How About Australian Qed Gold Detector?

[Reg Wilson]

As usual Phrunt (Simon) has summed up very well the pro's and con's of the QED, and the experience of Good Amount having their first gold hunting experience with that machine was something shared by a number of 'new chums' to the detecting scene. It was the cheapest PI on the market by far, and its performance on mild ground (such as Pliocene) was fairly good. jr beatty and I found many ounces in such ground, and almost directly under power lines on one occasion. It was only after we went back over some of our patches that it became obvious there were holes in the QED's ability and it had missed gold in some circumstances.

What I have neglected to mention in previous comments is how good it handled beach detecting, which is not my usual area of interest. At one time I took a QED to Nha Trang in Vietnam where my mate Dave (Dingo), and ex alluvial miner from the Palmer in Queensland was living at the time. We took it to the local beach which had heavy tourist traffic with the hope of perhaps finding some lost jewellery. Well, the jewellery turned out to be scarce, but we did find Russian coins at a surprising depth with the QED going from dry to wet sand without a problem.

The builder of the QED, unreasonably expected QED owners to stay with that one brand, rather than move on to more advanced (and expensive) detectors if they decided to continue with their detecting pastime. Some of course decided that this was not the hobby for them and either sold their QED or let them gather dust in a cupboard. It was a natural progression for those that gained enjoyment from swinging a detector for whatever reason to advance to more sophisticated machinery, and many did.

[中国 张]

Thank you all for your replies and sharing, To sum up, this QED+ also has many hardware/software breakthroughs and upgrades.

[Reg Wilson]

Summing it up I would say that it initially showed promise of positive evolution, but along the way took a number of wrong turns that inevitably could only end in extinction.

[GoodAmount]

16 hours ago, phrunt said:

It's a concern you had EMI problems as that's where the QED really excelled for me.  It worked remarkably well even right under power lines.  I believe one of the problems people had been was EMI related which sending the machine in for repair fixed.  You'll see I'm on gain of 10 (max) right next to the power line.

Thanks for linking your videos phrunt. It looks like your machine was much quieter than mine. I used headphones most of the time, which seemed to amplify the problem. On some occasions in a couple of locations the EMI spikes were so frequent and strong I had to quit detecting. I ended up buying one of Woody’s in-line filters, which made it usable at those times. My machine also had a ground balancing issue which turned out to be a dry-solder-joint on the main circuit board. Service was excellent to get it repaired quickly.

I didn’t send the machine in for a firmware upgrade after reading about yours and others experiences with sensitivity a depth reduction. I’m glad I didn’t. My Sadie coil pretty much lived on it full time and the smallest flake I found with it was 0.08g pretty close to the surface. I was proud of the achievement at the time, but with my 7000 + X-Coil combo I’m now regularly hitting gold that size at depth and frequently below 0.02g. In many locations in my area this represents the majority of gold left, so it can be the difference between going home with a few bits in my pocket or getting skunked.

I don’t get to the beach often, but when I do I’ve been using my Nox 900. I’m very keen to use the QED next time I go now.

[Aureous]

15 hours ago, Reg Wilson said:

Summing it up I would say that it initially showed promise of positive evolution, but along the way took a number of wrong turns that inevitably could only end in extinction.

I reckon if someone else (or a company) took over Howards concept and made it triple channel with ground tracking, it could match or beat anything out there. Especially if there were several timings  coded for it. But, it seems extinction is the likely scenario 😞 

[phrunt]

I always thought @Nokta Detectors could take it over, they would turn it into a solid build quality and no doubt with their team of engineers they could really turn it into something pretty good, perhaps not up with the big guns but who knows, they've done it before, if they were to keep the price right with their build quality, they had the chance to make the QED a good seller, perhaps its best they do it from the ground up rather than buy out someone else's efforts.

Nokta are known for top notch build quality and they would likely make it waterproof. No more audio issues, they would also catch it up to the times with aptX LL wireless audio rather than its primitive Jaycar setup.  I was quite disappointed when I discussed its audio problems with Steelphase who made the SP01 signal enhancer/amplifier as I couldn't get my SP01 to work on the QED, like many good headphones it was quiet, even being an amplifier, Steelphase knew the problem the QED had and tried to talk to the QED manufacturer about it to help sort it out as it wasn't the fault of the SP01 but the QED manufacturer didn't seem interested in any help, even though Steelphase had the solution, it was just a problem that couldn't be fixed, although at least acknowledged it was a problem.

They clearly have some very smart people onboard doing their detector R&D at Nokta as proven by their detectors so they would sort out the problems and improve on it in many ways, I have no doubt's they would have the smarts to make it a much better detector if they did take over the QED, they're doing one from the ground up and I am confident it will be a decent detector although I think it would be wise if they make it a general purpose PI, not just prospecting, coin and relic along with beach to broaden its appeal with the gold detector market being so dominated by Minelab, and shrinking with the finds drying up the world over.  A general-purpose PI to suit everyone's needs just doesn't exist. 

The thing many liked about the QED was the GPX coil compatibility, if it didn't have that, it wouldn't be near as appealing, Nokta should and could follow this path unless they found a benefit to making their own coils with depth or sensitivity that couldn't be achieved with the GPX coils compatibility.  If they're making the detector waterproof, they could just release their own proper waterproof coils to supplement the shallow waterproofing of many GPX coils and come up with a waterproof cap to cover the non-waterproof coil entry plug and have a waterproof plug as well, or sort out an alternative for that such as an adapter to go from the waterproof plug to the standard GPX coils plug for when they're in use.

I've not used a Whites TDI, but the QED just seemed a more sensitive version of it, possibly a bit more complicated to use and far worse build quality.

As much as I'm not a fan of the toxic culture that surrounds the QED, I still think it has some potential.

[George Kinsey]

It's a fine detector.  I have the version PL2. I can send it to OZ and they will upgrade it. I would go on the morning chat and I liked everyone on there. Respectfully, George Kinsey