GPX 6000 U.S. Owners Reports

[oneguy]

45 minutes ago, Skookum said:

Awesome finds. So you ended up getting one! I was wondering if you might. Mine is sitting here burning a hole in it’s box. It’s driving me nuts. BTW, I think I found your nickel about a month ago, too. 😂. We should team up and cover some ground.

I'm gonna bet you guys will have to stay 1/4 mile apart at least....lol  That sob is one sensitive mofo.......

[Skookum]

5 minutes ago, oneguy said:

I'm gonna bet you guys will have to stay 1/4 mile apart at least....lol  That sob is one sensitive mofo.......

Sounds like a good test for reporting on! I know Nugget Shooter has been cruising around with a band of 6ks on his YouTube channel. I don’t recall any comments from him about it. Interesting idea for an experiment. 

[oneguy]

On 7/5/2021 at 6:36 PM, afreakofnature said:

Boy with it going crazy with airplanes I am thinking it might not work near some power lines.  I have a nice patch that is close to some where i could hear a little emi trouble with both the Z and SDC.

Today I got in 3.5-4 hrs for only 2 bits.  First 2 hrs the emi was terrible, I was thinking "well we'll be selling this as it just won't settle down for any length of time and is quite annoying.  Last 2 hrs threshold about SDC smooth, just a couple noise cancels and I'm liking the thing again?  Then I hear and see a jet and I'm waiting for the 6 to go bonkers.....it doesn't?  Then another jet....threshold stays pretty calm?  One minute I'm gonna toss it over the bank into a ravine then all is well????  Started doing what Lunk mentioned and just let it go nuts and usually whatever is causing the emi disappears.....?

[Skookum]

Got out yesterday morning. I had a similar experience. Sometimes the noise cancelling would tune out a plane, but other times, no. There was a plane every 5-10 minutes and sometimes several at a time. At one point there were 3 overhead, I just had to stop and stand there in frustrated submission until it the sky cleared. Another thing I found was that the GM1k and the GPX6k were pretty good at noise canceling each other. However, there was one “channel” on the GPX that the GM couldn’t handle even with multiple reboots. The solution was to repeat a noise cancel on the GPX with the GM nearby.  The 3 larger finds here were all very iffy signals in Normal Auto 2 with the 11” coil. I probably wouldn’t have bothered with digging them if I wasn’t using the GM to double check and see what the GPX was saying through the chatter. The largest piece was 1.6 grains of spongy gold under 5-7 inches of dirt. The rest were sub-grain. The smallest 3 were only found by bulldozing with the GM 5” in Manual 10. The weight of the 11” coil and point of balance was very nice.

[Northeast]

I see quite a few mentioning EMI troubles with the GPX6.   Very likely that the amount of EMI experienced in the States is far more than what I get here in country Victoria but the following may still be relevant.    

In the time that I have been using the GPX6 I have found that Manual Sensitivity 1 provides a very smooth threshold yet does not really lose much in getting a target response.  The response is certainly quieter at Sensitivity 1 than Sensitivity 9 for example, but it is also much easier to hear through a smooth threshold than a noisy one.  

There have been many times that I can run Auto and Auto Plus without issue or maybe have to put up with a little mess in the threshold.  There have been times where dropping to Manual Sensitivity 1 is the only way to continue detecting, but I've continued to find gold.  

Possibly worth testing a few targets pre-dig in Manual Sensitivity 1 and seeing if they are still detectable.  Might give you a bearable alternative for the times that EMI is driving you nuts.   

The ease/speed of setting changes is one of the little bonuses of the GPX6. 

[phrunt]

Northeast, you have a SP01 correct? Seeing you're hunting in Manual 1 at times and the target signal is significantly less volume but still very apparent does using the SP01 with it cranked up high help with that?

