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Nokta removed the V 1.14 update from their site, only V 1.13 for now. I tried V 1.14 and thought the DT mode showed promise, BE not so much. I'm using V 1.13 now.

In WA, an easy focus is any igneous or Volcanic rock types (schist, Diorite, granite etc) and keep within 5km distance of these. Plus North or South of known gold mining areas.

MMMMmmmm.... You wait a further 12 months & there will be less gold for you to find. Early bird gets the worm. One thing for sure is that ML honour their warranties & your mates who get the new detector straight off the bat will get the gold you would have most likely shared in with them. Food for thought. D4G

Fair enough. Thanks. Just goes to show, again, that no one detector or coil combos do it all. I take it too that you are talking about totally detecting previously hammered ground & not out general prospecting for new virgin stuff? That is a different ball game all together. In the perfect world we would all love a stable, smooth, rock solid threshold. When pushing detectors to their limits, especially on hammered ground trying to squeak out that bit more depth/sensitivity, the threshold is going to suffer. It then becomes a matter of dealing with that but still knowing what the detector/ground is telling you. Bit like Steve's insane high end settings. Not for everybody & obviously not for you but can be the difference in hearing signals among that "noise". The reality of that "noise" is that it just becomes part of the threshold to your ear & your brain/hearing adapts to it almost subconsciously given a bit of time & any target signals stand out. D4G

September 26 2002 Part One Haul Road Troubles It rained all through the night and the temperatures are in the upper 40’s. The rain is not overly hard but it is steady. Clay and I took a walk up the haul road and it has deteriorated in a few places. He said he and Old Bulldog could handle it so we all got started with our work for the morning. Around 10:00 AM the rain started picking up in intensity. It wasn’t too long after that when my radio came to life. It was Big Clay and he said Old Bulldog had slid off the road. Conor kept the tom running while I jumped in my truck and headed up the mountain. It had gotten very slick and parts of the road were washing out. A little more than halfway up I saw the truck. Clay had gone off the side on a tight turn and slid down into a depression about ten feet below. There was no getting out of there in these conditions without help. He was extremely lucky not to have rolled the dump truck over. He dumped his load of gravel between the road and where his truck was sitting. Then I went up and got Jacob. He brought the excavator down and used his bucket to build a little ramp back up. Then I hooked a logging chain to his bucket and the back of the dump truck. It worked and we got him back where he needed to be and Jacob reloaded the gravel back into his truck. It was looking like our time here was running out. TO BE CONTINUED ...........

Don't be so sure Steve.... from what I hear, this isn't so far from reality,

I have reported on a similar topic - In salt water the Manticore is extremely sensitive to the salts and about the max Sensitivity is about 16 (as you state). In my case, when the control box is totally underwater in the Gulf, a target "blob" is seen in the area of 1-3 on the center horizontal line and the blob increases in size as I increase Sensitivity from 16 and up. Basically, 16 is the highest sensitivity in salt water for the Manticore when looking for low conductors. [I also have to use Underwater Boost to hear the target signal!]

Steve said there was an issue with part of the website.

I jumped to Garrett with the 24K and Axiom and declined an invitation to sign a new NDA with Minelab as I did not want to risk any possible appearance of impropriety. I've wrapped up work on the Axiom obviously and at this point content with where we are in detector technology given where I started 50 years ago. Long story short I've not had any contact with anyone at Minelab in over a year. It's not something I am all anxious about one way or the other as my big nugget hunting days are behind me. I have little interest in anything other than a detector that gets a solid 20% more depth than what we have now, and that's not going to happen.

Really strange man. Where's Steve today? Maybe this is the Rye Patch weekend and he's over there. He will know what happened.

I have neither, but do have the 800, Manticore and Deus with both HF coils which is almost the ORX, I'd pick the Manticore first, Nox 800 second and Deus with HF coils 3rd. The Nox with 10x5" is more like the Deus performance wise on small gold in milder soils, with the 6" coil I find the Nox better for smaller gold. At this point for me, buying anything other than the Manticore is settling for second best. I just hope the Manticore gets more coils in the future from Coiltek.

hi Kingswood, What surface do u mainly look for May I ask? I have seen people saying AB, CZL, AU. I have only realised to read suface geo last week. lol Also as for fault and fractures, I thought you can see them from bedrock geo map anyway? So why would you use mag? lately I have been looking at Laverton and in some E tenements there are a few dead SPL and live SPL. Would you reckon around the SPLs there are still good chance to have a look? I assume the good gold won’t come up alone? some YouTubers said the more intense the drill holes are the more prospective, what do you think if this ? Kind regards, ethan

I used my GPZ again after some time of having it stored in the cupboard to try get my monies worth out of the GPX 🙂 I just love my GPZ, it's a detector that suits me, I like the stable threshold, I like the double blips on pellets from the DOD coils, I like that I find it easy to use, I like that it talks to me in a way I can understand. I've always liked really stable detectors, and always struggled with ratty detectors, the GPZ maxed out is so much more stable than the GPX on low sensitivity. I guess I just like the GPZ more no matter how hard I try to like the GPX. My GPX is dramatically more stable after the fix, if you recall my earlier posts on the GPX I hated it, I can now deal with it, but just prefer the GPZ. It may be detrimental to my detecting as the GPX may find some gold I'll miss with the GPZ, no way to know, although I'm sure that goes both ways. I just gel with the GPZ and the GPX is something I put up with.

