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8" X Coil In The U.S. - A Field Report


jasong

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It really does scream on tiny stuff, the first few surprised me thinking I had 1+ grammers just to find little bitty guys. I was vocally dubious about your claims of the GPZ obtaining parity with the GB2, and I still want to go test it myself, but after using this coil I have to think that gap has been closed significantly and you are right. Though I feel it's still not hitting on stuff 0.07 grams and under quite as hard as the GB2. But honestly, that stuff is like toss back in the wash material to me so maybe it doesn't even matter. What I'd like to test is speci gold, disseminated in quartz and ore pile type stuff. I think the GM1000 and GB2 are still required there but honestly I think think this 8" will hit some of the stuff I thought was out of range.

Reason I say it hasn't achieved parity is because Test Wash 1 has a bank in which a lot of black sands and tiny gold nuggets are eroding out of. I can run my GB2 over it and pull out a bunch of 0.02 gram type stuff, and I could hear there was more left when I left it last year. I can pan it and usually get 2 or 3 per pan. The 8" surprisingly heard a few but not as many as I know are there. But it did hear some, and I was unable to recover any because the pinpointer wouldn't hit them, the coil edge wouldn't detect them, and light was getting dim and my patience for tiny stuff was limited.

Does your 8" have bump sensitivity to rocks? And vegetation? Mine will sound off on certain vegetation which just scrapes across the coil, not even bump it.

Also, does your coil emit a high pitch squeel? I didn't notice it until I dug into a bank and had my coil leaning at head level. It's extremely high pitch and anyone with hearing loss or anyone over the age of 30 or 40 probably won't be able to hear it. But I have great hearing despite 20 years of playing punk and metal drums loudly somehow... I was able to record it on my phone, but I don't want to waste phone bandwidth uploaded it if you heard it too.

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Simon - I was wondering if it was my adapter or maybe the cable knocking around, and some may be that, but it definitely zaps when I scrape a rock on the underside too hard, and when I'm poking the coil into bushes it will go off when stuff scrapes against the top of it, and I determined none of that was cable movement. I didn't try running under 18 sens though, and I only ran at 18 sensitivity for maybe the first 2 minutes since I realized quickly this coil was quiet (EMI-wise), the rest was all 20.

Oh also, I can mount my AT pinpointer on my backpack with this coil, no problem. The GPZ does still set my pinpointer off in a feedback loop if I get it too close, but oddly it only seems to do it when I'm in black sand laden wash bottoms. It will interfere but then stop when I move the coil if I'm in mellow soil.

JW - Hey good to see you post again. These coils feel to me like the equivalent of having a GPZ 8000 in a way, it's a noticeable advantage over the stock 7000 in basically every measurable way. If NF comes out with a range of coil sizes I think people will understand what we've all been talking about. 🙂 My experience with the GPZ in Arizona tracked similar to your story above - in so much as I revisited a lot of GPX patches and found a few nuggets here and there with the GPZ. But the amount of nuggets I missed with the stock GPZ and later found with the various X Coils (mostly the 17") + GPZ was far greater than what the stock GPZ found that my 4500 missed. I feel that if I took this 8" to every good wash I've ever found I could probably pull up 200 or 300 little nuggets I missed with the GPZ/stock coil. That is Arizona gold/ground though.

Nevada is the big question mark in my head. I haven't run an X Coil of any size there because the spring-fall months are really hard for me to escape work. I really want to see what the 8" does up there wet, and the 17" dry.

Lacking a GPZ successor on the horizon, lacking a range of NF sizes, and if the GPX 6000 doesn't improve heavily on the 7000, then an 8 or 10" X Coil and 17" X Coil is probably the best way to maximize detecting performance for anyone fairly serious about such things in the US. That 15x10 looks compelling too based on the NZ reports and good successes, that may be the killer all around single coil. We will see what NF and the 6000 brings though.

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Re: Desert shrub falsing with the 7000

Here in Sunny Yuma and in Qsite I find the 7000 makes faint target sounds when it passes through desert shrubs, particularly the browned out dry stems along the wash banks.  It hits on the first pass, then silence after that as if there is a static discharge between the coil and vegetation that releases the static energy after that first pass.  It's maddening when you're trying to find those whisper targets on the bank edges.  I even tried spraying the coil with the anti static product used for clothing, didn't help.  One of those quirks you just have to learn to live with.     

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  • The title was changed to 8" X Coil In The U.S. - A Field Report

My feeling was something like salts/electrolytes in the plants became detectable with a more sensitive coil, but since they are mostly dry I don't know about that either. Maybe it is some sort of static component...added with maybe the coil is sensitive enough to detect small movements in the cable as Simon suggested. Little from column A, little from column B situation?

I had a visitor this morning, a guy who's been detecting Gold Basin since the early 90's. I told him I was testing this new coil out so we went to a patch he had worked for 20 years while my coffee brewed. A dealer and their clients also work this area with GPZ's pretty hard, and there are boot scrapes and dig holes everywhere.

Snagged 2 little guys in 15 minutes, 0.07 (was ~1inch deep) and 0.09 grams (~4-5" deep). Screaming targets, tested both in situ with his 4800 on sensitive extra and 11" mono and not a peep, but that wasn't too surprising since it's PI. The 0.09 grammer would make the faintest peep when we bumped gain up and turned off stabilization, but it was just a "barely there" sitting on the coil after I dug it and the smaller one wouldn't sound off sitting right on the coil. I think someone is in the market for a used GPZ now. 🙂 Still, shows it's fairly easy to snag a few dinks out of patches that had a lot of production in the past with this coil. 

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Great thread guys!! Lots of good information to be used here!👍👍

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Jason,

   Great work out there with those x coils... hope you get to compare the new z search coil by nuggetfinder with the x coil, would love to hear the outcome of that....

Dave

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