Jonathan Porter

Mines a GLX but no sat Nav you lucky 🍀 devil. 😆 What brand of android are you using, is it an external arrangement or replaces the 2DIN dash unit? Agreed on the Enerdrive gear very good stuff have it in my Bushtracker Van (600 amps lithium) and my NPS truck (3 x AGM). I use the new Trilobite app on my android phone but some are a bit cautious about data. OziX is good but a bit klunky at times.

Good old troopy, I’ve been tempted on occasion but ended up with a dual cab cruiser instead. Mine’s the Sandy taup colour (some call it baby poop brown 😂). I see you’ve stuck with the slimmer wheels and tyres. Did you need to do anything with the suspension, I had a Lovells GCM increase with 2 inch lift done prior to rego so I could legally tow a 3 1/2 tonne Caravan with a 600kg payload. The V8 diesels have plenty of grunt just have to watch out for the Alternator because its slung low and doesn’t like muddy water. There is a fully sealed kit available for them if you do a lot of water crossings. The only other thing I’m not a fan of is the narrow track on the rear they look like they’re crabbing from behind and have a tendency to follow the road on some of our less than ideal outback single strip bitumen tracks. Makes a long haul a tiring experience constantly wrestling with the thing to stay on the road. 🤨 What sort of sat nav did you stick in yours? BTW I’m hearing you on the coffee, 5am Nespresso machine cappuccino and a read of the forums is my favourite time of day. 😝 JP Mine is a work in progress, eventually I’ll have a canopy with 2 spare tyres at the rear and a rooftop tent, the tray has 40 litres of water in the headboard and another 70 litres in an under the tray water tank with a pump. Toy hauler towed behind for extended trips into country a SxS can be used.

Make him sleep in a swag under the bus for shade. 😇

It’s already started Steve, had a good customer grumbling excessively about him wanting a 17” out of the start gates and emailed ML accordingly. Argh the joys of being a dealer!!!🥴 Argh the joys of being a field tester!!!!🥵 Argh the joys of proofing what I say a hundreds times before I hit the submit button!!!🤪

I think gold attracts more than its fair share of this type of human behaviour, mainly because it’s seen as being ‘got for free’, my brother in-law once said to me “its all right for you living the life of Riley” meaning I had it easy and just went around picking up gold just laying there on the ground!! I once calculated I worked more hours in a few months than he did in a whole year working for the local council. When you find yourself getting excited about the idea of a flushing toilet and the ability to turn on a light without having to start the generator you soon learn about “The Life of Riley” and how alright and easy it is.🥴 No gold is easy gold, all gold even the ‘easy gold” takes effort and determination. I do however find myself getting the fever when I see someone’s gold finds but never begrudge them for their successes, you have to be “in it to win it” and often with gold “what’s for you won’t go by you”. Another saying I like is “there’s no rush in the Gold Rush”.

Looking forward to seeing your rig Norvic.😇 My favourite hobby is trying to set up the perfect rig, 😉 I like my creature comforts so a shower every night and a cold beer or two after with a good bed off the ground preferably under something solid not canvas is the go fir me.

Humans are a weird blend, we hate adversity yet require it to feel fulfilled. There is nothing more fulfilling than doing it tough looking for gold and doubting yourself then being rewarded by a good find, the combination of the two makes for a very immersive adrenaline rush that is addictively euphoric. I think the insipid part of humanity we are all talking about here develops through petty jealousy and a smattering of frustration combined with a blend of skepticism. Maybe it’s because the pastime/occupation attracts a certain type of personality who loves nothing better than to throw in discord all based around that persons skepticism, because they can’t do it or have never personally experienced it then it has to be BS! Or they have done it and hate others doing it, or hate others who are successful spilling the beans and bringing in more competition. I see this a lot especially around discussions of new detectors, the expressions of mistrust because I work with Minelab so therefore my input is null and void!! Crazy thing is my input has to be totally unbiased when giving feedback to ML, really big expensive decisions are often based around my feedback, to the point where I spent a lot of my own personal time double triple checking everything I do just to be sure I’m not barking up the wrong tree. I get asked a lot by Engineer’s “Are you sure?” 🥴 Here’s an extremely memorable example of the types of things that have happened to me over the years with prospectors and why I shy away from social gatherings etc. Years ago I was in a caravan park with Steve Herschbach and Chris Ralph, we’d come into town to do some washing and shopping and were hanging around while our washing dried. A fellow prospector I knew came up and said hello, I hadn’t seen him for years so it was enjoyable to catch up and also let Steve and Chris enjoy meeting some Aussie detectorists. While we were all laughing and chatting this guy I had never met before came up and barged into the middle of our group without even introducing himself and accosted me saying in a big booming voice “All that gold you showed off in your second video, you never got that all in one season, I call BS!!!”. This wasn’t the only occasion this sort of thing happened during Steve’s trip downunder. Those personalities for whatever reason feel motivated to break social engagement protocols and just blurt out their ‘skepticisms”, they are in the minority but boy do they make an impact. On a forum where we are all hidden by distance and a keyboard it can often be worse where you will see outbursts from people who would normally remain quiet in a group gathering and is why I think we see a higher percentage of this type of behaviour online. Either way when your constantly the target for no good reason other than someone wants to ‘project’ their inadequacies and petty jealousies, it can leave you very gun shy but also seething inside because of the injustice of it all. 😞 JP

