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Latest 12" X mission over, was staying out 2 nights but the frost sent me home to the warm bed, plus I lost my pick, walked couple of ks blew a couple of hours and could not find it. Yeah, yeah I know how can one lose a 3ft long pick, done it before will no doubt do it again. I am convinced there is a pick stealing triantiwontigong that exists on all gold fields I have visited. Lot of talk about settings and ground balancing methods lately, as we have often discussed before, these are individual settings and no one has the correct settings for anyone but themselves. Very simply my current, and I say current because I will go with what gets the gold whether settings or hardware. Settings are semi auto, general, no audio or ground smoothing, volume 7, threshold 24-27 depending on wind noise (WM12 no booster or h/phones) normal mostly but difficult when patch hunting usually, sensitivity between 8-20. Ground balance is.... no use of Quick track button, no ferrite simply let the Z do it`s thing, it is next to the SDC the easiest gold detector I`ve ever used. KISS (Keep It Simple Sir) occasionally as I`ve said years back I`ll go into manual but very rarely as it requires having to fool the Z into doing a Quick Track. ML if you listening give us firmware that has an option allowing us to avoid this forcing of QT. I am very sure I am not the Lone Ranger in this request. Crikey another photo posted, I am going soft no...……... I

Norvic, this advice might help you. When you go from Semi-Auto to Manual and back again direct from the Ground Balance menu of the GPZ it always suggest the need for Ferrite balancing by playing the Quick-Trak Guide on your screen, to avoid this you can do three things, Turn Guides off in the Guides Menu Use the BACK ARROW button twice to cancel the Guide Preprogram the USER button to Ground Balance Mode If you use the USER button to access the Ground Balance menu the Quick-Trak guide video is not played, there is never any need to use Quick-Trak when going from Manual to Semi-Auto mode, just pump the coil and keep walking. Hope this helps JP

Hello All, Out here in Arizona, USA, it's been very hot and now humid as the Monsoons are right around the corner. That being said, I have been poking around an old placer location loaded with iron rubbish in search for overlooked gold nuggets. I have made it a point to start very early, right at day break and hunt until the heat runs me out (typically 4-5 hours). I was using the Minelab GPZ 7000 and placering a wash bottom down to bedrock like the old-timers would. I'm lucky every so often to get a nugget here and there wedged in the bedrock cracks/crevices that the old-timers missed or overlooked. It's always a mystery to wonder what the old-timers really discovered in some of these really rich coarse gold placer areas. I'm not sure of the rules about Youtube videos, but I have attached two of them for your viewing. Hope some of you that are not able to get out right now can enjoy the adventure with me.

That certainly does help, you know I`d set the user button to manual yonks back but hadn`t got aroundtoit since update or reset buh…... Old fella syndrome, many thanks JP. PS. Did straight away, easy as, now why didn`t I go there before......don`t laugh we all get old fellas syndrome if we are fortunate to live long.

Posted part of this a while ago on another forum.... Have been following with interest a bloke here with an SDC and the new 14" x 9". I took him to a recently scraped patch where you can always rake up beer money. Using my standard SDC I located 6 targets for him, 5 turned out to be gold and 1 was a tiny chip off a loader bucket. With his SDC fitted with the Coiltek 14X9 we could not hear 4 of the gold targets. The 1 gold target we did hear, we only heard it because we knew it was there. The bucket chip was clearly heard. No way would the nugget we did hear have pulled us up had it not been located first. On this same spot I found 12 more small pieces that day while he found none. The bigger coil certainly loses the sensitivity of the standard coil and he's pretty confident he's not getting bigger bits at depth either that he's getting with his 5000. This probably doesn't mean much and was in no way a definitive test. It's just what we found on the day and no doubt others experiences will differ.

I’m now stocking Doohickies if anyone is interested.???

