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Not A Fan Of The GPZ 7000 Yet.. But Hope To Be Soon


Jin

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My second outing with the zed I tried the factory presets except I used semi-auto ground balance and ground smoothing off. Tried those settings on a patch I've pulled many different nuggets out of over the last year. (4.5 ounces) The zed didn't get any more targets using those settings. 

I then proceeded to increase the sensitivity up a fair bit but still no luck. I tried many settings/timings but alas no more gold with the zed on this patch.

As a last ditch resort to try and justify my purchase of the zed after a 3.5-year wait, I cranked the zed up to the most aggressive settings I could get away with hoping to find something that my 4500 had missed.  

The settings were... Extra Deep, Normal, sensitivity 20, threshold pitch 33, Locate patch, audio smoothing high. (also used steelphase booster with filter 3 to quite it down even more) (ferrite balance etc) 

I was pleasantly surprised at how well the zed handled the ground using these settings compared to the gpx when running flat out. Hardly any hot rocks compared to the gpx. Unfortunately after a day of trying this and many settings and thoroughly going over small patches of ground that the 4500 had success on the zed found nothing. My conclusion is one of three things.

1. I don't know what I'm doing. Although surely it's pretty foolproof using the zed in factory settings with a controlled coil swing and the coil slightly off the ground. 

or

2. Hitting my patch over the last year with the 4500 in Normal and Sharp timings with gain at 15 has done the job. Id previously used enhance with a high gain and done ok. But once i cranked it up in Normal there was still gold left that enhance couldn't hear. It makes me wonder if folk who say that they got gold in past patches with the zed ever bothered to max out the gpx on their patches first.

or

3. The gold was fairly shallow (350mm was the deepest bit found) and all within the range of the gpx so no chance for the zed to prove its worth.

I was a little disappointed with the zed if I am honest but will give it time and look forward to seeing some kind of advantage over the 4500 that I hear about from others who have had 4500/5000 and now swing the 7000. The thing that I didn't like is that it's advised to keep the coil slightly off the ground. I'm a scrubber and like to use the coiltek Elites to push branches/leaves out of the way in an attempt to get right up close to the ground. Sort of defeats the purpose if you ask me to be swinging 3cm off the ground.

 

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  • The title was changed to Not A Fan Of The GPZ 7000 Yet.. But Hope To Be Soon

Minelab agents recommend not scraping. I was told by one 'expert' at the gold expo in Bendigo at the weekend that it was not the thing to do.

Jin, I have a slightly used bridge in Sydney that you may be interested in purchasing.  

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13 hours ago, afreakofnature said:

I scrub with my Zed, I don't remember reading that you should not do this.  But can't give you any feedback to your other problem.

I may have misunderstood the scrubbing bit as I was referring to a post from JP sent to me by Northeast. 

JP: Quote - In the case of Normal Ground Type mode on the GPZ 7000, those modes are very aggressive so will saturate more
readily than Difficult mode. I generally keep my coil around the 30 mm mark even in quiet
ground.

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Jin, it sounds like you have used conservative and hot settings on the GPZ with the same results.  I think it may be time to scrap off the top 6 inches or more and recheck to see if there are any nuggets at depth. 

Brian.

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I was never a ‘scrubber’ with the Z but certainly ran it occasionally touching or just above the ground.

You mentioned that the GPX got lots of hot rocks and the Z got none.  In Normal mode I found the Z was a hot rock (and hot ground) magnet in my part of the world and in the GT.  The fact you got none makes me wonder what other setting on the Z is dulling it’s performance so much that it is knocking out hot rocks. And could that same setting be knocking out gold? 

 

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8 hours ago, Reg Wilson said:

Most ground I have encountered will not tolerate Normal mode.

I use Normal mode often with the 4500 although with a low gain, sometimes as low as 1. The ground im more familiar with isn't as bad as some I've encountered but still has ironstone present. Although I've had this discussion with a few that disagree I've found that the Normal timings with a low gain will pick up gold missed with Enhance with a high gain. Probably the only reason I get away with doing this is that I use the sp01 on filter 3 (more compression of the audio response I guess) and turn my audio tone right down. Would I use these settings for everyday detecting? NO, but on a known gold patch what have you got to lose. In one spot no bigger than a room I dug over 20 hot rocks but also recovered 3 bits of gold that when checked in Enhance wouldn't register any kind of response.

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5 hours ago, Nevada Brian said:

Jin, it sounds like you have used conservative and hot settings on the GPZ with the same results.  I think it may be time to scrap off the top 6 inches or more and recheck to see if there are any nuggets at depth. 

Brian.

Hi Brian, I've done that in one section but found no more. I've raked it as well in other areas. It almost seems like the run of gold shedding off the reef is shallow. Only a few bits showed some wear most was prickly and sharp and hasn't traveled far. 

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43 minutes ago, Northeast said:

I was never a ‘scrubber’ with the Z but certainly ran it occasionally touching or just above the ground.

You mentioned that the GPX got lots of hot rocks and the Z got none.  In Normal mode I found the Z was a hot rock (and hot ground) magnet in my part of the world and in the GT.  The fact you got none makes me wonder what other setting on the Z is dulling it’s performance so much that it is knocking out hot rocks. And could that same setting be knocking out gold? 

 

Could be the case Northeast, although I still did get hot rocks with the zed just nowhere as many. In the future ill head back to this spot and see if it's just a case of user inexperience but I feel I gave the zed a good run using reasonably conservative timings/settings and then had to resort to trying to figure out some more extreme settings as I wasn't finding anything. Funny thing is I showed my mate who has a zed how to use the spo1 (filter 3) and normal timings and the bugger found 9 nuggets not far from my home. He said, yeah it's noisy but when you get over gold it really stands out amongst the chatter/noise of the machine. 

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