Who Has Had Issues With Their Gpx 6000?

[Gold Catcher]

2 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

The GPX 6000 is a superb detector when working correctly as intended, but the number of reported defects has been really disappointing, especially people experiencing multiple coil failures.

Totally agree, and with aftermarket coil and shipping for the fix you are down for $6600, let alone the frustration. But what would have been the alternative after purchasing? Selling it for a loss? At least now I have a great working detector. But the bad after taste for sure remains. Makes me wait a bit longer to get the GPZ8000 after its release, that's for sure.

GC

[Desert Dawg]

Due to the repairs on my gpx6000, I am considering a second backup pi machine now. I have pretty much given up on vlf nugget machines as backups since the latest pi machines are so sensitive and 3x the depth on tiny gold. Perhaps soon I may get a Axiom as a backup pi. Back in June we had along a couple vlf detectors but they were pretty worthless at rye patch due to all the rainfall and saturated ground at the time. My gpx6000 performed great in all that wet ground.

[Gold Catcher]

The GPZ was a great built detector from the get go. Ok, some minor issues here and there (cheap screen, some latency when changing settings-which presists even after the last software update, some shaft issues), but overall pretty good right away. Same for the SDC, aside the battery issue which was easily managble.  These were the good old ML quality days. I wish they would come back!

GC

[phrunt]

The thing that puzzles me about Minelab is they don't seem to do any failure analysis to work out why the problem exists and how to remedy it.  The same weak ears transitioned from CTX to Equinox to Vanquish and they were replacing coils over and over again for a decade for people with broken ears yet they did nothing about it until finally the Manticore came along, they knew they were a problem right back on the CTX and even if it is end users breaking them by leaning on detectors and so on they were not near as robust as other brands and I think they only did something about it then as Nokta were giving them a bit of a hard time about the quality of their products without even mentioning any names, but everyone knew who they were talking about as everyone knew Minelab had the problems.

The GPX 6000 comes along and now what 2 years later people are still buying them with dodgy coils, at this stage at least so far it doesn't look like they've found the root cause of the problem or they are just doing the same as they did with the coil ears letting the problem ride out, perhaps its cheaper for them to replace coils than it is to fix the problem.

The shipping back to the service agent in USA seems quite expensive, here it was $11 for my GPX and insurance was automatically included so no big deal and that turns into about 7USD but you guys pay a lot so it's a real inconvenience sending stuff back to them all the time to repair/replace.

You would think the engineers would be desperate to pull apart faulty coils and work out why they're failing so they can adjust manufacturing to prevent further failures, which would be a normal business practice. 

I really don't understand their way of operating but it sure doesn't give confidence in their products and shows a certain level of contempt to their customers.

[Gold Catcher]

27 minutes ago, phrunt said:

here it was $11 for my GPX and insurance was automatically included so no big deal and that turns into about 7USD but you guys pay a lot so it's a real inconvenience sending stuff back to them all the time to repair/replace.

I paid about $150 for shipping and 6k insurance. Things are totally out of control here.....with everything!

GC

[jasong]

Minelab seemed to get on any potential problems with the Manticore update. In general, the VLF guys seem to get better service when I browse that section. Minelab completely ignore us from what I can tell, despite the fact that we dole out $6k, $10k for detectors. I'm over $30k total in Minelab products, I expect a lot better.

I wrote to ML directly in addition to early reporting on this forum about the EMI problem. They took a while to respond back to me on the 6000 but I waited patiently and said nothing. Then when they finally responded back, they just gave me a link to the same old "noise cancel" article despite the fact that I just told them in great detail all my field experience and tests, and that noise cancel wasn't working and there was likely a hardware problem affecting all 6000's having to do with EMI/interference. Then they continued to tell me there was no issue.

Hilarious considering by that time I had already found their hidden fix page. Not only did they know there was a problem but they had a fix for it, yet they still were content letting customers go out and waste time and gas money in the field with equipment they knew had not only an design flaw, but that they had a fix available and could have stopped the insanity right then and there, but didn't.

I called a few dealers and realized Minelab wasn't telling them about the fix either (even the repair center hadn't heard of it back then, when I called to ask), IMO it didn't look like we'd ever get it in the US at that point and I was dead tired of wrestling with the issue and wasting time, that's when I showed Simon the semi hidden link (I no longer had access to it from the US) to see if he could view it from NZ. Simon posted it here shortly after, but it was me that found it and decided to publish it so that they would start issuing the fix to everyone. I was trying to be patient and respect ML's privacy and gave them a bunch of time and chances over and over again to do the right thing first before exposing the fix to the public since at first I thought they would do it themselves and vindicate my observation of what seemed to be a wide-scale hardware flaw causing EMI problems, but they made it clear they were not going to do it on their own and I had wasted enough gas money and time and taken enough flack from trolls on my integrity/detecting experience, so that was enough for me.

