50 more old pages to convert, and my goal is to have this done before the end of next week. There are more performance tweaks I can undertake but with if the site stays as fast as it is now the benefits will probably not be as noticeable if at all. The most visible upgrade I will do soon will be to convert everything to SSL secure communications to bring the site up to current recommended standards. That may cause a little turmoil with images served from outside sources but I expect any disruption there to be minimal Been a fair bit of work and I always stress a little before server moves, etc. However, the benefits should be considerable moving forward both for me as admin and for all you as members. Thanks again for your patience during this process!

I have had mine for a year now and it is the only detector I use now. My only thoughts are the 9 x 11 coil works great in the water but I wish he would offer a 12" coil for the damp,wet and wash. It also would help shrink those fields while relic hunting. Tarsacci MDT 8000 metal detector

That would be cool. I always wanted to try a D-Tex, Gardiner, Compass, Arado, etc... but was stuck on early Bounty Hunters and Whites. Always wondered if anyone actually used them in the parks around my area in the 70's

Hi all. I have downloaded a photo resizer app off the internet for android devices. It has the resize options of pixels, cms and inches. Which do I use for this site and details please? I am going to try and get my head around uploading photos to this forum via my tablet or smartphone rather than via computer. TIA and help appreciated.

Looking at some usernames on this forum i sometimes wonder how they came up with their name. Obviously some have user names that are their real name but others are a little more bizarre. When i decided to join prospecting forums i didn't know what to have, so googled how you say Gold in different languages. I came across "Jin" which is the Chinese term for gold.

I changed my Youtube channel name which was Dig-a-holic to Paul B. I am unable to change it here. Can you change it? Thanks Paul B

- - - which means all my uploaded images have vanished, including the "Reg Wilson Gold Album" and "Gold found with the QED" Wasn't even given the option to transfer my images to parent company Photobucket for a fee. Huge amount of work to edit and transfer images to another host - so shock and apathy prevail for now - need a beer and time to think - - - :<(

I and probably many of you have been experiencing forum connection issues recently. Some of it was a database server crash, and part of it a corrupted file due to the crash. However, the forum database is also getting large, over 2GB now. I May do a prune of all members who have not logged in or posted in over a year. This has not been done in years so there are thousands of inactive accounts taking up space. If you have not logged in or posted in over a year now is the time, otherwise your account may disappear. You can see the forum without an account though you can’t download files and such. Bottom line is if you are not logging in or posting you don’t need an account so I will be cleaning that up very soon. I figure a year is long enough to be reasonable but if anyone thinks that’s too little please speak up! I am also going to delete the photo gallery. It gets very little use but is a resource hog. 90% of the photos there are mine, and I may move them to my personal website then link there. Almost no members are using the Gallery and it is a separate module I pay for on top of the other forum costs. I suspect most members don’t even know it exists. So that’s going away unless you all rise up in protest! Simultaneous members online at once has been climbing rather rapidly. 133 on the site as I type, and that alone may be causing connection refusals due to the forum being on a shared database server. So concurrent with the above I am working with my hosting service to move from a shared database server to my own VPS dedicated database server. This will help protect the forum performance from being impacted perhaps by other server users (and them by us), and allow me to isolate and more easily diagnose any issues here. Add all this up and we should all see better forum access and speed very soon. To anyone experiencing these issues, my apologies. The good news is that this is all because the forum is growing while most seem to be shrinking, so in a weird way I’m happy to be bumping into server limits. Just wanted to let you all know I do pay attention to this stuff and try to do what is needed to keep things humming along smoothly.

I just want to interject here and say, that I’ve been to a lot of forums on the net, but “Detector Prospector” is the best on the internet. A good place for non-biased information. Quick responses, non argumentative, a great group of contributors. I am glad that I joined. Hopefully we will all be here for the next several decades.

I was interested in exchanging info such as the noise voltage density per m^2 of out here in my location, nV/√Hz/m^2 but didn't see a appropriate category on the forum. I was wondering if anyone knows of a metal detecting forum where there might be people who design metal detectors.

