Whites V3i detector?

Anyone out there still using this detector? Always wondered if the polar plot and other screens could really at least cut down the odds on tabs vs. gold rings? Or as a coin hunter how is It? It came out with a bang but kind of fizzled after a year or two it seemed?
I will always have a soft spot for Whites as found my first silver coin with a XLT.
And also remember there big first page ads back in the 70s when all I could do was dream about being able to afford a Whites detector.

Just for you Ole Harold.
Not my video.
Still a good one though.
[m.youtube.com]

Ole' TNSS!

One thing I really like about the V3I is the 3 frequency pinpoint. Silver and all coins but zinc pennies the lower frequency is highest when you pinpoint. Gold and lower conductor targets the 22.5 frequency is the highest at pinpoint. Usually I can tell what the target most likely is by the pinpointing bar graphs. Combined with the polar plot a lot of information can be gathered to give you a idea of what’s under the coil.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/2019 07:23PM by Kraemer.

Harold, it's a really great machine, but has some limitations. Plusses are the 3-frequency pinpoint. You can pick through closely spaced trash in non-motion mode as slow as you want to go and see the relative strength of the frequencies change as you sweep over individual targets. It's a real hoot to see the frequency bars flip from blue to green as you slowly sweep across a pull tab right next to a coin, for instance. As far as I know, there is no other machine that has this capability, and once you learn how to use it, you wonder how you ever got along with it. Other plusses are the great color screen and adjustability for those of us that like to tweak. Minuses are the very laggy audio in disc mode and finicky ground balance. The best mode is mixed mode because the all-metal channel is instantly responsive and lets you know what the detector is seeing in the ground in real time. The V3i is a real engineering marvel and a very underappreciated machine. If only Carl had stayed at White's and finished his work on the V4 ...

It's has a little slow processor & a little on the bulky side...... but has great discrimination .......if i was going to hunt a trashy park

the V3i would be my first pick. I can ID steel bottle caps instantly & I can cherry pick nickels within 100's of pull Tabs.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/15/2019 04:17PM by Rob in (ca).

Yeah, you run that thing in 3 freq you’ll leave stuff in the ground. Depth suffers. Wonder if one will hit a 9” deep nickel using 3 freq and stock coil in mild ground??

Maybe your buddy Ole' Cal can get His hands on one and run it through His infamous test garden? Ha.

Harold,ILL. Wrote:
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> Maybe your buddy Ole' Cal can get His hands on one
> and run it through His infamous test garden? Ha.


That’s one detector you could do a video on and post. And someone definitely would complain about this setting or that setting being incorrect. Would be a waste of time really.

Heck even Ole' Daniel liked the Whites V3i as it could bust through that hot ground He has in 7.5kHz and get them deep minnies which made it F75 like.

I like it, Harold. It's main setback is the long learning curve, thinking on it, I think that is really its only setback; it just takes time to learn.

I enjoyed the video. What I would have liked to have seen is the guy created a Nox program and then run it head to head with the Nox. That would have been nice.

Did you see that Indian pinpoint on the V3? The RX Gain setting was masking it, but the pinpoint called it right. That was cool.

Anyway...yeah...I'm a fan of the V3.

HH
Mike

I think I had a video or two at one time with the V3i at the bullet place.

I thought it was doing really well there at one time. That was because I had no idea what I was actually walking over and missing, and never having a clue what was beneath my feet. I found some bullets with it and was happy. It wasn't until the pulse machine awakening, that I began to see what all I had missed (and the staggering number of HOW MANY). Then suddenly...a lot of those machines I thought were pretty good, were not as good as I thought them to be.

I don't think there's another detector that can compete with the V3i for hunting fresh drops of coins and jewelry when it's mated with the BigFoot coil. I used the V3i for just that task from 2009 until about two years ago. I figured White's had to be coming out with a new Top of the Line detector so I sold mine while it was still their top dog. Silly me, like playing the stock market. I do still have three DFX's to use the BigFoot on but they play second fiddle to the V3i. Enjoy hunting vacant lots and ghost towns to modern coin hunting so the DFX's mostly stay hanging on the wall while the Nox and MMK head out most days.

Hi Guys.

I have had the v3I since release had it back to Whites for the update as it was the v3 originally . Where the v3I has the advantage is its visual target identification,resolution between metal types. As an example the Equinox lumps toghether in the 13-19 numerical range. The Equinox hits on everything but theres not much distinction between metal types. Where as the V3I shines in the jewellery dept. in a modern site with all its data it supplies would be my best chance to be fooled less by common modern junk.

The v3I is a masterpiece of technology even now going on 10 years old.It does take a while to get the gist of how its all put toghether but when you master it it will reward you with the goodies. It has got some down sides like all detectors but all in all to me it is a ripper



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2019 06:26AM by pinpointa.

It’s not just Carl Moreland who left Whites and went to work at First Texas. The complex V3 software’s author also works at First Texas now. Carl posted that info a while back.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

At the time of it's introduction, and I'm speaking of the 'V3', I never saw such a divided opinion about any detector to date!

A Ferrari with a Yugo engine. My other 8 incher.

I love it all time. And try to use often I can. V3i still shines. With MARS 9 inch sniper coil is a perfect tool.

lytle78 Wrote:
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> It’s not just Carl Moreland who left Whites and we
> nt to work at First Texas. The complex V3 software
> ’s author also works at First Texas now. Carl post
> ed that info a while back.

If they got all those "top dogs" over there-----after ALL this time-----WHY isn't FT coming out with something?????