So yeah, they do appear to have some sort of strange contempt for their customers. They are happy to let us waste our time and money on products they know are defective and that they could fix, but decide not to for whatever reason. Minelab should be happy they have dealers and field testers who are decent, helpful people making the company look good, because if it wasn't for them I'd say the company could fall into the abyss and I'd not care after how much time and money I wasted trying to figure out the 6000 thing just to get lied to and then not even an apology from corporate.

[Gold Catcher]

I am still puzzled though why this was not noticed during field testing. Did the prototypes not have the unshielded part(s)? It surely should have been noticed by the testers when using the speaker. I did not notice it at first since I never use external speakers. But when I finally did it was clearly noticeable.

GC

[jasong]

That's kinda the point of my last post - I'm sure the field testers did tell them. Minelab knew it was an issue. And they already had a fix, when I first reported this being something that was affecting literally every single 6000 I ran across, wether the owners had recognized it yet or not. 

That's the reason I was so frustrated, Minelab knew the issue, figured out how to fix it, but never told us or gave us access to the fix let us hang out to dry. They hid it 100% from US customers. I figured all this out, and still I decided not to post it or tell anyone, and let them have time to fix it. Until I lost patience. I'm not convinced they would have fully come forward with the fix for everyone at all if I didn't do it for them. Or if they would have, when exactly that would have happened since at the time I was many months into reporting the issue and they were still denying it existed.

I want people to understand how it went, because I didn't post a lot of the entire process of this whole thing at the time, I was still thinking at some point Minelab would come clean, or at least apologize for the inconvenience...something...anything. They seem to have zero respect for their customer's time and money though. Some of us do this full or part time and it's our income. And for people like me, even just getting out to a place that I can test takes a lot of gas money when it was $5.50/gallon or whatever - I was dropping $160 each time to go out and get back. And then the gas and time to go redetect everything where I had to stop or was about to crack the machine over my knee and gave up. 

[phrunt]

Even when the website came out with the notice they've tried to get out of fixing every detector by saying it's an infrequent problem acting as if it's only rare and on some detectors yet I've not heard a person yet who's had it done that doesn't notice an improvement and many are reporting an improvement even when using headphones.  Then they go on to say they've incorporated the fix into every new detector. 

Minelab has identified infrequent cases where users hear audio feedback when using the internal speaker. Please refer to the product notice on our website by clicking on the link below.

https://www.minelab.com/support/product-notices?article=482551

Minelab have produced a hardware update that removes this effect. This update is present in all newly manufactured GPX6000s.

In the event you have a production standard without this update and have experienced audio feedback when using the speaker please follow the procedure below in Australia to arrange for this update to be completed on your detector.

Please note for maximum performance headphones should be used. Headphone performance is unaffected with this update.

From what I can tell, it wasn't an identified problem by ANYONE until many months after release, the first murmurs of the problem were many months after release when some people starting pointing out it appears to be more stable on headphones so it was missed for quite some time I think.  Either way, if anyone should have picked up the problem it's the engineers.

[jasong]

27 minutes ago, phrunt said:

Even when the website came out with the notice they've tried to get out of fixing every detector by saying it's an infrequent problem acting as if it's only rare and on some detectors yet I've not heard a person yet who's had it done that doesn't notice an improvement and many are reporting an improvement even when using headphones.  Then they go on to say they've incorporated the fix into every new detector. 

Minelab has identified infrequent cases where users hear audio feedback when using the internal speaker. Please refer to the product notice on our website by clicking on the link below.

Haha yeah, that was the other thing that really got to me too.  👆👆 It's like...they just basically lied about no problems, then when they make something public it's...kind of another lie in response to try to save face. I really thought there was going to be some kind of clarification after some time passed, but there never was. No problem making the customers look bad for their mistake, but they won't let themselves look bad when it's their own fault...

I personally haven't run across a single 6000 that didn't have the issue. Most full timers I met in the field knew or suspected there was some issue, but the majority of 6000 users I met got out 2-3 times a month and didn't know there was an issue unless I showed them. I believe Minelab may have just been banking on a lot of people not realizing, thus no need to fork the cash to actually implement the fix. Just a guess. 

That said, the 6000 is a good detector when it's working right. They deserve credit for that. But I also believe it has another issue that needs to be addressed via software update which is a lot more subtle and hard to repeat than the EMI thing, and I'm using less and less of it now.  They can pay me next time if they want me to be a beta tester for them though. 😅 I don't work for free. I'm ready to move past Minelab myself, I wish Garrett or Nokta or someone would come out with a lighter 7000 type machine that could run these existing X Coils and let me get rid of both the 6 and 7. Half sine something or another or maybe the zero voltage patents are close to expiring? No clue. There is simply no competition even close anywhere on the market for the 7/X combo though right now though, we just need a lighter one, a bit more signal processing to quiet it down, a speaker, USB C charging, and that's pretty close to the only gold detector I'll need to own with all the coil selection. I pretty much only use the 6 on salty stuff now, or long range exploration as I no longer trust it to always be at the settings I want.