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My New GPX 6000 Is Faulty, Straight Out Of The Box


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4 hours ago, phrunt said:

 As Sheppo pointed out he's constantly using the quick trak to keep his 6000 happy, I can't notice the difference between using it and not using it although I do use it just in case there is something I don't know or understand which is very likely 🙂

And noise cancelling when it becomes ratty. I’ve also had the privelege of and am thankful for the help JP has given me with the machines I’ve bought through him. 

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9 hours ago, phrunt said:

Would you say the GPX prefers a slow or very slow sweep for harder to get edge of detecting targets?   You may notice in those comparison videos I did whenever I was trying to really get a target I took the swing very slow hoping it'd appear as I've found this works on the GPZ.

Good question Simon as recently I had been told that Auto requires a different swing speed to Manual when using my Gpx 6000 and I've yet to test if so ? 

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It's come to my attention from a helpful fellow owner my GPX may not have a bad solder joint like some other buyers have had, I think my GPX 6000 problem may have just been just poorly aligned battery contacts and not a fault at all, for GPX owners if you look there are two little spring loaded pins that connect the battery to the terminals surrounded by rubbers, it's quite possible one of these spring loaded contacts was not extending properly, initially it may not have come out at all causing there to be no power, after tapping on the control box the terminal popped out a bit further causing poor contact and coming up with the ! error on the screen as seen in this video. 
 

After knocking on the control box again and again when it was playing up it's possible it popped all the way out causing good contact which explains why after doing that my GPX has worked fine ever since.  Obviously this is an unproven theory.

If this is the case it's a possibility my GPX was never "faulty" at all, I was just unlucky with a minor problem and if this is my problem then it's not an issue at all.

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Well, I finally picked mine up and its a runner. Only spent 45 minutes running thru the settings, checking target audio quality etc and I was actually satisfied! I expected the threshold to be like a demented Bumblebee, driving me insane....but, it was quite OK. Too loud for my liking and I would have loved an actual threshold control to reduce it to a whisper....volume just don't cut it. But overall, the threshold was very tolerable.  

I found the balance to be terrible coz the coil is so light....I'll try to alleviate that with some adjustments... :dry: The Bluetooth headphones are actually the 1st ones Ive ever used that are truly quick and I couldn't perceive any latency. Comfy and easy to pair. Mine has no loose coil stem issues, once locked, it stayed there. Very little EMI and the couple cancels I made solved it easy. Got some tiny lead shot that sounded bigger than they were so that was pleasing... I was annoyed that the headphone jack was a 3.5mm one, I'll have to find an adapter to trial my old headphones with it. The little orange-topped gold bottle that was included was a nice touch....but it doesnt fit in the Kangaroo nut-sack that I use. Oh well, will make a nice backup bottle. 

Proper days test tomorrow, weather permitting... hopefully I can make a start getting the 40 grams that this machine owes me.

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This may help those that have problems. It is a small section of GPX 6000 Manual.

1576090304_4901-0386-2InstManualGPX6000A4EN_web_Page_1.thumb.jpg.4e7028c5a98f52729def3379a9fc50bc.jpg

 

  h1311772432_4901-0386-2InstManualGPX6000A4EN_web_Page_2.thumb.jpg.51cfc17e403e5d64ffe662550d9cca07.jpg                                                             
                                                                                            

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10 hours ago, PhaseTech said:

5. This is about the 2895'th time I've seen this - your coil cable's first loop around the shaft should be over the top, not under the shaft. When you loop the cable under the shaft, this puts a lot of stress on the cable entry point every time you put your detector down to retrieve a target.  

5. The coil will also pick up the cable with it routed as in phrunt’s video, thus giving you a false signal when swivelling the coil towards the shaft/cable. See the attached photo. Even mine is a touch tight. Use a longer loop if you ever run the GPX17 to keep the cable away from the coil.

62FC5ABA-D459-4F51-9527-5C4973F6E775.jpeg

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I'm hoping its a battery contact issue and am talking to my dealer about it being the possibility and hes talking to Minelab about it too to see if its possible a bad battery contact would cause the ! error., the ideal situation for me is Minelab just take a look at it rather than replace it, then at least I'd know what was wrong.   If it was the battery contact problem then tapping it lined them up properly or popped them through the little holes if they were misaligned at the factory and the problem should be resolved forever.  I didn't even look at the terminals when I was having a problem to check if they were there, not that I knew to as I could have just popped them into place and then not even done this thread had I have known.

Thanks for all the tips Nenad, yep, I was running full volume so I'll drop that back a bit, I tried difficult when looking for gold for an hour or so until I noticed after doing one of my multiple factory resets to calm it down, I haven't tried difficult when testing nuggets so I'll give that a shot.

