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A Few Nuggets For The GPX 6000 And GPZ 7000


phrunt

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8 hours ago, Gold Catcher said:

Watch the long term damage though of the arm/ shoulder. By the time you pass 50 it comes at you with full force. Someone once told me that when you are past 50 and wake up one morning without pain you are dead.

GC

I got to 35 years of detecting when finally I got calcinitis/bursitis of the left shoulder tendon from an unacknowledged (ignored) RSI injury. I had to give up any form of heavy PI detector (thanks to Garrett in releasing the ATX, which was the 'straw that broke the camels back') and went onto using lightweight high frequency VLFs. Although the 5 years using Gold Bug2, GMT, GM1000 and the 24K provided me with an extra 6,000+ bits of gold, the constant pain and endless painkillers finally sent me to the hospital to get surgery. The pain hasn't quite gone but at least now I can use heavier detectors again. One key 'takeaway'... just because you're 50+, don't ignore pain just because you might 'expect it'. It aint always arthritis. 

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Hi Simon,

Graat, detailed report. I’m not sure where you got any idea the 6000 is as hot in tiny gold as a Gold Monster. I’ve called the 6000 the Gold Bug of PI detectors, but that’s an allusion to its weight and performance relative to other PI detectors, not a statement of fact of it versus VLF detectors. A VLF has an inherent advantage on the tiniest gold over any PI made. In theory you can make a PI with a pulse delay so short that advantage would disappear, but then you would in effect have a VLF, with all the same issues. As you note, however, it gets more complicated in bad ground, where a VLF suffers far more than a PI, and where the 6000 has a real edge on all but the tiniest shallow gold versus a Monster.

I am glad you confirmed for yourself what I’ve said here before, and told you directly at least a couple times. There is no reason to think a 6000 will significantly outperform a GPZ on smaller gold, if the GPZ is sporting the right X Coil. Out of box, stock GPZ coil to 6000 with mono 11” coil, GPX has the edge. But X Coils on GPZ can makeup for or exceed that difference. And for max depth on largest nuggets in bad ground GPZ takes the prize, though I still have questions on stock GPZ coil versus GPX with 17” mono in the mildest ground. I’d not bet against the GPX in that scenario, as it would depend a lot on the nature of the gold itself. But the sheer larger coil size would probably tip the scale to GPX in mild ground.

Coils, coils, coils…. coils often make the difference, and can reverse results one expect on machines. I do not expect my new Deus 2 to ever be a serious match for my Equinox if my Equinox is running either the 6” coil or 15” coil. The machine may go head to head with Equinox with identical coils, but it’s those extra large and extra small coils the Deus lacks that makes the real difference. You get into similar situations when you start mixing coils on GPZ and 6000. And yes, I look forward to what a 6000 with small coil can do someday, though I’m still hoping for a plug and play option there.

Again, great reporting, thanks for taking quite a bit of your time to write that up and share with others. :smile:

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Simon, you’ve given me a reason to persevere when detecting lead littered locations.  My first solo day out with my new 24k was fun and very productive...for Pb!  It was everywhere, including wedged between the cracks of the intact quartz veins. I don't know why people would shoot directly at the bedrock! It had me wishing that there was some way to differentiate it from Au. I guess there is as you’ve shown...

Dig it and sort it!

 

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Sorry to hear about your injury Aureous, you've been killing it with the VLF's in places others dismiss VLF's as even being an option so you've made up for that handicap with skill and dedication and found yourself a lot on gold by doing so.  I should take note of stories like these as I'm constantly being warned, JW is constantly warning me too.  The old saying younger and bulletproof I guess.  It only lasts so long though.   I'm quite lucky the smaller coils I use a lighter which helps a bit with the GPZ weight but I really should try and use my bungee more, it's probably had 1 hours use since I got my GPZ.

Steve, thanks and yes you did tell me and and even had to spell it out as I didn't want to believe it, you're always a real straight shooter and I appreciate that, I get all excited about new products and hype them up to myself to be better than they are and I latched onto that Gold Monster reference and wanted it to be so,  I make them in my head what I want them to be and set myself up for disappointment although sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised.   I've done it with other detectors in the past too expecting way too much.  

I've heard you call it the Gold Bug of PI detectors a few times now and that's about what I was thinking more about it's performance on small gold, it was quite similar in small gold performance to the 19kHz VLF machines which is still very impressive as now you're swinging something similar to a VLF and PI at once in a nice lightweight package which gives a big advantage over someone with a previous GPX model.  I absolutely could not believe how light it felt, as I've read about it's weight being so similar to a GPX 5000 on a carbon shaft which mine is, but it felt significantly lighter than the older GPX, it felt so light it didn't feel real, it didn't feel like a powerful PI.   

Unfortunately I didn't get much of an idea how the 17" goes on the GPX as the power lines nearby just made it too unstable and JW didn't want to lower the sensitivity too much to try stabilize it as it's better just to put the 11" back on where he could run it hotter which makes sense to me as we were in a small gold area.  The 14" ended up doing exactly what it is designed for though, where the detector was too unstable with EMI it purred away with the 14' and has very impressive small gold sensitivity as both of us were impressed with the 14" DD.  If I had one I wouldn't leave home without that coil in my backpack just in case.

I guess now more than ever I understand why Minelab limit coils on all of their detectors now, they're not doing it to be nasty to us or whatever reason we come up with that they don't want to allow us coils, it's because they need to leave something in the tank for the new model, a point of difference.  There has to be a point where technology gets harder to improve to justify a new model or you're just ending up releasing First Texas paint jobs which eventually puts you out of business.  I'm not saying the GPX is a case like this, but an example of what could happen if technological advancements hit a brick wall.  At what point do they run out of ways to improve it, hopefully not too soon, but by limiting coils they can at least have a few different detector models going at once and people wanting multiple detectors for different tasks. 

