Ok I think I know what the GPS I's for

[Bryannagirl]

I used to work for an agriculture technology company. We sold GPS to farmers - why so they could see where they had been and where they need to go. If if you are not familiar with precision farming then you would not understand how important it is. The area the farmer covers in one pass is a swath. Precision guidance is designed to the the farmer can go up and Dow his fields with minimal overlap and no gaps.

Now how does this translate to the average detectorists. If you are like me when detecting I have an idea of where I detected but unless I was being very precise flagging or roping an area I could not tell you for sure if I missed and area or not. My guess is this system will let you set how wide of a sweep you make and the track that width on a map. This way you can see where you have been and where you have not been and what direction you coverd that area. Go away for a week come back and you can start right where you left off - no gaps and only as much overlap as you decide.. I can see this being a real benefit for relic hunters that cover large sites. Even for the local park hunter it would be nice to know to a pretty good level of accuracy where you have and have not been. This may be a better feature then I fist imagined.

Bryanna

 

[scubadetector]

Its so if you report your finding gold on here, the government can find where your hunting and mark the spot protected so they get it all. It lets you know where you are and lets the government know where you are at the same time!!!

 

[Jason in Enid]

Ahhhhh...Smoke and mirrors to lure the greedy who must have the fancy....lol...Needed something to warrant the $3000 price tag...lol
NEVER will I own a Minelab...

So why are you here? Are you just here to troll and bash a brand you don't like?

 

[Gonehunting]

Ahhhhh...Smoke and mirrors to lure the greedy who must have the fancy....lol...Needed something to warrant the $3000 price tag...lol
NEVER will I own a Minelab...

So why are you here? Are you just here to troll and bash a brand you don't like?

I was wondering that too. I own what best works for me but I don't go bashing another brand just because its something I don't know anything about..

 

[Bell-Two]

Ahhhhh...Smoke and mirrors to lure the greedy who must have the fancy....lol...Needed something to warrant the $3000 price tag...lol
NEVER will I own a Minelab...

Now the crux of your statement: Are you bragging or complaining?

 

[Bill M]

I think the GPS is a great idea!! I hunt sugar cane fields and bean fields and one row looks like all the others. It's next to impossible to grid it, to much area. Some of these fields are over 100 acres and when you find where an old home site was it would be nice to be able to mark it to go back to the same area the next year or the next weekend. Sometimes we only have a few weekends to hunt.

 

[Jason in TN]

n/t

 

[D&P-OR]

Man if you don't like Minelabs, don't buy em---nobody's twisting your arm.----No need to come on here hurling insults though.-----It may shock you to learn that neither are we greedy (OR RICH) people here.---We're just a bunch of detector enthusiasts that are excited about a new product "coming to market" in a brand of detector that we have really liked.-----If you don't like the discussions, I guess my advice would be "go play somewhere else".---------Del

Ahhhhh...Smoke and mirrors to lure the greedy who must have the fancy....lol...Needed something to warrant the $3000 price tag...lol
NEVER will I own a Minelab...

 

[mascard1]

More for me to own!

 

[scubadetector]

Its for what I said earlier:

Its so if you report your finding gold on here, the government can find where your hunting and mark the spot protected so they get it all. It lets you know where you are and lets the government know where you are at the same time!!!


It also stands for Government Piracy System not global positioning service.

Anyway, its an interesting concept for a detector. Not sure what to think of it at this time. Maybe in the future it will have a larger value when the accuracy of the system gets better.

 

[Jason in TN]

Think this will be well worth the money with the GPS here is what I heard it can do. It even has a alarm clock that wakes you up. Then you turn it on scroll through the menu decide what you want to find today then push enter. Sit it in the passenger seat of the car and the GPS will direct you to where to hunt for the day will also use the built in phone to call owner of said property and get you permission while you are driving. Then it will get you to with in 10 feet of what ever it was you were wanting to find today. All you do is get out of the car and dig yes you will still have to dig your treasure. Next years model will dig for you but will cost a extra $1000. So for the price this should be a great deal. You just enter what you want to find and the GPS will take you right there we all should be rich by the end of the first week using one. Just think of the hundreds of pounds of gold that will be dug the first week this detector is out.

 

[TerraDigger]

I think the GPS is primarily for prospecting, not coinshooting . Using the australian outback as an example, the terrain for as far as the eye can see looks the same. With literally no visual landmarks to speak of. There are also american desert areas that share similar topography. Thus the need for GPS. The large battery compartment on this new unit smacks of the requirements of a GPX unit. My guess is this unit is a GPX/E-Trac combined hybrid. Thus the $2500.00 pricetag. One is basically getting two machines for that price.
The PC mapping function will be tied into Google Earth which will allow for GPS co-ordinates of an area to be visually available on the units screen. That's my educated guess.

 

[aussiedigger]

​

Ahhhhh...Smoke and mirrors to lure the greedy who must have the fancy....lol...Needed something to warrant the $3000 price tag...lol
NEVER will I own a Minelab...

So why are you here? Are you just here to troll and bash a brand you don't like?

Well said!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Bryannagirl]

I really doubt the unit will have on board mapping. Instead it will track location and track where you have been and not been but there will be no detail on that map. Then you can download it to the PC and then apply maps to the tracking information. Again my Precision AG experience tells me that is the way it will be. It is simpler then applying map. I do think it will be helpful to more then just prospectors. Any large area or complicated area like in the woods the GPS will help you know if covered the area or not.

