Dateline D-Tex
Posted by Vlad on 6/12/2006, 8:14 am
205.188.116.13
For those that don't remember....
D-Tex was one of the early companies, and it was literally a family run enterprise. In the early years it made BFOs, TRs, and VLFs that were neck and neck with anybody. Then the patriarch of the family died, and with him the company that had been a labor of love, and they fell on hard times, and were either bankrupt or close to it.
Frank Ball, and Dorian Cooke were not only two of the nicest guys around, but they knew detectors, and made their bones working for Charles Garrett. A day came around when they decided it was the right time, and they bought D-Tex-probably around 1981 or so. Basically what they did was to put out newer versions of the Garrett Deepseeker and Groundhog. They were improved by being more compact and lighter, increased sensitivity, two speeds of autotune, and a new search coil design that was totally unaffected by any electrical interference.
And the loops interchanged with Garrett. They even came out with a very low profile and simple VLF/TR
water unit. But what they did not do, until it was too late was build a motion circuit. They even fielded a new Ground Cancelling Discriminator, which simply offered Reverse TR that had been again reversed to where it sounded off on goodies, and went silent on rejected targets-and this was an automatic circuit that operated like this. It also allowed the use of the conventional TR mode for those that did not want to hunt in reverse, because that system was very slow. And it came out with a five inch coaxial loop, which might have seemed all right in the lab, but did not have the depth in the field. I can still remember their full page ads in detector magazines entitled, "Motion is Dead"-yeah, right. But the marketplace saw otherwise, and they eventually added a four filter motion circuit. But by then Fisher had come out with the 1260, and Whites, Teknetics, and eventually Garrett were all making TID units. Now that was the day of the detector wars, between Whites and Teknetics-real emphatic! Tek had the first I.D. [not including the PRG], then Whites had single sweep identity, back to Tek with faster recovery speed....tones..you get the idea. Meanwhile D-Tex is not even on the sidelines or even the bleachers, they are in the parking lot, and then one day, they are gone. They had a good product, but were not market savvy enough.
Sometime in the late 1980s Frank Ball came out with a licensed and improved copy of the 1265/66, which could be locked in either of the two discriminate modes, and at a market price about 40% below Fisher. While it was a great detector, that was not enough to sustain it. Sometimes copying a design is not enough, you need to innovate.
Somewhere Frank and Dorian are still around, and still hunting with somebody elses detector, and I'm sure still thinking about building another detector. Here's to you, guys...............
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