New Minelab Manticore

[Chase Goldman]

2 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

The new Minelab Manticore goes deeper than any metal detector ever created. It does so by implementing new micro fusion core batteries, providing it with almost unlimited detection power. Everyone knows that all you need to do to make a detector go deeper is hook up a bigger battery.

The power is not just power, it’s a new form of power, an interleaving of frequencies and amperage the likes of which the world has never seen.* This allows for several improvements in detection depth. First, grass and other organic surface matter is instantly incinerated, turning into fine dust.** This allows the coil to get closer to the ground, which in turn allows deeper items to be detected. A secondary improvement can be had as the roots, earthworms, and beetles in the ground vaporize, leaving open spaces in the soil. We recommend that you detect the same area at least twice, carefully compacting the soil as you walk the first time, and then going over it a second time, to take advantage of the extra depth afforded by this new “OrganoElimination” OE Technology (TM pending) effect.

We are proud to include the very first implementation of heat seeking technology for metal detecting in the Manticore. The power induced into the metals under the coil is in direct relation to their conductivity. Silver, with its unique high conductivity, far better than even gold, is heated to near its melting point.*** By including heat sensors in the coil, this heat signature can be included in the processing algorithms to deliver the best discrimination results the world has ever seen. The HD Heat Discrimination (TM Pending) processing will take your detecting results to a whole new level, eliminating 98.976594% of trash targets.

Manticore. The detector that obsoletes the detectors that previously obsoleted other detectors. Get your today!

* Near field power effects may result in sterility. Use proper lead shielding over your delicate parts. Any rumors of cancer inducing side effects have been wildly exaggerated, and we estimate less than 15% of users will experience any carcinogenic effects. Any attempt to hook up coils to the detector that are not designed for it will likely result in said coil exploding. Flash injuries, and puncture wounds from flying shrapnel should be expected, and so we highly recommend using only compatible coils.

** The risk of second or third degree burns is considerable. A high quality fire suit and mask are recommended, such as those employed in metal refining. The protective lead lining previously mentioned can be incorporated into this suit for your ease of use and comfort. Due to high dust levels, high quality breathing filter masks are also recommended. See our new line of protective detector clothing for further details.

*** Be aware that items when excavated can produce second or third degree burns on contact. Use proper heat resistant gloves. We recommend metal refining gloves, but welders gloves are a suitable replacement if care is used.

Recommended minimum detecting protective suit. Only use suits guaranteed to include no conductive metal, as this may interfere with you metal detectors ability to work properly.

Wow.  Now I ‘m really disappointed because it doesn’t appear that Man-enuff incorporates “Active EMI” jamming, incapacitating all other detectors within a 5-mile range.  Could have sworn I heard someone wearing a Minelab hat and hot pants yelling out that it had this feature on some shaky video I saw posted on DD.

[GB_Amateur]

Hate to change the subject (although my smoke alarm did just go off -- better check my coils 😏).

Since no one here (who has gone public, anyway) has swung the Megawatt-Core, all we have besides mumbo-jumbo speak are specs (the ones ML has shown so far on their webpage) and a couple videos.  (BTW has anything else been uploaded since the Dutch one on Monday?)  What I'm wondering about is the graphics.  I feel a bit like I did when the Equinox (and Deus 2) came out, where people familiar with predecessors (FBS family and Deus 1 respectively) recognized things that us detector ignoramuses didn't.  On the Dutch video they seemed to indicate they were getting target shape information.  How accurate is that?  For example, does a coin on edge look oblong, round, or ??  Does an aluminum nail look different than an oblong pendant (both horizontally oriented)?

Also, is there ferrous-nonferrous info in that plot, and if so what does it say?  I didn't see any numbers so it's not quite what some of the FBS/FBS2 detectors reported, unless there is a configuration that hasn't been shown.

[cudamark]

On 9/1/2022 at 7:13 AM, King-Of-Bling said:

All this talk about power is really just that : talk , until it's out and we get to use it. But a full charge takes 7 hours in this day and age ? That is disgusting. Call me ridiculous , paranoid or whack. Here's all I know. In California , our great governor in this crazy heat has told us to not charge our EVs and 1 week prior said in the next decade no more new gas vehicles will be produced or sold. Also to turn up our thermostats as in don't run the A/C because it will cripple the power grid and cause blackouts. More insanity from these people. And all I can think of is why no one has made a solar powered detector yet. Lol

So, you want to carry a solar panel too? Where? on your head? 😄 That option may not be as attractive for those of us who hunt a lot at night.