Well said Steve and “So say all of us”. New releases are fun but all the finger pointing over the years has grown old for me, being torn between seeing people desperate for information and at the same time being accused of HYPE has grown extremely thin with me and made more poignant by my now being a dealer selling the products I often talk about. I will always try my best to inform people of my perceived bias but do not mistake my passion for this subject as being hype to sell products because you will get it sorely wrong. The only reason I hang out here is because of the effort you SteveH put into keeping this forum alive and informative, I love the hype/passion and excitement of this forum and thoroughly enjoy the camaraderie but at the end of the day after more than 20 years of being mangled by all the tall poppiests I am well over having to have my fundamentals scrutinised every time I offer an opinion!! Good to see a defined line in the sand, to all who read what I have just written, I help develop Minelab detectors and I sell the things so take what I say with a grain of salt if your so inclined!!🥴

I sincerely hope the new 10x5 coil has similar sensitivity to small gold as the standard 6”, one of the things I love about the 6” is the more refined iron ID information compared to the stocker. In quiet ground with the sensitivity cranked up my favourite gold haunt has a lot of pesky hot rocks that do not ID very well with the larger coil, also the tiny nuggets do not ID very well either, so the smaller coil just makes for a more enjoyable experience as it saves me a lot of scuffing and fluffing around.

Xtra Deep has a much longer delay before it starts to sample so a lot of ground noise is removed and also salt signal. I use it a lot in our ground when I want to go over an area in Normal but the ground noises are too dominant. The sorts of places where Difficult feels like it is lacking in any real depth (the ground signals are virtually non existent) but where HY Normal and General Normal are way too aggressive. Usually homogeneous places are best for this, ground that has a mantle of decomposed sandstone or saprolite with the mineralised gravel layer between, preferably in dry conditions. Usually in situations like this I lower sensitivity to somewhere like 6 and lower my Volume level by 3 or 4 points to tone down the threshold variation even a apply some Audio Smoothing and just specifically chase solid signals that sound deep. Have pulled some nice gold this way before I’ve run out of steam digging faint ground nosies. JP

TomAYtoes TomARtoes🥴, Key thing is there is more info at 20 Stabilizer setting on the GPX compared to 1. On The GPZ there is more info at Off than there is at Low or High!! I see your point in essence we are talking about dead zone, however on GPX and GPZ (carry over dross) there is a lot of things happening when you adjust these filters not just ‘dead zone’. Problem is, when trying to describe it that way things get messy really quickly. If your audio is drowning out the target signal in Off compared to Low then it suggests there is a conflict between threshold and Volume. Any sort of Audio Smoothing filter takes away from a full ‘lead in and tail out’ signal response making the audio train steppy. This is particularly noticeable in Difficult where we want all the target information we can get, in Normal there is a LOT more variation even in quiet ground so some Smoothing won’t hurt rather than going to Difficult. JP