I think the GPS is primarily for prospecting, not coinshooting . Using the australian outback as an example, the terrain for as far as the eye can see looks the same. With literally no visual landmarks to speak of. There are also american desert areas that share similar topography. Thus the need for GPS. The large battery compartment on this new unit smacks of the requirements of a GPX unit. My guess is this unit is a GPX/E-Trac combined hybrid. Thus the $2500.00 pricetag. One is basically getting two machines for that price.
The PC mapping function will be tied into Google Earth which will allow for GPS co-ordinates of an area to be visually available on the units screen. That's my educated guess.

 

[etracjoe]

Well I know for a fact that we have highly accurate gps for the consumer. The survey industry now uses gps and they are accurate to within inches because they use more sattelites to gather information. Your roads are paved using gps.....I've used it, and its not called millimeter gps for no reason let me tell ya!! Why do you think your ride on these new interstates are soo smooth? The technology is already there......they just came up with a way to adapt it to a detector. This will probably mean being able to plot where your finds are made and maybe so that you dont overlap so to speak an area that you have covered. This would be great for field hunters, prospectors and woods hunters. Although I dont mind overlapping, this feature may make it more efficient for some hunters. Who knows, it may do something outside the box of what I have mentioned!!

 

[Bryannagirl]

The truth is consumer GPS is good for about a meter when you have good signal and WAAS correction. But in most applications that is pretty darn good.

Bryanna

Well I know for a fact that we have highly accurate gps for the consumer. The survey industry now uses gps and they are accurate to within inches because they use more sattelites to gather information. Your roads are paved using gps.....I've used it, and its not called millimeter gps for no reason let me tell ya!! Why do you think your ride on these new interstates are soo smooth? The technology is already there......they just came up with a way to adapt it to a detector. This will probably mean being able to plot where your finds are made and maybe so that you dont overlap so to speak an area that you have covered. This would be great for field hunters, prospectors and woods hunters. Although I dont mind overlapping, this feature may make it more efficient for some hunters. Who knows, it may do something outside the box of what I have mentioned!!

 

[Heelgrasper]

Just to be a bit clear on this GPS thing since most of you aren't as used to them when it comes to detecting as us Danes:

Until 2000 the precision of GPS for civilian use was very poor as there was a restriction on precision of 100 meters (330 ft). It had been lifted shortly during the first Gulf war when the few persons with a GPS experienced a precision of 10 meters (33 ft) but it wasn't until 2000 that this became the general situation.

Since then it has become a bit more precise. I usually get +/- 3 meters, sometimes 4. With WAAS (or simular services) it should be accurate to about 1 meter but I have no experience with that. The reason those 3-4 meters accuracy is enough for the GPS in the car is usually that it assumes you're on the road so it will show you driving down the road unless you're really not on it.

There are other systems of "high precision GPS" but those all involves a rather huge reciever unit (about the size of a metal detector) and a subscription to some sort of service. The cost of such units and the subcription would make the CTX 3030 look like impulse shopping but then precision is down to about 1 cm (less than half an inch).

What we will see in the CTX 3030 is 99% sure the standard GPS that you'll find in smart phones etc. today. It has plenty of applications if it's set up right but that we'll have to wait to find out. But if you have never thought of getting a handheld GPS for detecting it's not like you'll find this usefull either.

 

[etracjoe]

If it was only good to a meter surveyors would not have a job. They have to be extremely accurate or they would be crossing property boundaries while puting new roads in etc. Im not saying Minelab is using same technology. I'm just trying to clarify that gps is more accurate than most think. And with some applications millimeters!! Like I said....I have used it before and it is not your typical handheld or automotive gps which uses minimal sattelites. These units use twice the amount of sattelites to give a more accurate "prediction". These are not military units but were very costly 8 years ago. I think it very possible for the price on this type of tech to have dropped substantially by this time. But maybe not to be included in a hobby detector.

 

[Critterhunter]

According to what I've read consumer GPS is only accurate down to 10 to 50 feet, but I can see where there are more accurate ones that will get you down to feet or inches but I suspect like he said that the receiver for something like that would be huge. You need enough physical space I think between the sensors to be able to put that kind of precision into 3D space, wouldn't you? Either way, I suspect the GPS in it like somebody said might be very power hungray and hence the big battery. Let's assume that it does have precision down to inches. I wonder how exactly you are going to be able to use that to keep you from missing spots while gridding when your VDI is on the display? Seems unpractical for anything but getting you to your spot to hunt. On the other hand, maybe they have an audio tone that tells you if you're drifting left or right out of the proper grid row you should be in? That would be interesting.

 

[Fire Fighter 43]

I use a top of the line golf specific gps from Sky Caddie when I play golf. I also use a laser range finder in conjunction with it to get a more accurate reading to the actual flags on the green. Golf is a game of yards and for the good players a yard here or there makes a big differance. Most courses have a yardage marker on the tee box that measures the distance to the center of the green. Several times I've compared this with both laser and my gps and found it to be dead on. It also has a map view of each hole and the point moves as I move around the course it knows where I am at all times.