Comparing The Evolution 17x13 To The GPZ 7000

[jasong]

Thanks, it's nice when I get a good feedback on vids.  I'm glad to see on retrospect now that some time has passed that after all this time my assessment ended up more or less accurate now that many others globally have used both. It takes a lot of time to do these and generally receive more criticism hate than anything else in the end, but Youtube can be like that. At the time, this was the first test on video of the new spiral wound coils, at least here in the states (I did it on day 1 of the US release). I think I deleted 10+ comments that were just insults with no constructive input on that one.

One thing I want to mention though is that when testing and standing in place, swing speed on video can look faster than one might think. It's also hard to gauge inconsistencies and slope in the ground from that far away over the course of a swing on video. It's been a while since I did this so my memory faded a bit but I thought I tried to do a fair variety of swing speeds, approaches, and angles to suss out a signal with each target. I'm a fast prospector for sure, but I do slow down in patches. Still my idea of slow may differ greatly from others. I just know what works and gets me the gold. For others it may be different.

Depending on the nugget, ground, and EMI sometimes faster works better to get a quick rise, poking and prodding and taking different angles (it happened a couple times in that video from what I remember), sometimes a slow steady approach with a nice mellow rise and fall is what does it. I think I tried to do a good variety, or at least enough that I felt confident the signal was not going to get better with those particular EMI conditions and that ground. It'd be nice to have a second person for tests who has an opposite style than I do though, to see if each other are missing anything.

I can only say what I observe personally, but I'm definitely not a proponent of the conservative setting methodology, at least not when I can run in Normal. Every single test I've done, without exception, has shown me that running hotter is better for my style. Of course up to a point, adjusting for changing environments sometimes this isn't the case. 

I wrote quite a few posts here on this during the first few weeks or month of the GPZ release, at a time when almost everyone here in the US was running in Difficult and low sensitivity, mine seem to have been forgotten for whatever reason though as other people moved into running hotter settings later on, but I spent much of the initial weeks of the GPZ release posting about running hot and I never really changed the entire time I owned a GPZ.

To me though, 18 sensitivity is about the maximum. Unless I was in a spot with very little EMI then I usually found that 19 and 20 added more noise than it did depth/nugget sensitivity. It's like the noise/depth scaled linearly until 18, then after that the EMI increases exponentially and the sensitivity still only increases linearly. It's the same with the 4500 to me for 15 gain, I rarely run in it, usually just 13 or 14. So, if I was in a place with even more EMI then I'd probably back the sensitivity off more again and that may be why conservative settings work better in other places, I'm not sure.

That said, I can't remember if I explained it in the video or not but I did try a bunch of different settings, including conservative ones, until I found the combination that gave me the best results and they were pretty much the same for each nugget, and that's how I settled on what is in the video. I also tried even hotter, and I think it was slightly better but much noisier.