Latest Minelab Patent - 11th Feb 2016

[Qiaozhi]

Enjoy!

[WM6]

Finally, changeable magnetic field is patented.

This can led to "free energy movement" generator.

[ivconic]

Latest news that i heard is that they withdrew their regional offices and sales from EU and focused all to USA market.
I guess most probably because their sales fell drastically in this region.
So...from now on if one wants their product; will have to import it from across the ocean!
It was obvious in last few years that they lost their "compass" and connection to reality.
Reading their patents is huge waste of time.
Sooner or later they will probably try to put patent on fresh air too.
They have reached their zenith few years ago; from now on they can only go down.
Most of you will be more than surprised on this; but i see similar destiny for XP too.
In my language there is an old saying and it goes something like this; "when flying too high, to the lower the fall will be".

[Teleno]

Determining the components of a sum of exponentials (spectrum of decay constants, spectrum of time constants) is an old, ill-posed inverse problem that pops up everywhere, especially in magnetic resonance imaging, and has been attempted by thousands of academics.

Their "invention" consists in discriminating a target by its two main time constants and was previously disclosed here (pages 23, 24, 27 and 28 ) :
http://pe2bz.philpem.me.uk/Detect-Se...ter_thesis.pdf

ML as usual inventing the squatting toilet. Anyone cares to submit a third party observation at the USPTO? http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1134.html

[Teleno]

Another prior disclosure: http://www.zonge.com.au/docs/environ...s/Perc2000.pdf Formula (1) and paragraph 2.2. Time constant spectrum determined by the so-called Prony's method.

An yet another: http://geosensors.com/global/Hollada...SAGEEP2004.pdf on page 8, "Estimation of Decay Parameters" for unexploded ordinance (UXO) discrimination.

All is there again.

[Dave J.]

Lots of fancy gobbledegook in the disclosure, but that has very little to do with the claims.

Evidently a newbie "inventor" who has no idea this stuff actually has a history. I can't believe Candy let him get away with this crap, maybe Minelab is shoving Candy out? Most of the claims that can be interpreted as frequency domain read right on top of the Fisher CZ (released November 1991 and still being manufactured) and I would suppose the same is true of the Minelab's multifreakers whose commercial history is also about 25 years old.

Then there's discriminating PI's that have been around probably even longer. Although to my knowledge there's never been a visual target ID PI marketed, it's not because of any shortage of people who know how to do it, it's a matter of how to get a competitive product out of the deal. The knowledge how to do it is obvious to anyone who knows how to construct a discriminating or "ground cancelling" PI, whether or not they've actually built one.

[Qiaozhi]

Their "invention" consists in discriminating a target by its two main time constants and was previously disclosed here (pages 23, 24, 27 and 28 ) : http://pe2bz.philpem.me.uk/Detect-Sense/Documents/pasion_master_thesis.pdf

The PDF link goes to the USPTO site.

[Teleno]

The PDF link goes to the USPTO site.

Can't edit that, but the url is correct.

[Qiaozhi]

Can't edit that, but the url is correct.

OK - I've fixed it.
The link now opens the PDF file correctly.

[ivconic]

Teleno:
"...ML as usual inventing the squatting toilet..."


Dave J.:
"...Lots of fancy gobbledegook...",
"...I can't believe Candy let him get away with this crap...",
"...maybe Minelab is shoving Candy out?...".

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark...
As i said; reading those patents is HUGE waste of time.
It's smarter to walk a dog instead...lot of fresh air...until is patented by ML!
...
Moving from EU to USA doesn't mean much. 320 millions (or so) of people market is potential market, but there are already well established domestic manufacturers.
It's obvious that their management lost compass for quite some time.
Last significant product that really made a difference was and still is Explorer SE, my hat down to it. Everything what came later is completely wrong leaded by obviously not so smart management.
...
Discriminating PI with VDI... you may skin a cat on several different ways, but you can sell such detector widely to people only on one way.
Pricing it $xx 000 is not the way.

[Teleno]

As i said; reading those patents is HUGE waste of time.

Yes and no. The patents are themselves worthless yet ML manages to gather the best existing state-of-the art and publish it in compiled form.

In this case - for those who actually read the patent and had trouble understanding - it's about decomposing a target signal into its main components.

We usually think of a target as a decaying exponential with a time constant "tau". In reality things are more complex. Targets have shapes that form separate paths for the eddy currents, each path with its own R and L. A target signal is the a sum of multilple decays with multiple taus.

If we manage to find out these taus we get a spectrum of time constants (a signature) characteristic of each kind of target. The problem of finding the taus is called "inversion" and is ill posed because when it comes to exponentials the signal is quickly overcome by noise, giving a disparity of possible solutions for the same data. ML (plagiarizing the UXO papers above) simplifies the problem by attributing only two taus to every target and then finding the best match.

This technique is something I had contemplated a decade ago and even wrote a java program to decompose a sum of exponentials. Nothing new under the sun, but if you follow ML patents you'll be kept up to date on these otherwise arcane developments that are hard to find.

[ivconic]

"...The patents are themselves worthless yet ML manages to gather the best existing state-of-the art and publish it in compiled form..."

It makes sense.
I stand corrected.
I'll give it second chance now...

[Davor]

I'm at loss why they let multifreakers (thanks Dave, I like this) lapse. None of their multifrequency technologies are under any running patents right now.

[clancy]

At last a interesting topic after long time.
I read this patent very careful. It is much more complex than you think.
It decompose target signals that ground balance saline soil with also log-uniform and with also log-linear VRM.
This much more complex than decompose into TC spectrum with no ground balance signals.
I think this not done before.

[Teleno]

At last a interesting topic after long time.
I read this patent very careful. It is much more complex than you think.
It decompose target signals that ground balance saline soil with also log-uniform and with also log-linear VRM.
This much more complex than decompose into TC spectrum with no ground balance signals.
I think this not done before.

There's no teaching regarding ground balance or aline sol in the patent, though the former is mentioned in the claim. It just discloses a two TC model of a target and fitting the response to it. It's been done before by multiple people.