D&P-OR Wrote:
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> lytle78 Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > It’s not just Carl Moreland who left Whites and
> we
> > nt to work at First Texas. The complex V3 softwa
> re
> > ’s author also works at First Texas now. Carl po
> st
> > ed that info a while back.
>
> If they got all those "top dogs" over there-----af
> ter ALL this time-----WHY isn't FT coming out with
> something?????

That's a million dollar question. The last significant product release was the F75/T2 and that's a long time ago.

When the V3 came out, two friends that I hunted with quit a bit at the time were both White's and Minelab fans (one was a White's dealer and did extensive beta testing on the V3) and they could outhunt an Etrac at the time. They were pretty good at telling if a target was a pull-tab or foil junk vs a good target using that color correlation graph. They could get depth equal to the Etrac,they did great with it hunting old blighted parks and sifting through the junk to pull out the goods. Very, very capable detector, just had an exceedingly high learning curve hurdle to overcome before one could master it.

Had White's taken that same detector, re-released it in a MX Sport like housing, with the MX Sports lighter weight, they probably sell a bunch more.

Unfortunately I think White's has turned into a family ATM.

True. Now Whites is dying. I don’t expect any new V3i models right now.

Sadly, First Texas spent a lot of engineering hours on two projects which were leaked by an east European distributor several years ago and neither of which could be successfully transitioned into a marketable product. I think most of us would be shocked at how hard it is to get a world beating ideas to go from an idea to a working prototype and for that prototype to be run through successive changes to get it to perform up to the expectations of the inventor and the satisfaction of the marketing department and management. It is only then that the rest of the pile of money is committed to the project. Injection mounds costing $100k or more for the plastic bits, purchase of the parts and materials for the electronics and the rest of the mechanical bits, fabrication of the circuit boards - then there’s the advertising bufdget.

A new top of the line detector costs millions of dollars to bring to market from concept. But as to the question of what the engineers do otherwise...

First Texas have a large product line - a lot of which has nothing to do with our hobby.

In our area of interest they have a product line up of 25 different models in the Bounty Hunter brand alone, with 11 different models in the Teknetics line and 16 in the Fisher line.

In their security line they have 3 different detectors.

In their industrial line they have 15 different detecting products.

Quite apart from any new product development, keeping all these in production, with periodic updates due to improved software or accommodation the need to incorporate new components due to non-availability of existing designs components is a heck of a lot of engineering manhours.

And before anybody says that it’s silly to have so many models, let’s just agree that they must have a pretty good reason for that. The reason is actually simple, they think it makes great business sense to have a detector at every possible price and performance point - and by essentially duplicating the filling of every market niche with more than one brand, they give themselves great flexibility in marketing into every possible distribution channel across the globe. Nobody ships as many metal detectors as First Texas. They have mass market online, big box retailers, independent dealers in dozens of countries supported by local distributors/agents. The goal of a business is to win and retain customers and in the process make a pile of money. Bringing new and exciting top of the line detectors to market is an important part

But still, having said all that it has been probably 5 years since a major new detector announcement from El Paso. A long time. Since they haven’t laid off their engineering staff and two years ago acquired a whole new team in Europe via the Manta acquisition, I suspect that they haven’t given up developing new stuff. When it will emerge and what it will be?????

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

I never used the V3i. The older I get the more I need simplicity from my toys. Funny how that changed through the years. Scrolling menus, infinite adjustments just are no longer appealing to me. Turn it on...Jack the sensitivity, and go. Let the detector do the thinking. The V3i can probably do that with the factory default settings. But then I am too anal to leave all those other settings alone. After all the detector companies label them advanced. That means better.....right? Yeah I need to adjust those to make it better. Wow maybe it is just me!

lytle78 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think most of us would be shoc
> ked at how hard it is to get a world beating ideas
> to go from an idea to a working prototype and for
> that prototype to be run through successive change
> s to get it to perform up to the expectations of t
> he inventor and the satisfaction of the marketing
> department and management.

Hmmmmm.......Nokta seems to be able to release several NEW products in a year including the Invenio which is a far more complex metal detecting product than FT has ever produced. Nokta must employ Supermen!

They have no existing product line to support, their older products are more or less obselete..

As for the Invenio. Impressive ads. And lord knows it’s complex - it’s also $10k or so. After you get one be sure and let us know whether you think it was worth the money. I couldn’t find a single credible test report form a recognized experienced metal detectorist.

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

Rick,

The Invenio is fabulous; yet, .........yes...….. somewhat complex.

Where do you hide the expensive attaché case with all the fancy display while you are detecting? And how do you get back to where the wonderbox showed you there was something great? Unless maybe you work the old fashioned way and dig to see. Then you can go back to your vehicle and admire what the box says it looked like in the ground.

Is it actually any deeper on a hoard than a traditional two box machine?

Is the adjacent target separation up to the standards of an Equinox?

If you have used it Tom, tell us what it’s good for.

Otherwise it might be a case like when the Chief of Staff of the USAF called Jack Northrop to his office and told him “Jack, I’ve seen your flying wing bomber (the XB-49) and I have to say it reminds me of watching a man and a woman making love (he used a different word) standing up in a canoe. Impressive as hell to watch, but what good is it?” (true story or so I was told in the ‘70’s by someone who worked for Northrop in 1947 or so).

Rick Kempf
Gold Canyon AZ- where there is no gold

The V3i is one heckuva machine...just very, very touchy to get optimal performance at a given site.

Shelton Wrote:
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> True. Now Whites is dying. I don’t expect any new V3i models right now.

Nope will never happen, the V3 engineers that wrote the code no longer work there, so unless White's ownership has a wake up call, you've likely seen White's go as far (technologically) as it's going to go.