Qld Sandy

It's been a while since I've posted on here, but life has many things to make us do and I hope I am not repeating what has already been said. I have used the update for a short while and can make the following observations. Running in High Yield and Difficult with the 14" coil, at one spot there was some ground feedback with the ground smoothing off. Going to Locate Patch, removed this feedback, and the Salt timing made the detector dead silent. This ground wasn't salty but it was interesting to note what the changes did. I had the threshold running reasonably smoothly at 27, with the sensitivity at 10. Locate Patch instantly made the threshold slightly jittery and the Salt timing made it more so. I guess I could have tuned to be rid of the EMI but wanted to keep the base setting and not waste too much time fooling around as the day was to be short. Another spot had patches that made the detector moan and the LC (Locate Patch) setting removed it instantly. I found I could run Normal and LC instead of Difficult so that leads to some interesting adventure in the next few outings. There isn't a lot of ground here we can run normal on so it will be good to experiment with it more commonly. I have dug targets in Normal that sounded broadish, but had no response in Difficult and they were deeper nuggets, so it will be a short learning curve. I haven't had the time to check out what the semi-auto ground balance does, but that will come. Cheers.

Sunday we were using Bogene's settings as it was noisy yet again. The EMI dropped considerably close to noon, but as we were on a roll we persisted and ended up with 31 bits for 14 grams. It is amazing how small some of these bits are and the depth they come from, especially considering we have been hammering this spot since 2008 with all the Minelabs since then. There are 2 little bits in the 0's of the GPZ7000 logo that will be about 0.05 in weight.

Hi mn, I try and run in Normal if at all possible, but usually Difficult is the soil choice I use. The mode depends on the sort of gold and the depth, but High Yield is usually the choice as it is very responsive to small bits, but if there were bigger deeper bits around General is my preference. When we were detecting a spot recently using Normal/High Yield, I had a signal that sounded a lot like a ground noise as that area is hot (a Goldbug will not ground balance there) but is reasonably uniform except for some claydome signals. Switching to Difficult/High Yield lost it completely which made me think it was a ground noise. On digging it later, I got a response in Difficult/High Yield after a few inches of dirt was removed and by then Normal was telling me it was a nugget. The result was an 8 grammer from 18". JP, I've watched that several times and the target gets lost in High smoothing at times. You'd really need to be on your game if high was selected and you walked over that as i'd reckon it would be missed. My thoughts are that Bogene's settings are probably a better option if it is very noisy, rather than use High smoothing, but one needs to be more aware of coil overlap so as not to miss targets. Smoothing to me sounds like the detector is dulled down quite a bit and after running it off, suddenly using smoothing just doesn't sound right. I have done some comparisons on a small nugget up close and High smoothing actually gave a better and more obvious response than either low or off, but deeper bits as the video shows, suffer. If I was detecting for small shallow bits in a slightly noisy environment, then I wouldn't be worried about using either of the 3 smoothing options, but for deeper bits, OFF is the choice. Cheers.

Back in the 4000 days and older gent named Bogene (in his 70's I believe) came up with a method of detecting that is basically turning the threshold off, screwing the gain and stabiliser up, and detecting like that. I've had a dabble with these settings but could never get my head around the no threshold part as it just sounds so damn wrong after being used to threshold since Jesus played fullback for Jerusalem. Yesterday we were detecting and old spot and it was noisy. I turned the audio smoothing to low on a few occassions, but don't really like the dullness it gives so went back to the off position, and played with the tuning on several occassions to make a smoother threshold. I had 9 little nuggets in an area I've had the SDC on recently and eventually decided it was a perfect time to try Bogene's setting on the GPZ. I started with High Yield and Difficult, threshold to 1, gain to 20, audio on 8 and scored one of the smallest bits I've ever found. I showed my mate and that was my first Bogene nugget. I tried normal but the ground wasn't that forgiving so eventually settled on threshold at 7, High Yield, Difficult, gain at 20 and audio at 8, and commenced to get another 14 bits. The detector is pretty much dead quiet, except for a very faint hum through the B&Z booster, and the signals are more like a mouse squeaking until you get the coil directly over the target. i found that on the faint ones, a large hole started got the coil closer and the target easier to find. On one signal we were digging I put the coil away from the hole on the ground and it squeaked. I scuffed the ground and moved the coil. That was the next target and next nugget. I would have thought that the coil would have to be over a target to get them, but brushing past some rocks and grass tufts produced a single squeak at times and some moving around of the coil produced an obvious target. I also found while experimenting that the 27 and 28 numbers I was running the threshold at are not the best for small nuggets and 26 seems to be ideal. 25 is where the threshold is in and out, but 26 seems to be the goods. I'm certainly not going to be using this method as my preferred setting, but it makes me wonder whether it might be an advantage on areas that people are having to run high smoothing on, so maybe someone who is having this difficulty might be able to try it out. BTW there is a picture of the nuggets for the day on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/GoldCityDetecting?ref=hl Cheers.

