hiya guys,,,had a problem a few weeks ago,,which seemed bigger than it actually was,,but at the time due to certain circumstances,,looked real bad ,,and expensive,,,the audio in the headphone socket went off,,,then on changing the box for a re-charge battery box the audio on the speaker seemed ok,,,so i changed the box back to batteries and it worked ,,but after switching off and then back on,,,it stopped working,,, completely,,now at that time i should have started again,,but i decided to send the controls back to minelab,,,they sent it back to me and said the ribbon connector on the board was not clicked down properly from assembly but now it seems to work o.k.,,,and it did ,,but on inserting the battery box again,,(the a.a. box) it started to sound an intermittent tone,,, and a variable tone also,,,up and down,,,this continued and i noticed as the battery box was being compressed made it worse,,,i tried the re-charge box again and no problem,,,,,what caused all of this situation was the a.a.box,,as it is apparent they are rubbish at keeping the batteries connected,,and they can move around as they are not really tightly packed,,,the remedy is quite simple,,,,you can put an old credit card on top of the batteries when loading them,,or better still i put a credit card size piece of tacky d.p.c (for damp proofing) membrane on top of the batteries and it stopped the rot,,,you can use anything of course that you want,, to do this job,,,but my reason for posting this is that as the boxes very quickly slacken off i cant be the only guy who it cost money just to find this out,,,i think an updated design would be a good idea,,,or at least they could supply a Minelab plastic card to do the job proffessionaly,,(har,,har ),,hope this may help some of you guys,,rgds 