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1 hour ago, GotAU? said:

Simon, you’ve given me a reason to persevere when detecting lead littered locations.  My first solo day out with my new 24k was fun and very productive...for Pb!  It was everywhere, including wedged between the cracks of the intact quartz veins. I don't know why people would shoot directly at the bedrock! It had me wishing that there was some way to differentiate it from Au. I guess there is as you’ve shown...

Dig it and sort it!

If you've got incredible patience and in a pellet ridden area then yes, dig it all will find you gold others can't be bothered getting.  You'll find the gold others just don't have the patience to recover.   JW blew me away with his patience on this occasion, he knew what he had to do to succeed through, we figured we'd hunted this area out of the more easy gold so the way to succeed was to sort through the pellets.  Using a VLF in this situation with a small coil can speed up the process as it's quick and easy to pinpoint, I've often considered just taking a bag and every single target that beeps just load the scoop full of soil into the bag rather than sorting it out at the time, take it all home and deal with it there which would save a lot of time and allow me to get a lot more targets.  I don't know why I haven't done that yet, makes logical sense to do it.

I'm sometimes shocked where pellets end up though, they work there way into places you'd never expect.  Sometimes you're so confident it's going to be a bit of gold, you're smashing up bedrock where there is no apparent crack for a pellet to get in there and it turns out to be an old pellet.  It's just weird 🙂

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On 12/13/2021 at 8:42 AM, phrunt said:

......Unfortunately the GPX was a bit unstable when first turned on, JW has been normally using headphones with it and not the speaker but we needed to use the speaker so we could both hear the response.  A few retunes and me turning my phone off helped a bit but it wasn't overly stable, we pressed on and tested anyway in manual and auto+ and the results were somewhat of a surprise to me and not what I was expecting......

.........It's not that I don't like the GPX, I thought it was fantastic, I just don't see the cost / benefit ratio adding up at all.

Hi Simon, you’ve made a decision you can’t see the value of the 6000 based on using it the worst way possible! 🙃 🤔 The GPZ7000 definitely gets a boost in sensitivity when using smaller coils but it still can’t hold a candle to GeoSense when it comes to early sampling.

The science says differently to your reporting when comparing the two which is why Minelab developed the 6000 in the first place. There’s a reason why EMI is more problematic with the 6000 over the 7000 as per the science so attempting to do a comparison in a high EMI environment using a known problematic audio delivery method is fraught with potential pitfalls (As has often been discussed on these pages, IMHO the speaker is a rudimentary tool best used in remote locations or for basic target retrieval methods/convenience etc).  

I completely understand you’re very happy with your current set up and that’s fantastic but reporting negatively on something you clearly have no experience with to validate your position puts a downer on a really nice and appreciated post to the forum. I’ve spent many hundreds of hours probably more like thousands of hours behind the 6000 and I can assure you even with a very sensitive coil attached the 7000 does not even come close to what the 6000 can do, and I say that from the perspective of being a dedicated GPZ 7000 user.

I prefer the 7000 over the 6000 because of what the 7000 can do scientifically, but if its to find a piece of gold no matter how small just about anywhere gold has been found before I would not even pause to consider anything BUT the GPX 6000 period.

JP

 

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2 hours ago, phrunt said:

If you've got incredible patience and in a pellet ridden area then yes, dig it all will find you gold others can't be bothered getting.  You'll find the gold others just don't have the patience to recover.   JW blew me away with his patience on this occasion, he knew what he had to do to succeed through, we figured we'd hunted this area out of the more easy gold so the way to succeed was to sort through the pellets.  Using a VLF in this situation with a small coil can speed up the process as it's quick and easy to pinpoint, I've often considered just taking a bag and every single target that beeps just load the scoop full of soil into the bag rather than sorting it out at the time, take it all home and deal with it there which would save a lot of time and allow me to get a lot more targets.  I don't know why I haven't done that yet, makes logical sense to do it.

I'm sometimes shocked where pellets end up though, they work there way into places you'd never expect.  Sometimes you're so confident it's going to be a bit of gold, you're smashing up bedrock where there is no apparent crack for a pellet to get in there and it turns out to be an old pellet.  It's just weird 🙂

Taking a sample bag is a very good idea

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Not very often I agree totally with JP but I do on this one, I believe the Z even with the 10" X coil doesn`t hold a candle to the 6K/11"Mono on those small scraps. In regards to VLFs vs PI vs ZVT, I found  a patch of sub grammers many years (last century) back with the Whites GM2 (which I believe is as capable as the GB2, just nowhere near as ergonomic) that patch has been flogged by all the PIs I`ve owned, the Z w/. X coils and the GM. The Z got some scraps but few, the PIs got some scraps but few until the 6K came along. The best of the PIs was the SDC on that patch.

The GM did well but the 6K blew me away with its depth ability on deep scraps, and the number I`d left with all the others. The past winter gold season I used the 6K only, it is to me the best patch finding detector I`ve used, not just because of its ability but also because of it ergonomics. My ground is from extremely quiet to noisy as, I use and have always used detectors maxed out when on patches, detect in a remote area where EMI has only been a problem when one particular small plane flies over, actually I`m getting a wee paranoid about him and think he`s only up there when I`m out there.😉

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Yes, I agree, the bundle wound 10" X-coil on the GPZ would struggle to keep up with the 6000 11" on small gold, it does add a significant boost to the GPZ when it comes to small gold but not GPX level sensitivity.  The GPX is very sensitive to small gold without a doubt.

 

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Nice hunts, great write-up and photos! 

I've never detected for natural gold, one of these days (come on retirement!!).

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