New Minelab Patent

[Qiaozhi]

Please be gentle.

[WM6]

Examiner for president:

In subject of patent we read:

A METHOD FOR DISPLAYING METAL DETECTION INFORMATION

So it should be patent about displaying MD information.

But then we read:

A method for detecting an electrically conductive target in a soil using a metal detector, including: generating a transmit magnetic field for transmission into the soil based on a transmit signal; receiving a receive magnetic field; providing a receive signal induced by the receive magnetic field; processing the receive signal to produce a processed signal; processing a duration of the receive signal, the duration begins after a time the processed signal exceeds a threshold value and ends after a time the processed signal no longer exceeds the threshold value, to produce more than one estimations indicative of a presence of the electrically conductive target when the target is within an influence of the transmit magnetic field; and presenting graphically the more than one estimations.

................. etc etc.

Instead of patenting method of displaying MD information, our "inventor" patented basic principle of metal detectors functionality including metal detecting itself.

What to say?:

Examiner for president!

[deemon]

What a shame ....

[Aziz]

That's a nice piece of - sh1t - oops i meant work of a patent troll.
*LOL*
Aziz

[greylourie]

Am I missing something ? 2D VDI ? Don't Minelabs and Whites already make machines with this feature ?

[WM6]

Am I missing something ? 2D VDI ? Don't Minelabs and Whites already make machines with this feature ?

Probably this is not about VDI at all, but to patent everything about known MD technology to prevent competitors to act in field of metal detecting innovations and their implementation in final product. Seems that some of patent examiner become total illiterate in legal linguistics, or there is something other behind. Such one "MD lawyer innovations" should not pass the examination.

[moodz]

....Minelab are patenting the processing / display of target estimations .... of course LRL detectors have had displays like this for years ....the probability of an estimation being correct being zero. :-)

[Davor]

There is a large corpus of papers on UXO that proves this approach to be valid. Even Minelab participated in the research at one time. That said, the approach was there long before this patent. Guess the examiner didn't know that.