Just some stats for those who may wonder about such things. In the last year (July 2018 - July 2019) this website had just over 350,000 unique visitors (each person counted once, not every time they post). The top ten countries.... United States 55.5% Australia 13.93% United Kingdom 8.22% Canada 2.45% France 1.19% Germany 1.18% Italy 1.06% Netherlands 0.99% Turkey 0.92% Russia 0.71%

So you see something that you do not think fits the spirit and intent of the forum. Somebody attacking somebody else, off topic posts, political posts, or just plain spam. How to handle it? Please, do not go after the poster yourself. Maybe it is a misunderstanding of some sort, but now you have created hard feelings with somebody else on the forum. The main thing, unless I have made you a moderator, it is not your job to moderate the forum. However, it is everyone's job to report objectionable content. Let me decide what to do about the issue. Every post has a unfortunately quite faint "Report post" link. On mobile devices there is a tiny grey flag. If the problem is obvious, just click that link and hit "Submit Report" and you are done. I will get the message and look into it, but if it is my middle of night, it may be a few hours. Be patient - I am on the forum every day. If you feel you need to give me more details, there is a place there for that also. My default response to threads or posts that are an issue is to simply delete them without comment. People involved usually get the hint. Some may take offense, and while that is not my intent - oh well. Maybe it really was no big deal but if it is a non-essential post I will err on the side of caution and delete it. My apologies in advance. I have only had to ban a handful of people over the years, and if I have to ban somebody I may leave the posts in question up for a bit so people can see why I did what I did, but they also will be deleted eventually.

As part of my Metal Detector Database project I want to be able to link to catalogs and user guides / owner's manuals. I get a little frustrated however about how external website links keep moving around or disappear. So I decided the catalogs and user guide area of the Downloads Page will have to get copies of everything I am linking to so I know things will stay put going forward. This is part of the archiving process for older equipment where manuals and catalogs may not even exist in scanned form yet. I will start with current equipment. Once I get all the readily available stuff done I may start soliciting for old catalogs and owners manuals people have sitting around so I can scan them and add to the collection.

I have been doing reviews of various gold prospecting metal detectors for years. I also have maintained a Guide to Gold Nugget Detectors that summarizes and links back to the detailed reviews. That's fine, but this website has branched out into all things detecting, and my reviews are limited to one niche of the metal detecting world. I also find I have an ongoing need to link to metal detector specs, and having a complete database of detectors past and present can help me as we go along. The main thing however is I am hoping to get a good user review database going. Long story short I am working on a new Metal Detector Database With User Reviews. I have created a simple framework, and am putting basic specification information in for current metal detector models. The detectors are listed alphabetically by manufacturer and model. There are basic specs highlighted - internet price, frequency, weight, waterproof or not, and whether the detector is a current model. You can use the "Sort By" function to sort the entire list by any of these criteria. The heart of it all however is the ability of each forum member to leave a "Five Star Review". You rate the detector overall - one star is poor, five stars superb. You can do a written review, hopefully one that simply says what you like most about the detector, and what you like least. I prefer this be kept clean and useful for others. This may or may not turn into anything as it really depends on all of us. The more reviews that get left, the more useful it will be for everyone. I am plugging basic specs in but as I get caught up I will go back and try and make each entry a compact listing of information about each model, possibly listing common accessories with part numbers. I already am linking to manuals etc. That way when somebody posts in the future about a detector, links can be made to the appropriate database entry so people can get more details. You can figure I will be doing a lot of that cross linking so it's not something people need to do unless they want to. Finally, when that all gets caught up, I will start working backwards and add discontinued models. I will stick with more popular stuff at first, getting more obscure over time. In a few years this could be a really great resource. I will be building the database regardless. Many of the entries are just placeholders at the moment, but if anyone wants to please feel free to place some reviews. It might help me tweak the system, and I am open to suggestions. As always there is only so much I can get on screen at one time, so the specs I highlight and such are limited more by screen space than anything. Check it out at Metal Detector Database With User Reviews. I will rejigger the menu structure in the future to make this easier to find but right now it's a little off the beaten path.

All the current Teknetics metal detector models have now been added to the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews. If you have owned any of these Teknetics models please help others by leaving a review. Discontinued Teknetics models will be added in the future. For an explanation of the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews visit this link Teknetics T2 Classic metal detector

All the current White's metal detector models have now been added to the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews. If you have owned any of these White's models please help others by leaving a review. Discontinued White's models will be added in the future. For an explanation of the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews visit this link

All the current Nokta/Makro metal detector models have now been added to the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews starting on page 3. If you have owned any of these Nokta/Makro models please help others by leaving a review. Discontinued Nokta/Makro models will be added in the future. For an explanation of the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews visit this link Nokta/Makro Multi Kruzer LCD display

All the current Minelab metal detector models have now been added to the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews starting on page 2. If you have owned any of these Minelab models please help others by leaving a review. Discontinued Minelab models will be added in the future. For an explanation of the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews visit this link

All the current Fisher metal detector models have now been added to the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews. If you have owned any of these Fisher models please help others by leaving a review. Discontinued Fisher models will be added in the future. I have most new Bounty Hunter models done but still have a few to go, and have made a bare start on the Teknetics models, but placeholders exist for them and reviews can be left. For an explanation of the Metal Detector Database with User Reviews visit this link Click for larger version..... 2016 Fisher metal detector models (latest available catalog)