Great low production machines

[Herb Jones]

Just wondering,.... what are some companies or models that never were mass marketed or produced? Aside from the big names around today. Did anyone get a design right, but fail to get it sold in numbers enough to make $$$$? I see some "not so common" detectors listed in some of your signature lines....just wondering.

 

[vlad]

Early '70's;
Technos Inc. of Maitland Fla made the Phase Readout Gradiometer (PRG) which was TID about 72 and at around $900 did not sell many.
It was before motion, no ground balance, but on the Florida beaches w/o minerals would hit a quarter at about 12 inches.[made by NASA engineers]
AH Electronics;
Made a type of detector that was called off resonance and the best discriminator ever made [and first units to reject tabs The Pro, & screwcaps Super Pro.]
Set your discriminator for whatever, and you could touch the objects to the loop anywhere and not get a signal. They also added a ground cancel circuit for disc
not using motion [The Quintron.] The problem with these units is they were so inefficient you needed car batteries to get any depth (6-7" about max)
Compass: ['80-81]
Made a unit called the Coin Magnum that used motionless discriminate, surface blanking, and notching-but Teknetics came out with the 9000 & 8500 [same time roughly]
and it was retired.
There was a company in Louisiana that made a BFO in the VLF range-never went anywhere- TR's were here to stay.
Bounty Hunter had one called the Outlaw that contained both BFO & TR circuits.
Eric Foster built a no-motion PI, the PPD1 with an induction balance circuit for analyzing iron by meter [ferr/non ferr]; might have worked in the UK with no minerals, but here it read a dime below about 3" as iron. It also had pulltab discrimination.
The UK also has the Arado which is a TR-IB, analyzing iron by meter; the 120/130 were absolute killers on iron. The newer 320 has motion and DD loop, can be fooled.
And the Saxon X1 was a similar unit to the Arados-might still be made. http://www.easytreasure.co.uk/x-1.htm
Troy Galloway, Shadow Detectors (X-2,3,5); first unit made for him by Tesoro, others by Fisher. He was not satisfied by anything and designed his own. Good units
but some people did not like them. He lost money on them because he did not sell enough-Troy is still around online and you can contact him.
All had some success, but where mostly niche detectors, or were surpassed by technology..

 

[bigchuckinva]

Don't Forget about the Best Relics machine ever made and un-match depth in goods soil !!!!!!!! The Nautilus DMC2B. There lots still in Hardcore Relic Hunters in V.A./ N.C. still finding relics deeper then any current machine.

 

[Tom_in_CA]

N/t

 

[Herb Jones]

Thanks nice info

 

[Mega]

I atill own and use 2 mint condition Arado 120b detectors,very deep on roman pasture sites,these machines had been the top detectors in the 80s,i dont use mine very often mainly because of the weight,but can still give alot of the modern machines a good run for the money.The last model that they produced the 320 was nothing like the older models and only a handful had ever been sold,Pretty certain the company is no longer making detectors as one of the main guys passed away.

The Saxon range are still being made but once again in very small numbers,the X1 was the deepest out of the lot and was a machine for skilled operators only to get the maximum depth from them,very expensive and although i have never owned one i had use of one for a while and its very similar in design too the Arado 120b's,depth was good but they do need constant adjustment to get the best from them.The biggest problem with the 120b was that if they went wrong you might as well dump them as they designed them internally so that folks could not tinker with them or try and replicate them,they coated the circuit boards with a resin type coating and tried to erase the component identification so other folks could not copy the design,for the most part this did work.

 

[PDH]

I second the Nautilus. It's been my primary detector for almost 20 years.

 

[Richard@BackwoodsDetectors]

Nautilus... I would like to see someone start making Nautilus again. DMC2B and 2ba would be great... Richard