What Next For Minelab?

[Lesgold]

Just put the 8” X coil on the zed for the first time yesterday. Joe and I took it and the 6 with the 10x5 attached out to our test patch a few hours ago. As Phrunt said earlier, the Zed runs quite well on max sensitivity with this coil (as does the Nuggetfinder 12”) The 6 also ran well with little emi experienced. Buried a few pieces of gold just to get some idea as to what to expect from the X coil. The six came out on top with a micro piece of gold (.045g) and picked it up a bit deeper and with a better signal than the zed. A .3 gram and a .5 gram nugget were also tested. We used the 6000 to test each piece as we continued to bury them deeper until any sign of a signal disappeared. The X coil was then run over the test bed and clearly gave “dig me” signals on both of the nuggets. We don’t take too much notice of this type of test but what we saw was encouraging. If the weather holds up we may do some detecting tomorrow and if we are lucky, a couple of live targets will be compared. 

[phrunt]

41 minutes ago, Lesgold said:

Just put the 8” X coil on the zed for the first time yesterday.

That's cool you've got an 8", were you able to run in normal? probably not being in Australia, my go to is Hy/Normal/19 sensitivity with the 8".  I can go 20 of course but I just like 19 for the extra threshold stability 🙂

My two favourite X-coils on the GPZ are the 15" CC and the 8".  

[Lesgold]

The test patch is in an old surfaced area where the ground is quiet. We did some testing in normal but the area we will be in tomorrow won’t allow this to happen. Too many hot rocks and heavily mineralised ground will probably kill my patience. I will be able to keep sensitivity quite high in difficult. 

[Gerry in Idaho]

15 hours ago, dig4gold said:

Thank you Gerry & Phrunt. While the 6000 has been a shambles & a frustration for many, I somehow have not had issues with mine. Touch wood. We do know who the tester were Gerry. Maybe they were just not aware of the issues at that time or ML did ignore them. JP did promote it as being highly strung & on the edge due to the nature of the beast & its heightened sensitivity & jittery nature therefore etc etc.

Glad you are not having issues with yours.  Now lets look into this a little deeper.  You are a seasoned Minelab user and if you are like most of us, you try to run your machines hot to get best results.  So the extra noise vs the extra sensitivity and depth on smaller gold was ok.  I did exactly the same and thought, well that must be how it runs and to put up with the extra noise for the better results = sounds fare.  Heck, I imagine JP also felt that way.

It was not until I started using the headphones and noticing the detector running much more smoothly and quiet did I realize an issue.  But some folks may not have caught that and so their added success was worth it?

I'm not pointing fingers at JP at all.  He did mention some of the extra noise for a new detector that is extra sensitive and that is to be expected.  I'm sure JP also mentioned it or at least asked if it could be cleaned up some.

This is very head scratching to me though. You mentioned "We do know who the tester were Gerry."  If Minelab is only using JP as the tester and nobody else, that's not wise at all.  Yes JP is tops and he can back up his words with his Success and knowledge.  But at the same time, JP is in only one guy in one region of the world.  If this multi million dollar company only had 1 Field Tester?  That my friend, just does not sound right.

Here's the bottom line.  At least they did in fact take care of it, but a little delayed (over a year). Doing so, just shows they are listening.. some.  Was it played out the right way?  Probably not to many of our end users, but at least it has been addressed and so now most of us should be happy.

Glad your unit is fine, but I also have a gut feeling, you might like it even more, if you were to have the upgrade.

I too have a few customers (long time Minelab users) and they refuse to send theirs in.  They have learned to put up with the extra noise to get the extra results.  I do know this, machines like the GM-1000, are not my cup of tea.  Too quiet, no threshold and no fine tuning capabilities.  I'll stick with the Equinox or Manticore all day long.  I also realize the GM-1000 was never intended for USA market. And I realize a % of people want simple, dummy proof, turn on and go. If that's the case, I'll sell them the GM-1000.

Options is what I like and as long as we get more options, I'm happy.

[RONS DETECTORS MINELAB]

My first 6000 unit was needing an auto-tune about every 5 minutes, but with the headphones on it was pretty good and I did not have to hit the auto-tune anymore. One of JP’s early post on this subject was dead-on as he said it had a speaker feedback loop issue. Woody said that the audio micro processor was too close to a bleeding out or faulty component and this was the issue that needed corrected.

I am now very pleased with the 6000 performance after the audio update was done as it really is the most smaller deep gold pi on the market, just not the cheapest unit. Come on Minelab 6000 for $3,999 😃

I will mention that I have checked several early on units that never had an issue with this, so must of been a select amount that resulted in needing the repair. 

[RONS DETECTORS MINELAB]

On 4/28/2024 at 5:44 PM, Steve Herschbach said:

 

On 4/28/2024 at 4:31 PM, RONS DETECTORS MINELAB said:

I would still like to see the actual Star Chart and GPZ 40% deeper testing site details on how they came to these conclusions.