Don't you have a "say" with minelab anymore with their detectors &/or testing them? D4g

I've used the smaller one for a long time now and love it, can stuff about 2oz of gold in it, which has only happen a couple of times. I put my ear plugs in it to, just in case I need too shoot my snub nose 357. I didn't know there's a bigger one I might have to upgrade as with the ear plugs and on a golden day it in can get crowded.

@Phrunt. I thought after the EMI fix on your 6000 that you loved it. What's changed? D4G

most of the time I use surface geo, then use mag imaging to define faults and structures.

I think they're behind in the single frequency VLF gold detectors, with Garrett in the lead there. They have stated they're moving away from single frequency detectors although broke that already to bring out budget models, but their next Gold VLF is likely to be some form of multi-IQ, but needs to give something they've not already done to the multi-purpose units. They can't just give it better coils like nice solid ones and think it'll sell well; I'd not spend the money to buy it when I already have the Manticore. Maybe they'll release one, but it's not going to be a smash hit with people rushing out excited to get it. I'm wondering if we are at the end of dedicated gold VLF's even being viable, and even then, they'd have to be cheap seeing a multi-purpose machine can do it well now. The GPZ is a tricky one, the more people that have invested in aftermarket coils the harder it is to bring out a new model unless its significantly improved. Can they significantly improve it? I wouldn't buy it if it were lighter and added discrimination. That's not worth 10 grand or more to me, it would have to blow my GPZ away to think about buying it, the hard-core prospectors that find a lot of gold will buy it and think it's great, but they're a much smaller portion of the market, Minelab needs a lot of people to buy it, just not the very successful gold finders as they need sales to bring in a good profit especially with the African market being close to dead. I wasn't blown away by the 6000, but its small gold sensitivity over the stock GPZ seems to have the market excited and has likely taken over as their best seller by far and they're going to happily let that be the sales winner for them for some time so they don't need to rush a new detector to market, competitors are starting to nibble at their heels but nothing to be too worried about just yet in taking control of the market, but the competitors are taking a lot of sales Minelab missed by high pricing. These sales won't show on Minelab's figures spreadsheets as they were never going to be Minelab customers anyway, but they've missed a lot of PI sales that have gone to Algoforce especially and Garrett in the US by people who were not willing to pay the big money but happy to pay less for a detector. Nokta is going to come out at some point and take even more of this market. My expectation is a new GPZ is not coming soon, they'll more than likely release a detector to fit into the Allgoforce, Axiom and Nokta PI range, and be competing in that area of a well-priced PI. You could say the 5000's already there, but a new detector gets a lot of sales, not an old one. They won't want to lose that market share of the lower cost PI to competitors as that's just the start of things to come, like VLF's all over again. Minelab have completely lost any dominance over the VLF market, and their share is shrinking by the day, hence the deep discounting of the Manticore. They will want to get into this lower priced PI arena before it's too late.

I have found small nuggets with the ORX, Nox 800, and Nox 900. I haven’t had an opportunity to nugget hunt with the Manticore yet. The ORX has great ergonomics and can be configured many ways including removing the lower shaft and coil from the rest of the detector and as long as the wireless signal stays connected I can just detect with the lower shaft and coil. It’s great for pinpointing and for detecting overhead or on the sides of cuts, etc. The ORX is not waterproof and the wireless signal will lose connection if the coil is submerged even in an inch or two of water unless you use the wired antenna. It has very acceptable sensitivity to really small nuggets, has ferrous/non ferrous 2 tone capability using its Gold modes and handles difficult ground conditions very well. Its audio is a little brash and cannot be adjusted or changed. The Nox 900 with the 6” or Coiltek 10X5” coils using its Gold modes in Multi simply has another gear compared to the ORX. Running the 900 at 20 of 28 sensitivity, it can compete totally with the ORX but the ORX has to be run at 95 of 99 to stay competive. The Manticore has yet another gear sensitivity wise that takes it past the 900 in its Gold mode if ground conditions allow. The Nokta Legend is also an excellent gold prospecting detector that I would consider to be slightly better than the ORX. Both the 900 and Manticore have much better stock ergonomics than the Nox 800 and easily compete with the ORX for balance and versatility in the field while being fully waterproof and having no issues going in or out of water. They are exceptionally versatile detectors for just about any kind of detecting.

Thanks Jeff I’ve got that LG 30 coil but my only trouble right now it’s just be a air test. I will put what you said if I can get myself back in the goldfields again. Remember people it is no stupid question you can ask on here. So you don’t be stupid and not ask it . Chuck

So I was shallow water hunting today(saltwater) in Tom Danowski settings. I would get a real faint target with sensitivity at 16. I would raise the sensitivity to 22 to see if I could here the target better and I was getting iron numbers and tones. I still dug the target and it was a coin. This happened 2-3 times so I didn’t do any ground balancing or noise canceling and was wondering if that what caused it. I wish I could post this question on his forum but for some reason I can’t register. also can others tell me how they st up there machine to wade in the water

Is there anything in California that is not against the law or doesn't cost too much? too bad, use to be a great state. Still very beautiful though.

The Legend will find small gold nuggets no problem with the LG15, LG24 and even the newer LG30 coil using Goldfield Multi or 40 kHz. I usually run mine in the A discrimination pattern and with sensitivity lower than Andy is using in the video. The Legend hits hard on anything metal within detecting distance down to about 0.01 grams.

Klunker, I think I found that one you left, thanks.

Looks like a Garrett AT in the middle, and a Fisher to the right, but they're saying the best finds are made with good company, meaning that a Garrett person can get along with a Fisher person, they don't have to hate each other for using different brands! A good message behind that. I don't know if it was intentional, but people don't need to look down on people for choosing a different brand or model detector than they use.