A few things to get everyone on the same page settings wise between the 5000 and the 7000. Firstly the 5000 has a Stabilizer control that goes from 0 to 20 with Zero being the highest noise floor filtering (noise floor is raised to filter out a lot of target signals) and 20 where the noise floor is as its lowest point allowing basically everything through. The GPZ has a control like this too called Audio Smoothing, when I see people complaining about more noise generally this is due to them being used to an extremely filtered environment with the 5000, out of the box the GPZ is set at Low Smoothing which is equivalent to running 15 on the 5000. There are not too many operators who are brave enough to handle 15 on the GPX because the threshold instability will drive them nuts. This is because the 5000 electronics are no-where near as refined as the GPZ so suffers a lot more from EMI, especially Sferic EMI (garbled variable noise). The GPZ factory preset is far more aggressive than the 5000 due to that fact alone, as such the Volume (Target Volume equivalent of the 5000) and Threshold are all set differently to compliment the lower filtering the GPZ can handle. So you the operator have to search around a bit if you want to get the detector noise similar to what you are used to or give your brain a chance to “learn” the new way the detector behaves and soon enough you will not notice the busier baseline of the detectors audio. I always train new GPZ users with Audio Smoothing Off, it is much easier to go from Off to Low than it is the other way round. The next thing in the GPZ’s favour is it’s balanced coils, nulled DD like coils have this neat trick of taming surface ground signals whilst maintaining good depth, in the case of the GPZ it requires a DOD style coil to avoid ‘movement signals’, this then means the GPZ is less reactionary to surface responses relative to the coil however it is different to say a GPX 5000 with a DD on because ZVT is a LOT more aggressive than MPS. On both the GPX 5000 and GPZ the ‘Target’ Volume (detect page menu bottom right on the GPZ) is extremely steppy in its behaviour (quite big movement in only one notch point past optimal), however its behaviour is impacted a lot of what the Stabilizer setting is or the Audio Smoothing setting position is, as such whatever you choose impacts on where the Volume ends up and also how you listen to the detector determines the volume position (headphones, WM12 speaker etc). I always advise using the GPZ with Audio Smoothing OFF, this way you can easily adjust the threshold and volume controls to suit. I never use the Smoothing on any other position because I like to be coupled directly to the receiver information wise on the machine. The threshold setting of 27 was chosen to compliment the Audio Smoothing at Low and Off positions as such if you go to the High position (equivalent to the GPX 5000 FP Stabilizer setting of 10) then your volume and threshold settings will sound muted and hard to hear. A good way to gauge the effect Audio Smoothing has on the GPZ and to get us all on the same page, using High Yield Difficult, put the Audio Smoothing in the OFF position, put Threshold on 27, put the Volume on 12, preferrably in a quiet environment, perform a noise cancel with the coil in air away from the ground and held flat, listen to the threshold and confirm it is reasonably stable. Then bring the coil to the ground and go into Audio Smoothing settings, highlight High Smoothing (make sure you have the WM12 in a good position as if you were detecting, usually your swinging arm shoulder side), listen to and familiarise yourself to the volume of the detector behaviour (you can swing the coil side to side once ground balanced to get a feel for the way the machine sounds), then select and confirm High Audio Smoothing and notice the immediate dulling and volume lowering of the threshold, there is also a corresponding nulling of ground signals and target signals as well. To then get your machine back to sounding like it did with Smoothing on OFF you need to adjust the volume and threshold levels to suit.The difference between Off and Low is less profound but still relative so once again you will need to make adjustments to get things back on an even keel. There is another thing about the GPZ that needs to be taken into consideration, the difference between Normal and Difficult is quite profound, Normal has incredible depth because the timings are fully opened up and you’re just relying on ZVT to deal with ground signals (does an amazing job compared to a VLF), the Normal Timings are far more aggressive and as such have a lot more headroom for filtering ect. I think this is where I have come unstuck with my American cousins when it comes to Audio Smoothing because the ground they are working allows for the use of Normal with elevated sensitivity. 🥴 Normal has a much busier volume associated with the timings as such you will need to tweak the threshold and volumes dependant on your ground type. There is plenty of headroom to compensate for timing variability by using the Audio Smoothing as a control rather than going to the extreme of using Difficult. Difficult kills depth right across the board relative to ground signal so it is always better to use Normal wherever possible. Difficult does have very good sensitivity to small close to coil targets and it also presents much better on 12 to 20 gram pieces at edge of detection depths (this is the same as the 5000 too), so it will pay to go over ground again using HY Diff with the Sensitivity cranked and Audio Smoothing Off just in case there are a few nuggets in that size range that has been missed due to the ‘hole’ in the timings, just make sure you give yourself at least an hour to relearn the way the threshold sounds compared to Normal as it can sound a lot different (Difficult has a lot of Gain built into the timings to lift the faint signals so can sound a bit twitchy when you go to them after using Normal a lot). I hope this goes some way to explaining things. JP

I’m special Steve, I have super powers when it comes to using a metal detector. 🤓 I honestly think I could find a gold nugget with a stick that has dog poop on the end if it, but I found out I’m not allowed to benefit from it monetarily. 😞

The SteelPhase is a very good Enhancer especially with headphones. I tend to turn off the filtering though.

I think we’ve discussed this before about Audio Smoothing Off. Why not just lower the Sensitivity and the Volume a few points to compensate rather than filter out edge of detection signals by raising the noise floor? I’ve experimented with this technique a fair bit even in quite variable soils and it works pretty well. I remember your not a fan of a twitchy threshold, so lowering the Threshold a touch will help too. By lowering Sensitivity and Volume theoretically there should be a point where the threshold feedback noise should reach equivalency with the low smoothing and high sensitivity method. Just my two cents.