[Geotech]

5 hours ago, PimentoUK said:

However, there is the X-Y display showing on the LCD screen. If this is anything like the FE/CO FBS system, it requires one l..o..n..g transmit cycle in its waveform to perform a 'pseudo-PI' transmission. This is not possible with the Eqx's Multi-IQ waveform, there's simply too many high-freq signals in it.
One possibility is they have created a mash-up of FBS and Multi-IQ. If the above waveform lasting 385 microsecs was alternated with a single cycle of 2.6 kHz, there would then be enough time to do the Pseudo-PI, and hence generate the "FE" signal of the FBS system. FBS uses a single cycle of 3.125kHz, so 2.6kHz is similar enough, and probably slightly better, at allowing this trick.
A down-side of this may be that there will be a slowing-down of the performance, much like the CTX is slower than the Eqx, due to the main TX waveform only being transmitted half as often. So it may be a user option: if you want 'CTX-style', you get slower response, if you choose 'Eqx-style', you get the speed.

Generally whatever you can do in time-domain system you can do in a frequency-domain system, just differently. You could determine target ferrousity in MIQ by looking at phase linearity through the response so I wouldn't be surprised to see that the Manticore does FE/CO with much the same waveform as MIQ. Also, it's difficult to mix simultaneous MF with sequential MF due to signal discontinuities that will screw up the channelization filters in the simultaneous side.

2 hours ago, PimentoUK said:

'Burnt coil' first:

The power put into a detectors coil is VERY small, 10's of milliwatts, enough to light an LED, for example the little red 'standby' light on your TV. So even if this power were increased +50%, it would still be a pathetic amount of power. Nothing will burn, burst into a mass of flaming plastic and copper, explode etc. So any suggestion that Mandingo is capable of such havoc is baloney, and is likely a failed attempt at 'hype'.

Only two things of relevance come from "+50% more power":

A potential improvement in EMI handling. If there's 23% more voltage on the TX coil, there's +23% more return signal from the target and the ground .... but the EMI signal remains the same. Hence a modest improvement in signal-to-noise ratio, which is useful.

Increased current drain on the battery pack. However ... the Eqx draws about 420 mA, from a single Li cell, say 3.8V, hence 1.6 Watts. Of which less than 0.2W [my estimate] is spent driving the coil , the rest is microprocessor / ADC / signal amplifiers / LCD screen/ audio amplifier / wireless TX/RX etc etc. So the new machine will be similar; most power is the inner workings, the 'enhanced' coil power is not a major contributor.

Probably you could hook up a BFO coil to the Manticore and it wouldn't physically burn it up. I took Tom's comment to be more tongue-in-cheek than literal.

A typical VLF TX coil current might be in the 100mA range yet battery current may only be 25mA. This happens because the coil is resonated with a capacitor and the TX energy is mostly recycled, with the periodic energy loss due mostly to coil resistance. This is obviously true with a sinusoidal TX but it is also true with a square-wave-ish MF TX. With an ideal coil (R=0) the power delivered to the coil is zero even if the TX current is 100mA. So when someone says "this TX has 50% more power" I don't know what that even means unless it's a total-loss PI transmitter. I assume ML's "50% power" statement actually means 50% more current which also means a 50% higher voltage drive. I think Tom mentioned this results in only a 7% depth increase which is right assuming a 6th power signal loss, which is close. But, hey, 7% is 7%.

The V3 had a TX Boost option which kicked the TX drive from 10V to 30V, a 3x increase. This added about 1" of depth to most coins but cut battery life in about half because the TX coil resistance wasn't all that good. And in an MF detector (and really, any detector) TX coil resistance determines the lowest practical frequency you can run due to power losses. This could be why the Manticore's coils are different, they focused on a lower R to run a lower frequency and/or higher drive voltage. Although MIQ runs at 2.6/7.8/39kHz the 2.6kHz component appears to me to be weak and is probably mostly used for ground analysis, not target detection. That's why BBS/FBS was better for deep coins, it was dominated by 3kHz. So if Manticore can run a much stronger 2.6kHz you'll see deeper coins.

On the display...