Norvic, I didn't think you got 'weather' up there! I was told that everyone had left Victoria (including NE's parents) for warmer parts north in trailers by the drove and would be gone for months. (Those are the real claim jumpers.) My second great surprise is that some Aussies would honor a poem with the long name of Triantiwontigongolope (not Triantiwongigongolope or Triantiwontigong) when it is impossible for most of the country to spell a contraction (they are -- they're) and instead just say and write there. Your Kiwi cousins do much the same. (Your on your way now!) haha ? I think I found your pick but just like the Triantiwontigongolope I resemble you may never see me return it to you. Finally, I must admonish you guys about waking a sleeping Triantiwontigongolope as you don't know what you will get. Mitchel

Do you have a current picture of The Triantiwontigong? There may be some comparisons ? Nice gold Norvic. A small coil on a Z looks so out of place but also very enticing. Sorry Mitchel, just pulling your chain ?

Ha ha not sure how you can lose it when you need it to get up from the ground these days.

In my "back yard gold field", although I live in the tropics, am inland some 100miles at an altitude of 1800ft or 513metres, todays temp here at The Knob got down to 4.3 C to a max of 24.4 C, much colder down on creek & river flats. MN another unthought of feature of the tropics is we get viscous hail storms that sometimes leave inches of hail on the ground in our summer on hot days when the temps over 45C that`s what around 110F.

I just had an idea. You know those gps trackers (see pic below), like "Tile pro" and so on? What if you taped it onto the handle of your pick somewhere? Then if you "misplaced" it, you just track back to it. (I think it has a smartphone app that it works with.) Just a thought.

Hi all, just wanna show u this find ,was in a breccia pipe, its not gold but its beautiful too ,cuprite crystal with native copper thanks to the gold monster, regards ?

I have a small copper point and a spear point, native copper nuggets can be found in Ak and they were worked into tools, interesting finds but can only be found in a couple of areas...

Is that the spiral or bundle 12" Norvic? How do you like that coil now that you've had a run of different sizes for a while? I'm hoping it can turn into my daily use coil if it's roughly as sensitive to the sub-2 gram stuff as the Z14. Tangentially, last winter I realized I had lost my WM12, went back and walked 6 miles of ATV tracks on my GPS and was able to find it buried in a tire track with only a bit of the rear clip showing above ground, so glad I had GPS tracks recording or it'd be lost forever... X Coil 2021 News

Solved! (I think). After some playing around with Equinox I think I figured this one out. If you noise cancel, you will see the "progress" bar graph make its way around the VDI/Disc Pattern circle as it tests all channels. If you attempt to move on to a new setting or go back to detect mode while the bar graph is present, then you will have to hit the button again. However, if you wait a second or two for the bar graph to disappear, then only one button press is needed to switch back to detect mode or move on to the next setting menu item (ground balance). I tested this out and I can make it do either repeatedly depending on whether or not I wait for the bar graph to disappear. It is a little quirky behavior, but if you know what is going on, it is really a non-issue. Bottom line, give it a second or two after completion of the noise cancel before you press any buttons and you won't have to press that button twice. Problem solved. Let me know if you are seeing the same thing I am. Would like to put this to bed for Deep1 so he can get some detecting in with his Equinox and be spending less time with ML repair and the post office.

The Equinox is a great machine for the water/wet sand and many people have found lots of gold with it. If you have a lot of black sand or you just want to dig deeper get the TDI BH. If the TDI is not deep enough for you then you can do the battery mod. You can also wait for the Fisher Impulse if you have that kind of time since who knows when that will be available. Good luck

