The Future of Metal Detecting

Intro: 

Hi! Welcome to Episode 34 of the metal detecting show podcast. This week I want to talk to you about the future of metal detecting, I chat about how a move to a cashless society will negatively affect the sport and some technological advances that may have a positive impact on the hobby. So let's get on with the show.

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Hey everyone before we start I want to thank you for listening to the podcast and I hope you enjoy the show this week  but before we begin I want to give you the following information. 

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Ok this week I want to talk to you about the Future of metal detecting I have seen online many people attempting this but inevitable they talk about the history of the detector which I have covered before and bitcoin and the cashless society which I also will discuss a bit later but very few have tried to put on a futurist hat and look at what technological advances have been made outside the hobby and how they can impact it. Such as faster cheaper smaller processing power, material science, environmental science and advances in legislation and society.

As you can see there are many area’s that the hobby could progress or regress so there is some good news but also some bad news and im afraid I am going to start with the bad news. If you are a park or beach detector you will be aware of this already and that is societies move towards a cashless economy with companies the likes of Apple, Google and most banks as a matter of fact offering a cashless payment system. 

You now also have Decentralised Banks such as Revolut offering a virtual banking experience online and here we go bitcoin or any crypto currency really all have the accumulative effect that people are no longer carrying around with them cold hard cash or at least not as much as they used to even the humble debit card is having an effect.

Less cash floating about the economy can only mean one thing and that is less cash or coins to drop on the beach or in the park. Now I would think that’s fine as most modern coins in the system are pretty crap and of no value beyond what the government has printed on the face of the coin. So whats the big deal I hear you say well as a beach detector I'm normally coin-shooting with the hope of hitting a gold ring or a piece of jewellery its these crap coins that dull the pain of the long periods between top finds. It's like a gambling addiction it's not the wins that are addictive it’s the near wins and every coin found on the beach is a near win to gold ring or a piece of jewellery take that away and what left for the beginners to get hooked on. The time between wins will be too protracted requiring a exercise in patience before the hobby sticks with them so potentially we will have less people engaging in the hobby in the future. That’s great for the people in the hobby right now right! 

well no if there is no turnover of people joining the hobby there will be no one purchasing metal detectors or any of the many accessories we go through each year and if there is no profit to be made then companies will fold and if theres no competition there will be no advances in technology designed to one up the other guy. I'll get onto technology later but its not all doom and gloom this only affects beach and park detectorist. Field or relic detectorist's will not be affected by this at all. Also if you reside in the United states of America then this cashless society will not be a problem for you guys as cashless payments are expected to stay flat well into the 30’s while in Europe it is expected to double in the next 3 years when cashless transactions are expected to hit 493 Billion transactions per year.

So Beach/ and Park hunting will have to change but how well if you think about it although the number of coins people carry about with them will drop the number of electronic item will increase. 

We already see the advent of mobile phones and now wireless headphones some worth several hundreds of dollars increasing in our finds pouch and considering that the average mobile phone is worth in scrap value something equivalent to a small 14k wedding band we need to start paying attention to this and in particular ewaste this is a find that will only increase in value over the years so pay attention to those headphones you found. 

Now field hunters don’t get comfortable there is a little bad news for you too and I know some of you are experiencing the impact of this environmental progress already and that is the use of contaminated green waste. if your not familiar with what green waste is and how it would affect the hobby well Green waste is what happens to your compostable house hold waste that you may be required to separate for collection by your local council this is gathered up and mixed with other green waste from commercial sites and land clearances this all gets mulched up and sold back to farmers so they can spread on their crops as fertiliser now what happens is there is no regulation on what is in the mulch so inevitably you get different qualities of green waste and at the low quality end you get green waste contaminated with mulched up trash including metals which as you can imagine causes havoc for us detectorist. 

Low Quality Green Waste is one area that both Metal detectorist and Archaeologists agree it usage is purely based on being a cost effective way to dispose of waste. It is essentially creating a trash dump but miles wide and an inch deep and unless there is regulation of quality this has potential to destroy the hobby and has already rendered some parts of the UK unsearchable. The fact that this is a cost effective way to dispose of waste leads me to believe that the politicians are more ready to adopt this as it positively affect the bottom line a=making it easy for them to ignore the cost to the cultural heritage of their counties. 

Other Environmental advancements that potentially can have an adverse affect on out hobby and that is farm pesticides and chemicals that are sprayed on the crops these have been shown to have a negative impact on the quality of finds due to chemical corrosion. 

So the price of progress is not all good but there are some aspects of progress that will absolutely have a positive impact on the hobby.

For example Looking at the potential impact of technology on the hobby. take Moore's law for example which indicates that processing power will double every 18 months while in that period the chip size will half. 

