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My First Go With The 7000


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I finally popped for the 7000 after having a pretty good year with the 2300.  Mike G took me out to his family claim in one of CA. famous hydraulic pits for a bit of practice and familiarization.  Within 10 minutes I found a tiny .25 gram flattened gold nug at impressive depth for something that small, perhaps 4 or 5 inches.  I pushed pretty hard for the next 3 hrs finding one more similar sized nugget.  What I hadn't counted on was the terrain.  We were hunting a steep hillside with a lot of cobble piles, downed timber, deep gullies and iron trash.  The 7000 is a beast in that kind of terrain.  No amount of tricked up harness/bungee support will help when you're pushing that big coil up and down in all directions against gravity.  

As you may recall in one of Steve's original posts about reasons not to get the 7000, he cautioned that it is best suited for open, flat ground.  I was wore out after a 6 hr trial.  Me and the 7000 were soundly beaten by another friend of Mike's pushing a belt mounted Eureka Gold with small coil.  Despite the small coil, he could actually cover more ground, under, through and around the obstacles with a nearly weightless machine and iron discrimination.  A better tool for those conditions without a doubt. 

It took me several hrs to get my ears and brain accustomed to the chatter from the 7000.  I ran it in the preferred settings, High Yield/Difficult, gain 9, Smoothing off, but it just seemed noisy.   I personally never thought the 2300 was that noisy and I ran mine through an small amplifier to boost the volume.  Its all in what you're used to and I can understand the GPX users rocky transition.   

I need a few days in some more suitable terrain to really get a good feel for this machine.  I may have to run out to the sagebrush flats of N. NV.  I've got some promising shallow bedrock desert washes back in AZ that I can't wait to try, once the weather gets a little more tolerable. 

 

Until then boys and girls, keep er low and slow.

 

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You could not have had a better instructor plus an amazing historical place to hunt. Congrats

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You could not have had a better instructor plus an amazing historical place to hunt. Congrats

Yeah, we went down to the main pit and I saw all the spots where you guys found gold, including the Lucky Lundy and Mrs. Lucky sweet spot.  Looks like excellent rattlesnake country.  Mike ran into one small one. 

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You will need more than a few days to really understand and learn the 7s new subtle language, but it will come. Keep it up.

 

I'm a weekend warrior and so I don't get to use the 7k much. I am finally getting used to the sounds that it makes........but  I still like my 2300 better for small gold. They are both excellent gold sniffing  machines.

 

strick

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I run mine on the default settings in High Yield/Normal Soil/Low Audio Smoothing. May play around with turning the audio smoothing off this weekend if it doesn't get too many false hits. Been ground balancing with the iron ferrite ring too and that's helped with falsing a little. Right when I got my GPZ I ran all these settings I got off the internet that I thought you were "supposed to" do but it made my machine loud and unstable. After doing a system reset and following Jonathan Porter's ground balancing procedures I find gold on the stock settings and that works for me. Maybe a year or two down the road I might get bored and start tweaking it a little but for now I like to keep things simple.

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