Maiden Voyage 10x5 Coiltek Goldhawk

[Calmark]

I had a chance to go up to the high sierra area 3 days ago with my brother to do some scouting and detecting with our Minelab GPX 6000 detectors.  He had the stock 11in round mono and I had my newly-arrived Goldhawk 10x5 made by Coiltek.

We found some old-timer workings in an area that was new to us both.  Those old miners sure did a lot of work and there were rock piles stacked everywhere.  Bedrock was very limited to a few places lower down the slope.  We concentrated mostly on the areas nearer to bedrock to see if we could find something the previous miners had missed when cleaning it.

I set up my GPX6000 on auto 2 with threshold on and went to work scanning the piles and sides of the gullies.  I immediately found small shards of copper bullet jackets, some small lead and the usual nails.  The machine ran fairly nicely, without any real noise issues for the first hour, so I figured today might be a day noise-cancelling wouldn't be needed much.  Scanning steep slopes was not only a breeze with such a light coil, but I didn't get a lot of extra noise from not having the coil horizontal, like I do when using my stock 11in round mono.  I ended up doing about half a dozen noise-cancels throughout the day.  Mostly in the later afternoon as temps rose and generally when more emi is around due to distant planes, etc. At any rate, off to a good start so far with the new coil.  

After about 1.5 hours I hit the first nugget on the sidewall of a cut, right atop some bedrock.  It was a very rough piece and weighted .13g at about 1.5 inches of depth. Off to a good start, and gave us hope more nuggets could be found at this location.  And, as it turned out, we got a lot of hope quickly after I dug a coarse 2.45g nugget about 45 minutes later 7 inches down out of the side of a throw out pile.  Game on now that we knew this spot had some real potential after all!

In the end, after 10 hours of swinging that day, my brother and I ended up with 8 and 7 nuggets each, respectively.  A great outing to a new spot, and plenty of nugget digging action, even if most were on the smaller side.  My brother with his 11in coil beat me by 1 nugget, but he had two "patches" on exposed bedrock knobs where he found all but 1 of them.  I did eke out a .25g nugget about 3-4 inches he missed at the first spot.  Maybe it was due to the smaller coil size, or just because he left me a bonus nugget.  Nice of him to "share". 

Overall, I really enjoyed using the 10x5 Goldhawk.  I could fit it among the rocks and bushes very easily.  I "side-wall" scanned much of the day and the light weight of the coil made it very manageable.   Sensitivity of the ML GPX6000 with this coil is really nice and its probably similar to the sensitivity of the 11in mono while still getting nice depth on small nuggets.  I was able to pinpoint quite easily and quickly with the 10x5 as well.  I dug probably 1/3 more targets than my brother, though partly that was due to how jazzed up I was from finding that larger nugget early in the day, haha. 

I included a picture of the trash just to give you all an idea of how much junk you have to dig to get the good stuff.  

  

[LuckyLundy]

Great outing with your Brother and your new Coil.  Thanks for the report on the new coil.

[Calmark]

I forgot to say, my brother ended up with 8 nuggets for 2.87g on the day using the 11in stock ML mono coil.  His largest was 1.02 grams, so most were fairly small, but nice looking, coarse nuggets.  

[phrunt]

Great post, well done to the both of you.

I agree with everything in your post, the Coiltek running a bit quieter and handling angled detecting better seems to be a very consistent attribute owners are noticing.