So right now we are actually at the pinnacle of this giving us access to low cost high power processors which the newest detectors are slowly taking advantage of this for example if your detector can update its software or can connect wirelessly to your coil or headphones then it is safe to say you are using a high power low cost microprocessor but I think it is with the recent addition of the equinox series of detectors from minelab with multi frequency that we are seeing the full potential of cheep microprocessors being utilised with several other manufacturers clambering to follow but what potential do these microprocessors bring well for example they bring higher speed signal processing which allows for better resolution and recovery of the signal but if you ask me the future will be in if these manufactures adopt machine learning often confused for Artificial intelligence which is an altogether bigger concept around mirroring human intelligence of which machine learning is a subset. 

Anyways machine learning is about giving software the ability to receive several inputs learning from these inputs and using what it has learned to predict the outcome of the next set of inputs. 

Machine learning has the ability to desern patterns from data that no human could see or understand. So i'm saying the metal detector of the future will adopt machine learning to predict if a find is good our bad, metal detectors will no longer focus on the metal make up of a find as such as that will no longer matter all that will matter is that the find is desirable and what probability your detector indicates the likelihood it will be a good find. How will this work well if your familiar with ML you will know that there is a learning phase of the process which is essentially some feedback telling the ML software that this is a good find or this is a bad find. This learning normally happens via human input so in our metal detector analogy the software would gather all the inputs for example the depth, the type of metal, the mineralization of the soil on and on and would predict if a find was good our bad the user would dig the find and feedback to the software by a button press whether the find was desirable or not. 

The software takes this feedback and alters its prediction for the next set of inputs from the coils and signal processing. this continues with the detecting machine learning all the time however for this to be effective this cycle has to be done 1000’s of times which is well beyond the ability of one detector to do. 

So for this to work in the real world we adopt a collective approach where 1000’s of metal detectors upload their hunt data and download a pattern based on the previous upload but a pattern that is improved and more accurate than the pattern before. A detector would need to be specifically designed to capture this feedback from the operator who has understanding of the requirement to share data essentially everyone has a part to play in the accuracy of the detector. I can see this working where if a detectorist is happy to share their data they get to purchase the detector at a low cost while if a detectorist declines to share the data then they pay a premium to download the latest data. This pattern data can also be utilised across several models of detector allowing the collective cloud of data to grow and become more accurate.

It would be possible right now to program a cheap microprocessor to do this, so Minelab/Garrett if you want more info hit me up ill gladly elaborate for a percentage. 

Another development that will affect the future of the hobby is community design: What are you talking about Ciaran well anyone who has a Simplex or an Equinox will know this. This is the production by individuals in small batches of accessories or replacement parts, look at the equinox for example and all the problems it had with the shaft, this I imagine was a big concern for Minelab at the time but once the community got together and designed a carbon fibre replacement this was no longer a problem for Minelab as it became fashionable to have a carbon fibre shaft something which minelab didn’t offer and something people were changing whether they had a problem with the shaft or not. Just a few years ago I needed a bracket for my CTX and did a search on line for CTX 3d printed parts and it returned one part one total a bracket that I still use to this day to hang my detector safely in the shed.

Just search for equinox 3d printed parts in google today and you will see pages and pages of versions of parts from coil bolts to new arm cuffs some people are even printing and selling these. So a whole industry of bespoke small batch detector parts has cropped up with the advent of the 3d printer. People are suggesting improvements online in forums and it is inevitable that there will be someone with a 3d printer designing it as they speak. 3d Printing allows repeated cheap iterations and improvements augmenting the user experience of the detector and this will continue to get better in the future. Allowing a more dynamic design process for future detectors in fact future brands I believe will adopt a robust manufacturing process utilising standard fittings that allow people to easily swap out or repair parts.

Now pulling Machine learning and 3d printing together there is research and development ongoing right now that is using machine learning to develop optimise and fine tune radio antennas generating weird and wonderful shapes which can only be manufactured with 3d printing using metallic filament it is not a large stretch of the imagination to assume that future coils which are essentially a pair of antennas will be produced using this research and production method. So watch out for some weird coil configurations coming your way.

Finally something that we already have but that is beyond the purse of most detectorist and that is ground penetration imaging right now for example we have the nokta makro invenio pro which retails at approximately 8K Dollars these beast are supposedly using AI im sure they mean machine learning and is what has been categorised as a 3d metal detector despite the spin it is clear that this detector is at the cutting edge of finds visualisation and as you know all things that are at the cutting edge are expensive and full of problems. however it wont long before the price drops and all the bugs are ironed out for example these detector although it can detect small objects for example it cant visualise if these objects are a ring or a coin but watch this space as the research done here is bound to leak into future consumer metal detectors

So to quickly recap the future of metal detecting is bad for coin shooting on beaches and parks ewaste will be a big part to play as detectorist will start to realize the value in dropped/lost electronics. Field detectorist will have to contend with low quality Green waste target masking out the good targets and Future Detectors will utilize Machine learning 3d printing, data connectivity and community design to ensure up to date programs and patterns and dynamic repair and design.

Wrap Up 

That’s it for this week’s I hope you liked this episode of the metal detecting show podcast.

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Once again, I hope you have enjoyed this episode and we will chat to you all again next week. 

Get out there eyes down and Happy Hunting.