It's been available since day one - read the three posts I made here:

 

I do believe Minelab testers do a very thorough testing and research job on their detectors, but I do not feel like they explain it through their marketing charts very well.

So I would hope Minelab could add enough standard target size information on their next comparison chart to allow any one to re-create a similar test bed. An example would be using several minted gold bars from sub-gram and up or even some more common objects like coins.

[Steve Herschbach]

On 5/1/2024 at 9:26 AM, RONS DETECTORS MINELAB said:

I do believe Minelab testers do a very thorough testing and research job on their detectors, but I do not feel like they explain it through their marketing charts very well.

So I would hope Minelab could add enough standard target size information on their next comparison chart to allow any one to re-create a similar test bed. An example would be using several minted gold bars from sub-gram and up or even some more common objects like coins.

The idea is not for things to be clear, the idea is to sell metal detectors. A basis in fact obscured by smoke and mirrors magnified by people’s desires to see what they want to see equals sales.

[phrunt]

I don't like their marketing charts at all, they're manipulative, they don't declare which coil they 5000 is using, nor do they mention changing coils on it would change the results, they make out that the 5000 performance doesn't change and the result it had in their testing are the final results.  The same goes for the 7000 although that's more satisfactory as the aftermarket coils for it are not official products.

I'd rather they not did these performance charts for marketing.  I'm sure when the new detector comes along it's chart will demonstrate it's better than what currently exists, in the form where the current models are lacking intentionally to make the new model look better. 🙂

I'd rather they just verbalized it saying what's improved, how it's improved and why they improved it.  For example, for the 6000 they could say they've improved performance on small gold and specimen gold, along with lightening up the detector and improving its resistance to EMI over the existing GPX series.  This would all be very truthful and stuff any owner of it would be able to clearly see as beneficial when they buy it.  They could use marketing to bling it up and add a lot more benefits too.

As for testing, it seems not long after release JP at least was commenting on the issue, the more the end users were pointing it out the more obvious it became there was something wrong.   Minelab likely said they think there might be an audio feedback loop going on and they're investigating it, still took a long time to resolve, but we are all happy they did.  Some days mine ran a dream, the next I was being punished pushing noise cancel all the time, factory resetting over and over again or just turning it off, waiting 5 minutes and turning it on with a factory reset to calm it down.  The fact it had good days makes you think perhaps it's just environmental EMI and a detector running on edge, but you could replicate the same problems in very low sensitivity.  It turned out it was poorly shielded inductors so changing inductors to better ones resolved it, I believe due to this every model with the old inductors is affected to some degree, now all new ones use the new brand inductor.  If the testers spent their time in headphones, they likely wouldn't notice it as it was nowhere near as bad with headphones, and who would think by using a speaker you would change the detectors stability, it probably wasn't tested on speaker much, the speakers also not loud enough for noisy environments, I hunt near rivers a lot, can never use the speaker, far too quiet.  They should have had a GM1000 speaker in it.

I don't think Minelab will make a similar mistake in the future, the best people to test a product for a fault like this is the engineers working on it, not a detectorist.  How is a detector user going to know what's normal or not when it comes to wild behaviour, yes, they can point out it was noisy or seemed to have unusual EMI issues on certain days, but the engineer would be the one that would know something is truly up if they were using it when it happened.  It's an engineering issue, not likely a tester issue.  The engineers missed the fault.

[jasong]

The giveaway is that the detector would send itself into a feedback loop when set onto the ground (or sometimes up in air too). That is abnormal. This was my point to Minelab when they kept insisting otherwise and denying it. But it was clear to me after wasting endless time testing in numerous environments eventually that the one constant was the detector causing itself to go unstable.

The problem existed no matter where the detector was run - even out among the most remote locations in the Lower-48 with very little EMI around, another indication the detector was the problem and not purely external EMI. This is why I think testing across a wide range of locations/environments is useful.

I believe processes like this are ways to determine issues with detectors/design in the field. But I also agree, this is one engineers should have caught too. 

 

[Norvic]

4 hours ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

Glad you are not having issues with yours.  Now lets look into this a little deeper.  You are a seasoned Minelab user and if you are like most of us, you try to run your machines hot to get best results.  So the extra noise vs the extra sensitivity and depth on smaller gold was ok.  I did exactly the same and thought, well that must be how it runs and to put up with the extra noise for the better results = sounds fare.  Heck, I imagine JP also felt that way.

You nailed it Gerry, perhaps ML should get a few newchums also to field test, especially for marketing a very capable turn on and go newchum detector like the 6K. No doubt us old codgers who are so conditioned to noisy detectors, are not the users  detector companies should be targeting.

However here we are in a thread urging ML to bring us a new capable gold detector, what they have consistently and reliably done since their inception last century, bagging them on an old issue that`s been totally flogged to death. 😉