The bigger coil will suffer more EMI and more Salt/Conductive signal but ground noise should be less.

Do you suffer from much EMI where you hunt?

The subject has been done to death here G4G, suffice to say I was against the trivialising of the modification aspect of the adapter and the risks if things go wrong. To fix a blown GPZ is north of AU$3K, so not cheap. It would have been good to have been able to push the deal through on securing the proper leads but alas things didn’t work out for many multiples of reasons best left alone for sake of the forum.🥴 Originally I had a tech at ML do me a favour and build me an adapter so I could have a play, so yes that is true, they were curious at the time too.🙃 So in summary, I was never dead against the X coils and really like the guy who developed them, just the tacky politics and lack of full disclosure.

Really good write up and it’s great too see that the X coils are doing there thing for you jasong😎 . The year before COVID I was fortunate enough to get into some really mild mineralised ground that was essentially virgin, my partners had already done two trips to the area that season before I could get there so the main patch we had eyeballed the year previously had already had a smashing from the guys. The basal geology is largely altered sandstone so when it weathers out the soils are reasonably benign except in the laterite areas where all the ironstone has leached out onto the surface, things get a bit troublesome there so standard coils and Difficult timings were the go. I had a 17” Spiral wound X coil with me that Elnur was good enough to send my way to test the ferrite balance modifications he had been working on and this coil was one of the best X coils I had used to date. I decided to target the main patch where the nuggets were in a layer of gravel beneath a layer of gritty decomposed sandstone, the stuff was so fine the wind was pushing it around. Little piece I heard just sitting on the sand after a huge wind storm that lasted for 4 days. I’d say one of my friends had dug it out and the wind blew the soil away. Here I could use the GPZ in High Yield Normal with the sensitivity cranked from to 14 to 15, absolutely amazingly quiet ground for Australia. I got a good glimpse of what it must be like for you guys in the US using Normal all the time, absolutely amazing the depth I was getting on gram pieces, some well past a foot. I pulled in excess of 2 ounces in very short time going over the deeper sections of the main run. There was no real X signal in this ground so the detector just purred along, but this coil was pretty good on that score anyway. Plucky 12 gram bit off to the side of a friends old patch. The country is bare because of a fire earlier that year. The extra coverage of the 17 was really useful in this open terrain, but the real bonus was the sensitivity on the tiny surface gold or the deep stuff. Few bits out of the same hole, the coil was chattier on this ground because it had more Ironstone, from memory I had to use Difficult or suffer the hot rocks and ground noises. I’ve spent considerable time using these coils in a variety of terrains around Australia, I have never had an issue with the coils themselves other than early stages or the manufacturer only the misinformation and the resultant discord when I tried to put balance to the discussions. The risks are still real, do the adapter wrong and it gets expensive, However I never had a problem with any of my adapters. Here in Clermont where I live the ground is extremely variable and high X, because the coils are so sensitive they can be problematic in our ground especially with saturation. If all the coils made now are similar to the one pictured the high X ground should no longer be a problem, so the way to look at them is similar to the old days of Normal timings (SD, GP days) where you needed a DD coil in DD mode for noisy ground and used a Monoloop coil in the quieter deeper soils, the same applies with these extremely sensitive X coils, use them in Mono type quiet country and go have some fun. Same thing will apply to the Concentric coils when they become more readily available. JP Few more pics

Arizona and QLD, NSW, VIC, WA (Australia) 😁

Think depth. 😉😇

There’s a likely looking spot, ping a nugget.🥴 Over and over again!!🤭 I like my nuggets like my girls, being a bit of a challenge and playing hard to get. 😜🤣

The SDC is still king of simple, both from a controls POV but also the way it behaves over the ground and what it imparts to the operator.

I rarely use the 12” NF I have because my primary focus with GPZ is always about max depth so I focus on the larger coils ‘Always”. My situation is totally reverse of you guys in the US with your steep mountains and tough Terrain. If I detected in hillier environs then I would for sure be using the smaller coils more but 12” would be about it. Once you go below that size the depth advantage of ZVT relative to larger gold target sizes signs off dramatically. Plus I do have the use of the GPX 6000 remember. 😉😇 Recent GPZ gold from last Saturday

It’s ancient history now, the vast majority wanted access to the brute horsepower of ZVT and got it. The subject of ML not doing anything smaller has been done to death and TBH I’m sick of it. If NF make a cazzzilion 12” coils then we’ll know the answer to that question I guess.🥵