I don't know Dave, as I haven't got a CTX battery here. The AA holder is definitely side by side as I had a look at the small circuit board in one to confirm this. Some of the pins in the detectors may be joined internally? If it won't work then I'm guessing there is a valid reason behind it. Cheers.

Hi Dave, That is from my website, or should I say was, as I have modified the item info. I'm not sure where I got that info from, and have put some holders into stock on the basis, but have checked just now as I saw this thread and they are not compatible with the GPZ from what I see. I also fitted 8 x AA's into a holder and the GPZ doesn't fire up. Further inspection shows that the CTX AA holder (and presumably the battery also) has the positive and negative pins side by side at one end, and the GPZ battery has the positive and negative at opposite ends of the pin socket. I don't want to be the goose that modifies a CTX holder and finds the GPZ lets the smoke out. I must apologise for the incorrect info and have modified the item to reflect this. Cheers.

Hi Dean, The old Coiltek Mini UFO (17" x 11") and UFO (24" x 12") coils were epoxy filled and they were dreadfully bump sensitive, but we put up with them because the threshold on the older detectors was not so stable in our area, and it wasn't seen as an issue unless we were trying to carefully detect gullies or small creeks among the rocks. When the later Minelab PI's came along the threshold stability improved to a stage where the UFO style mono coils were too damned noisy and were sold off to people with older machines. I still suspect the coil design. You mentioned an SDC, and it also has the cable internally in the shaft, and it is not touch sensitive at all from my experience, which tends to point towards the coil design itself. Cheers.

Hi Russ, If you like my Chevy (actually a Fisher body US version) you'll probably like the T-Bucket I'm building when I have the time. Cheers.

Hi Dean, I had an ATX and it was the thing that annoyed the heck out of me. I hate falsing and it seemed every time the 12" x 10" DD coil was bumped, it sounded off just like a nugget. Some people can put up with this, but the areas we detect are generally littered with surface rocks, and it's one thing that I can't put up with, so I sold it off. I thought the falsing was from the coil itself though, but never tried a mono coil on it. It had some advantages but never suited my way of detecting. Cheers.

Russ, That's probably a good analogy. The first of the Holden Commodore engines had a computer with a "Block Learn Memory", which tracked the sensors and actually would substitute a value for one that went missing or out of range. It would also learn and update the fuel curve for engines that were worn or had a lot of milage. I wonder if the GPZ does a similar thing?

The paper by Bruce Candy is well worth the read and is a must for all those with a GPZ. The section about ground balance is the critical area for mine and there are tips to make this procedure accurate. It appears to me that the GPZ is more like a computer than what we have had in the past, and is a totally different animal than the 5000 and older detectors, hence should be regarded as totally new. That means that we need to disregard a lot of the ways of doing things that we have learned and ground balance procedure is the first base. Pumping the coil is not the best way to ensure an accurate balance especially when there are several factors being charted and adjusted out. It makes me wonder whether the testing that was done just after the release is at all accurate, as it was done with the 5000 and older mindset. I'm not trying to disregard it, but have to ask whether it is relevant in light of this paper. With the limited time I have had with the 7000, I can say that it impresses me more each outing as I have seen what it is capable of, and have many customers that give feedback on it. Cheers.

Hi Lunk, There are a couple of nice crystalline bits in there also. Well done. Cheers.

I am certainly a believer because I have seen what this detector is capable of, on ground that I'd thought almost all nuggets were gone from. Having said that, I am not naive enough to believe that every spot of mine will hold more nuggets, but I sure hope they do. From the short amount of time I have detected with the GPZ it is obvious to me that the operator needs to be far more precise with his coil swing and height to get the best out of it. As it is entirely new technology to what we are used to, there will be a learning curve but I see lots of benefits coming. The weight of the machine isn't really an issue if you use a harness with a hipstick of sorts and a good bungy. The supplied harness doesn't suit me, but the hydration pack I was using does, and it has a hipstick in place to help support the weight, while the water bladder helps to balance the pack and stop it climbing up my back when I dig. The grumblers can say and do what they want, but that won't deter the ones who believe in the product and are having success with it. All it will do is drive them to keep information to themselves. I like Steve's comment I read recently that went something like "The older I get the thicker they expect my skin to be, when in reality it gets thinner". So damned true. Cheers.

Yes mate. He scored a dozen for 6 grams also at the same spot. Cheers.

This is the result of around 10 hours of learning the GPZ7000 on and old patch of ours. We have been detecting this area since the GPX4000 came out and coils from the 14'x9" NF mono up to the 25" NF mono. It is an excellent area for "testing" as the area has had a good going over. 12 of these little bits came from an area I've even done with the SDC2300. More learning will occur this coming weekend at another area. Cheers. ps they are just under 9 grams in total