It appears to me that the manual brightness goes down to 1 but not 0. This suggests that the display is a transmissive type which (like most cell phones) always requires some level of backlight or you can't read it at all. The CTX and V3 used a transflective display which was sunlight-readable even with the backlight completely off. But very few companies make transflective displays because, in a showroom where sales are made, they tend to look washed out next to an eye-popping transmissive display. Transmissive displays obviously chew up more battery power and any color display is far worse than the near-zero power of a segmented LCD such as used in most detectors. So the Manticore is going to have a higher batter draw just due to the display.

[Steve Herschbach]

32 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Cal thanks for asking this because I knew it was going to come up eventually and here we are 4+ years later trying to put to bed a huge misconception that Minelab initiated with their original pseudo tech Equinox Multi-IQ marketing.  The 5 (now 6 on Equinox with the addition of 4 kHz)) single frequency set points have no relationship to the Multi-IQ SMF frequency spectrum for the various modes either in terms of frequency range or in the number of simultaneously transmitted frequencies.  Minelab continues to remain mum about which specific frequencies comprise the constituents of the SMF spectra and the absolute range covered.

As noted by Pimento previously, similar to Equinox and XP’s D2, it is likely that only two or three waveforms of different frequencies are being combined during transmission (certainly not 5, as many mistakenly believe).  But until we can hook a spectrum analyzer up to Molybdicore, we are not going to know and ML is probably not going to say.  

I will say this.  Just because FullMontycore is utilizing the standard 5 “Nox” single frequencies, doesn’t contradict the ML claim of an expanded SMF range or higher upper end frequency simply because the 5 SF settings have nothing to do with the SMF range, so Goldfield in Multi-IQ could still conceivably have a top end of 80 kHz and be heavily weighted to favor the target response from the 80kHz waveform.

 

It's all about reception and processing, not transmission per se. You have to transmit to set the buffet, but when you actually end up eating, you can pick and choose what to eat, and how much. It's easy to see what a detector transmits. It's very hard to see what is going on with the processing. I would posit that the processing algorithms have been "expanded" or improved.

[CPT_GhostLight]

I'm going to throw my own speculating into the mix and guess that the Manticore is positioned to replace the aged-out E-Trac and that there will also soon be another higher end machine to replace the soon to be aged-out CTX.

[Steve Herschbach]

18 minutes ago, CPT_GhostLight said:

I'm going to throw my own speculating into the mix and guess that the Manticore is positioned to replace the aged-out E-Trac and that there will also soon be another higher end machine to replace the soon to be aged-out CTX.

I don't see how that is speculation. E-Trac was discontinued. Manticore at same price replaces it. CTX continues to be flagship machine.... for now. Don't place many bets on it being any time soon however. Minelab flip flops between prospecting, and the rest. So what's up next? A Multi prospecting detector to replace the Gold Monster? Or the fabled GPZ 8000? More likely that instead of CTX replacement, but there is nothing that says they can't do the CTX thing next. It honestly just boils down to looking at internal sales figures, and replacing the weakest performer. They sell them until sales run out of steam, then replace with something else. As long as sales remain strong, it is foolish to replace a good seller, when something else is not selling as well. It's all about making money folks. Maybe Manticore finally undermines CTX sales enough that it ends up next on the chopping block.

[Daniel Tn]

Competition drives new models from manufacturers for sure.  You can almost guarantee one of the first new Minelabs will be on its way to Turkey to be taken apart to be reverse engineered. It didn't take them too long to make a competitor model to the Nox, and might not take long to do a competitor model to the Beast.  You can guarantee Minelab knows this and probably isn't letting the R&D and Engineer dept take too long of a breather after releasing the Beast.  

[Chase Goldman]

48 minutes ago, Daniel Tn said:

It didn't take them too long

Eh, 4+ years is kind of a long time…

But they did deliver, finally.

[Cal_Cobra]

1 hour ago, Geotech said:

Generally whatever you can do in time-domain system you can do in a frequency-domain system, just differently. You could determine target ferrousity in MIQ by looking at phase linearity through the response so I wouldn't be surprised to see that the Manticore does FE/CO with much the same waveform as MIQ. Also, it's difficult to mix simultaneous MF with sequential MF due to signal discontinuities that will screw up the channelization filters in the simultaneous side.

 

A breath of fresh air, thank you Carl 👍

Any speculation on this statement from Mark Lawrie when he said "the MultiEQ+ frequencies were expanded" ?