Many of you may be aware of Detector Prospector Forum started & owned by Steve Herschbach in the US. Steve is actually an Alaskan & while still at college he & some buddies started a business catering for the divers, gold miners etc supplying equipment, parts etc. The business grew to a multi million dollar operation. It became known as AKMDS. Alaska Mining & Diving Supplies. Steve a very keen gold miner, dredger & detectorist saw an opportunity very early on for the need in his area for just such a service. What really just started out as a bit of a hobby & just getting stuff in for himself & his buddies grew into the operation that still carries on today. Steve started a forum way back while still in Alaska, which I became quite involved with. Steve was very generous with sharing his knowledge on all aspects of gold recovery. His forum was hugely popular.
A few years back, after a lifetime owning & running AKMDS, he decided to retire & leave Alaska & moved with his wife to Reno in Nevada. Selling his business to his employees but remaining a director. He has since relinquished that too. On moving to Reno he took his forum with him. Renaming it Detector Prospector Forum. DP forum for short.
Steve’s knowledge & passion for detecting lead him to became hugely involved with Minelab & detector development & testing. His last being the GPX 6000. Steve loved all aspects of detecting, not just gold but coin & relic as well. Even doing a few stints in the UK chasing Saxon/Roman stuff, & with some success.
I was very involved on DP forum from its birth when Steve started it from Reno. My demise came when the Russian made X coils became available for the GPZ 7000. Minelab have taken control of after market coil manufacturing by adding an electronic chip to the coils for their detectors. Without the chip, copy righted, no one could make a plug & play after market coils for the ML detectors. Unlike the days of the SD, GP & GPX detector days. GPX 6000 excluded as it is chipped. The smallest coil ML made for the 7000 was the 14”. Not so good here in NZ for most of our detecting conditions. Smaller coils being a lot more practical & favoured. Minelab did say they would make a 10”. They lied, it never happened. I wonder how many 7000’s they sold on that “promise”. Kind of sucked me in & I know I wasn’t alone.
Because ML made two coils for the 7000, the 14” & 19” they needed to be interchangeable on the detector. The Russians worked out that the electronic chip was at the end of the coil lead that screwed into the detector control box when exchanging coils. It was thought it was in the actual coil housing. So the Russians just chopped the chip end off with a short tail on it, reapplied a screw on connector to it, & also a connector on the end of the coil lead where the chip had been cut off from. By then screwing those two connectors back together & putting the chip back into play you could still use the original ML coil. The important thing here was that now the Russians had made an adapter with Minelabs all important secret source chip that could now be applied to their X coils. Well what a shit fight this caused. Minelab were powerless as the chip hadn’t been copied so no breach of copyright. X coils made lots of coils for the 7000. I was in like a robbers dog & in on this asap. The egg on Minelabs face was the fact they said they couldn’t make a 10” coil as the wiring configuration wouldn’t fit in a 10” coil shell. One of my first X coils was a 10x9. The Russians even made an 8” coil for the 7000. So this really called Minelab out.
So my posts on DP Forum when using the 7000 were now always with an X coil on it. They were/are that good. I have never had a ML coil on my 7000 since. Now this didn’t go down well with Steve & Johnathan Porter, JP. Who together were both heavily involved with the development & testing of the pending release of the new GPX 6000. They, & of course Minelab saw the X coils on the 7000 as a huge threat to this new GPX 6000’s sales. Why would people fork out 9-10k for a whole new detector when for a few hundred dollars they could just get a new X coil or two for the 7000 they already had? More so because of the smaller X coils that ML said couldn’t be made. To get rid of that threat & my posts on DP Forum showing results of gold got from ground the ML 14” on the 7000 was no longer getting but the smaller X coils were. Steve banned me & my mate, who was also getting involved with X coils, & deleted all my total history & involvement on DP forum from day one.
That cut like a knife. I couldn’t believe it. All I was doing was going out detecting with what I considered to be the best options of detector & coil for my detecting situations, & it was paying off. I didn’t harp on about X coils, they were just there in my photos & the gold too I suppose told the story that Minelab didn’t want out there with the pending release of the 6000. The politics I just couldn’t be bothered with. Minelab mining the miners. So I got banned & my entire history wiped, I was very upset over it for a long time after so much time put into that forum. It still grates me today but I just walked away. My mate on the other hand packed a bit of a hissy fit over his banning. To the point that he worked out something with Steve & got back on the forum. For me the damage was done with wiping my entire history, like I never existed. After a while Steve emailed me & invited me back on but I declined. I am 99.9% sure the pressure was put on him from JP & Minelab to get rid of me. I asked him that but he avoided answering that. He didn’t even offer an apology when he invited me back. Steve is pretty honest & up front & he isn’t/wasn’t totally sold out to Minelab. Unlike JP who I swear was vaccinated with a Minelab needle when he was born. Steve has worked with most of the detector companies giving his pros & cons & his straight up honest opinions. Most detectors have their strong & weak points & Steve exposes those. No matter the make or model.
The last company he worked with was Garrett & their Axion pulse induction detector. Garrett actually paid for Steve to go to Australia to demonstrate & promote it & to also get a feel for how the American made detector behaved in Aussie soils. I think because of that there is actually an Axiom made to better suit Aussie soils.
While over in Aussie, Steve caught up with his so called mate Johnathan Porter. Because Steve was there with Garrett & JP is married to Minelab & their number one disciple, something went down between them. JP didn’t take kindly to Steve jumping ship so to speak. Pretty pathetic really. So they kind of fell out. Now with the release of the 8000 it seems words on Steve’s DP forum were exchanged between them that got heated. The guts of it have been deleted now. I was made aware of this & the closing down of DP forum by my mate who got banned from DP forum along with me but got reinstated. Funny thing is that he became an administrator of the forum along with another guy in America as a couple of years back Steve decided to step back from full time involvement. Almost closing the forum back then. End of an era & one of the best forums out there, if not the best.
Despite my banning I still hold Steve in high regard, not so JP.
Sorry, I got a bit carried away.
This from Steve in closing things down.
March 31, 2026 - When I wrote the post that starts this thread in 2023 my life was obviously headed in a different direction. Unfortunately a side effect of this was that the forum no longer received the attention from me that it had in the past. New forms of social media also took a toll. The final blow came in surprise advances in AI that made seeking out sites like this for advice and information a thing of the past. The irony is it is copyrighted sites like this that AI companies robbed of content and knowledge that is the bedrock they built on. In the end though I have to say it was really me withdrawing from daily involvement that lead to where we are now. As of 3/31/2026 I have closed the forums to further new activity. The site will remain frozen in time and in place for as long as ad revenue at least breaks even with support costs. That may or may not be a long time however as an inactive site draws no views to generate said ad revenue. In closing, my thanks to the many fine people who contributed and made the forum what it was.
JW 