All these reports of EMI issues are quite scary for me and there are a number of people talking about it, as we have high voltage lines through a lot of my gold hunting spots and the reason I didn't overly enjoy using my earlier model GPX and often felt like wrapping it around a pole and tried many things to resolve it even those funky EMI reducing metal covers you can buy for the GPX that claim to help with EMI along with the Coiltek AI coiil and was seeking out an alternative in the QED for a machine that handled EMI better and ended up settling on the GPZ which works excellent in the power line areas especially with the concentric coil.     One of my favourite gold spots is right near an international airport and the planes are coming into land near it 🙂 The GPZ isn't overly bothered by that either and I just had to keep away from the area with my GPX, or dumb it down so much I never found anything, since getting the GPZ it's become my most productive area.  We are such a small country a lot of the gold areas aren't remote, often you can see houses while detecting 😉

I wish you could hire machines here, I'd only need one for a day or two to work out how well it'd do here. Oddly Kennard's hire which I recall was in Australia too hire out CTX 3030's but no other models.

There are rumours of a couple of 6000's in NZ now but nobody I know of has one so there is just no information yet how well they go here just yet so I am trying to decipher and translate information from other countries 🙂

[Bishop]

i really like my gm1000 and have been using it a lot. so much that when i get a target on the the 6k i keep looking at the screen to see if its going left or right,
oops, wrong machine. could they make something like that on a pulse induction? not that i trust the meter and dig everything anyway.
nice gold Skookum. will be out that way maybe Sunday, definitely Monday. strapping the gm 1000 to my back for pinpoint if necessary.

[tboykin]

I spent about ten hours total detecting with my GPX6000 in Southern Oregon. Got three small bits for 1.2 grams total.

Sensitivity is great, ground balance is a little finicky with the mono coil, but holy balls the EMI was bad. The way they hooked up the speaker made it so I had to use headphones. Maybe the amp is too close to the sensitive stuff, but as soon as I switched to the speaker the machine started going off. Lucky for me it was only 101 degrees so I just wore the nice black headphones.

The chunkier .7g piece was at least six inches down!

The GPX did sound off on some of the andesite and hotter serpentine but the ground is murder for most machines so I am fairly happy.

It’s a keeper as long as they can fix the speaker issue. “Just don’t use it” is not going to work for me in bear country. But the second day the EMI was not as bad when I checked the speaker. 

[oneguy]

3 hours ago, Northeast said:

I see quite a few mentioning EMI troubles with the GPX6.   Very likely that the amount of EMI experienced in the States is far more than what I get here in country Victoria but the following may still be relevant.    

In the time that I have been using the GPX6 I have found that Manual Sensitivity 1 provides a very smooth threshold yet does not really lose much in getting a target response.  The response is certainly quieter at Sensitivity 1 than Sensitivity 9 for example, but it is also much easier to hear through a smooth threshold than a noisy one.  

There have been many times that I can run Auto and Auto Plus without issue or maybe have to put up with a little mess in the threshold.  There have been times where dropping to Manual Sensitivity 1 is the only way to continue detecting, but I've continued to find gold.  

Possibly worth testing a few targets pre-dig in Manual Sensitivity 1 and seeing if they are still detectable.  Might give you a bearable alternative for the times that EMI is driving you nuts.   

The ease/speed of setting changes is one of the little bonuses of the GPX6. 

So far in my area manual 1 has worked the best for me but sometimes I can jack it up a little and usually check target with higher sense.  Another thing I think probably helps is keeping that coil on the ground, I get sloppy with my other tectors as they are very forgiving, this wild beast not forgiving at all. Might try using the headphones tomorrow maybe....????  13 fires started in my county after yesterdays storm so we all might get booted outta the woods soon....fingers crossed

[Gold Catcher]

9 hours ago, Northeast said:

 I have found that Manual Sensitivity 1 provides a very smooth threshold yet does not really lose much in getting a target response. 

This is what I found as well. However, this might only be true for shallow gold. My suspicion is that with sensitivity 1 you will take a significant hit with depth. I will test this these days. Although the 6/11 is not designed for outright depth, it nevertheless should be somewhat useful for deeper gold as well.  But this will of course be more of an issue when using the 17 inch coil where dialing back on gain might defeat the purpose of using a big mono.