Minelab SDC 2300 User Guide 4901-0172-4

I bought a house in meadview about 4 years ago.  Every couple months when I go there I try to get over to gold basin to do some detecting or drywashing.  It took me a couple years to find my first nugget out there and its been a couple of years since then and I havent found another.  I swing an SDC and I've read people have done pretty good out there with that model.  I find plenty of lead and boot tacks a inch or two down but not much deeper than that.   What settings are people using out there?  How deep down are people finding the gold?  Would I be better off with a  different model that can go deeper?  I'm not very confident in my abilities since I learned this machine on my own and have only found 2 pieces in the 4 years and dozens of times I've used it.  Any advice would be appreciated. 

Here's the 1st video Minelab USA did for TV.  You might know the English sounding dude from FL.
What's interesting is we were able to see Minelab Mine Detector as it turned into a gold detector.
The comments towards the end about seeing what's in the ground before you dig it, I'm still waiting.
Do you feel, we'll see a detector that can actually see the item or at least the shape of it with any accuracy and if so how long out?
 
 

Hi!
Another classic question,but i have a ctx3030 with 17inch coil and do mostly detecting in the saltwater.It goes deep and thats what i'm looking for,depth,,I know that SDC2300 is a PI machine and very sensitive to gold.But when it comes to depth comparison in saltwater and knowing the SDC2300 has 8 inch coil,then the question is which detector goes deeper?is it worth buying that expensive unit just for saltwater beahhunting? 

Glad to see Simon is back.
I know there are previous posts about SDC battery compartment seal, I had problems with mine this summer.  
 
Here is the background that I have posted about before.
I dredge in an old cut that wasn’t cleaned that good into the bedrock.  The bedrock is a quartz muscovite schist that through frost shattering and dissolution is deeply weathered making it easy to dredge into for a couple of feet.  Because it is a cut the water is always murky and work is done by feel.  A couple of years ago I dug a big section that I thought was cleaned up.  Previously I seen a guy use an Excalibur to check where he had dredged so I took the SDC in.  There was targets so dredged deeper and recovered a couple more nuggets.  Now this has become standard practice.  
This summer while changing the batteries there was water in the battery compartment.  I cleaned and dried the compartment.  Also cleaned the seal and the machine worked fine but I would like to change it.  Through a search nobody sells replacements?

With the fantastic weather in the Rye Patch region during the month of October, I was chomping at the bit to get down there, but my summer job didn't end until the 30th. It still took me a few days afterward to get everything wrapped up, so I finally hit the road and met up with Gerry and friends at Rye Patch the following Tuesday. The detector training class we were scheduled to give that weekend ended up being cancelled, thanks to a winter storm that was forecast to move into the area on Friday. Needless to say, having only two days of optimal detecting conditions before being snowed out and forced to move on to Arizona was a total bummer.😞 Intent on finding a few bits of gold in-spite of the looming storm system and armed with our trusty Minelab GPZ 7000 gold detectors (and one SDC 2300 - also quite trusty, btw), we hit an old patch in hopes of digging up some previously overlooked yellow metal. Only two small nuggets were found after a couple of hours searching with four coils on the ground - not a very good start. It was then that I remembered another old patch nearby that I had completely forgotten about, it had been so long since I had been there. It wasn't a very good producer back in the day, but perhaps we would be able to find a few nuggets that the VLF and early PI machines may have left behind. Within minutes of hitting the ground, my good friend Chef Rusty and I both popped a shallow sub-gram nugget; not a bad start. Soon, everyone was digging good gold! My second target gave an obvious yet deep sounding signal response from the GPZ's stock 14” coil. I imagined it to be a three or four gram piece at a depth of 12” to 18”. Gerry noticed me digging quite an excavation and came over to capture the action on video. At a measured depth of 20”, the target was finally out of the hole, and as I held it aloft there was an audible gasp from the audience that had gathered to watch, followed by cheers and fist-bumps:

 
After a thorough cleaning, the specimen weighed in at a whopping 40 grams - a totally unexpected and pleasant surprise! The nuggets kept biting sporadically for everyone the rest of the day, and the same was repeated the following day. Just goes to show that sometimes the ZVT tech can really ignite an old burned-out nugget patch. Much fun was had by all, and it really made up for such a short two-day detecting trip. Pictured below are my finds, including the 40 gram chunk, a couple nuggets at over 8 grams, and all the small bits, with a total combined weight of over 66 grams.