My father just came from the basement and handed me my old Red Baron. I put the 16 AA batteries in it to make it run and it fired right up. I totaly forgot I even had the thing. it was my first and only non whites brand. It worked pretty good too.
Very Cool
I had an RB5. When they first came out a couple of us didn't want anything to do with them. We thought it would take the fun out of digging to know if a signal was good or not before we dug it. A friend of mine let me use his and I started popping up buttons out of a trashy area and decided I needed one.
That looks like Carl Morlands collection. Unfortunately many of them no longer work.
PPratt you hardly changed brands when you switched to Whites as George Payne (the father of SPD/motion) moved over to Whites to design their early motion machines. Its often better to follow a designer than a brand.
Major problem with all the early SPD machines was the need for such a high speed of sweep to get depth and discrimination which was why they retained a TR discrimination mode (with no ground exclusion) for so long.
Pprat, thanx for the trip down memory lane. That machine came out in 1977, the year before Whites introduced their first motion discriminators (original 6000, then the 6db, etc...).
UK Brian hits the nail on the head in everything he said. The only thing I'll add, is I remember when we first started to see a guy swinging a Red Baron, and then the 6000s. We thought they were nuts, because of their obvious lack of know-how on the proper way to swing. You see, for the earlier all-metal TRs, then the VLF all-metal and TR disc, it was just assumed that you needed to go slow and pay attention to whispers, etc..... Imagine what it looked like to see someone going along like they were practicing their golf swings! But believe me, we stopped "laughing" when we saw the silver these guys were bringing in to the club meetings Within a few years, there wasn't anyone who didn't have a motion discriminator of some brand or another
I wish I still had mine just to have it. I dug a lot of good relics with that thing. I lent mine to someone and ever got it back. Stupid me. I'm dumb enough to have lent 3 different machines out. One came back broken and 2 I never got back. Never again.