I'll give it a go in manual with it at 12 or 1 o'clock, sounds about right as it did seem to improve a little dropping down to around there.

I'll bury some targets and see what difference if any it makes on performance.

And I'll re-adjust my coil cable 🙂

I'm waiting to hear today what they're going to do with it. 

I'm going to have to buy some vinyl adhesive covering or something and cover my coil like Sheppo, I've scratched the crap out of it with one day detecting from my scoop.  The plastics quite soft, it's like its made from recycled ice cream containers.

Oi, don't get lippy about my 0.03 of a gram nugget! It's what we have around here 😛  When I found the 4 gram nugget the other day I struggled to fit it into my gold bottle, I just don't need a big gold bottle 🙂

These are the nuggets I've compared with so far, it hasn't won on any of them.  When I mixed up nuggets it was the two on the left, the top left and the bottom left, you can see they're the most used with their containers scratched up from my rubbing the coil on it trying to get a hit on it with the GPX.  As you can understand burying this little nugget is going to only have 2 to 4 cm of soil over it before the GPX no longer gets it if that, it's almost nothing.

They're a good indication of nuggets I find around here though and why my focus is on the small stuff, they're some of the nuggets from the past few trips out that I haven't dumped into the collection yet.

test nuggets.jpg

Here is an unexpected positive though, this is my battery, it's only ever had the initial charge when I got it, this has done a detecting day from about 10am until around 5pm with about an hour of hiking and eating lunch so I would say just over 6 hours, along with about 1 to 2 hours of testing and it's still only 1 bar down.  This was having used the speaker for the time between 10am and about 1pm and the headphones for the rest of the day and a majority of the 1-2 hours testing has been on the speaker so I could record video.  I must say I'm pleasantly surprised with the battery life.
Battery.jpg.5447c020ec54db8647442c389bb6c762.jpg
 

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Ok Nenad, your tips were very helpful, I appreciate that.

I just drove about 20 minutes away from the nearest power line, in a remote farm area with no known major EMI sources to me, my GPX had a threshold I'd even call a nice threshold on the highest manual sensitivity, much better than what I've ever had with it previously.  It still went crazy with EMI randomly especially when I put it down to dig something but a noise cancel fixed it up and it went good again, sometimes just picking it up and walking a bit calmed it down again, Geosense confuses me 🙂

Running the detector on the lowest volume caused quite a marked improvement in stability I think, it also made smaller targets easier to hear, that and it was running far nicer.  I was using headphones so even though the GPX volume was on lowest it was plenty loud enough.

I've also fixed my coil cable to keep it further away from the coil, much like Sheppo's example in his photo.

I didn't take my phone with me for two reasons, one was any introduced EMI and two I wasn't going to bother doing a video as I had my doubts it would make any meaningful difference in performance adjusting a few things.

What took me by surprise is there was virtually no performance difference at all when using difficult over normal with the GPX, not that I could see anyway,  I expected it be be like the GPZ where if I switch to difficult the detector becomes neutered on small gold compared to normal, it makes quite a difference.

Then I had a lightbulb moment. Because I can run my GPZ maxed out in normal the performance is unlike those that have to run in difficult with their GPZ where as with the GPX those that would normally have to run in difficult on their GPZ with the lesser performance also run in difficult on the GPX yet the GPX performance isn't hindered by being in difficult.  This possibly means they'll get better small gold performance on the GPX than they would the GPZ.  It's all starting to make sense now! 🙂

While in these settings like difficult and lower volume level along with a different location away from EMI I didn't really get much of an overall performance improvement I did get quite the usability improvement and I could also hear the faint small targets a fair bit better than before due to the lower GPX volume.  

I'm now thinking I need to rig up my SP01 Enhancer to the GPX and take advantage of this lower volume stability.

Thanks again, they were great tips. 

I also found the Avantree Torus neck speaker thing on Amazon Australia so that's been ordered, free delivery to NZ and only $149AUD.

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7 hours ago, phrunt said:

Oi, don't get lippy about my 0.03 of a gram nugget! It's what we have around here 😛  When I found the 4 gram nugget the other day I struggled to fit it into my gold bottle, I just don't need a big gold bottle 🙂

 

Don't worry, plenty more tiny pieces of gold in nature than big ones - that is true everywhere. Not to mention the bigger ones are/were a lot easier to detect, so the tiddlers are all that is left in many spots. I just like to reserve the title of Nugget when I get the odd bigger one, and anything over 10 grams can be called a LUMP 👍 As you know, I am in South Australia, probably the worst state for detectable gold. Actually we do mine a lot of gold here, but it is predominately what is produced as a by-product way way down by the big miners. 

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