As promised, I got out this morning to do a review on a new Russian Xcoil that I received. But let me state firstly that I am not a dealer, I paid for this coil myself and have no self interests other than reporting what I find as I see it. So here it goes: I headed off to the gold fields of Arizona at about10:15pm last night. It was 105F outside but it was dropping. So it looked like this was going to be a fairly comfortable night for detecting. The goal of this trip was: 1) compare the Russian 10" Xcoil to the 14x13" ML coil in respects to finding gold 2) check ferrite balance 3) check knock sensitivity 4) review overall design The first patch I tested was one in which I had only found small gold (nothing over .3g). In total, I am lucky if this patch gave up 15 grams, but it was very fun. And I gridded this area to the best of my ability. Rough dimensions are 50'x50'. It is unlike any of my other gold area I have been to. There is no quartz on the ground, but seems to be a basalt looking grey covering up a red gossan type material (which the gold is in) There are areas on this hill where you cannot swing a detector it is so hot. And hot rocks are the norm, here. Once on location, I began with the standard coil, dropped the ferrite ring and ground balanced. I also followed up with noise cancelling, etc. Then I proceeded to recheck an area which had a dense concentration of nuggets, previously. I found nothing but I succeeded in warming the machine up. No knock sensitivity, threshold was a little ratty with the EMI, but nothing out of the ordinary. I ran the most conservative settings I know. There are much better settings, but I wanted to know how the coils would operate without optimization. Settings are below: High Yield/Normal/Sens=4,Vol=8,Thresh=25, tone=53, Vol Limit=7, Ground Balance Mode=Semi Auto, Audio Smoothing= off, Ground smoothing= off Next, I switched to the 10" coil. Used the ferrite and checked knock sensitivity. all was good. It also, had the same level of noise as before. so I began hunting. after 15 minutes or so I had a target and it was a small nugget. and then another. At this point I just wandered through the area I had gridded and found a couple more. Total to this point was four small nuggets. I didn't want to spend all of my time here so I headed back to the truck. On the way I checked a wash that I thought I checked previously. Apparently not good enough. I found two larger nuggets, now I am up to 6 nuggets for the trip. But back to the truck I went to check patch #2. Now this is where it gets interesting. It is about 5 minute drive to my new area. The gold from this area *did* come from quartz stringers and the local metamorphic rocks. The largest piece found was 5 grams and I believe I found a little over an ounce in total. Most of it from two washes but some from the adjacent hillside. Anyways, after parking I started my slow walk to the patch with the 10" coil. After getting my wits scared out of my by what I think was a bobcat, I continued to the area. I immediately noticed a problem. The coil was very noisy. I tried everything I could and tried to rebalance to the ferrite. But it would not work. So then I walked back to the truck and got the std coil. This coil ran smoothly. So it wasn't my imagination. Then I switched back again to the 10" coil without rebalancing to the ferrite. No problem. It was smooth. As soon as rebalanced to the ferrite ring, it was out of wack again. So this was frustrating. I never did check knock sensitivity as the ground noise was already an issue. By this time it was 4am and I decided to call it a night. So it seems that while the coils work well in some areas, there are the areas (as JP mentioned previously) that will give some issues. The only way to trick it is to use your std coil and lock in the X-balance and then switch coils without rebalancing to the ferrite ring. Another note I would make about this new coil is that the coil wire itself is thicker and does not like to go into the shaft. After multiple changings, I found that with a little mid shaft rotation, it helped with this immensely. The standard coil wire drops right in. That is really all I have on this, for now. I am not sure if this helps or just muddies up the water.

Found this barber and a soap jar early 1900's from nearby hunting trails that aren't marked on maps. Lots of land to poke through but these were pretty much on the trails. The jar's info I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodbury_Soap_Company

No black paint. Cheers, Rick

That`s pretty impressive on the test bed. One of those targets, and I cannot remember which one, is very tough to hear with the 7000, but the 32" hears them all no worries. I reckon this could be a killer coil in the wide open spaces of WA. Not a lot of ground around my way would you be able to use it.

I’ve stopped stocking them, first of all the orders would mostly get misplaced in transit and then the ones that did arrive would vanish off the shelves before I could provide them with owners reflective tape or otherwise?. I’m pretty certain they’ve been getting inside help from missing pens, hair combs and odd socks!!!?

Your quiet write Mitchel. There currently in Clermont accordion to the latest police reports. JP had best be on the look out, he might loose some stock out of the shop. Triantiwontigongolope - Us Victorians have no hope with big words. Drop Bear is much easyyer ?

I guess if somebody put a gun to my head to buy one tomorrow, I would probably get the TDI Beachhunter. Not that it is the “best”, whatever that means. It is a floater that needs to be weighted just to work correctly underwater. But I complained and lobbied for a decade trying to get White’s to make a waterproof TDI so I guess it would be fair to give one a go.

Me too! Or at least waterproof my GPX ?

I would like to get another PI myself one of these days but really can’t get too excited about any of the current offerings. It’s like VLF has finally made it to the 21st century but waterproof PI is still all so last century. I wish that new Fisher would hit the market.

Hi Rick In most detector coils there is a conductive coat of black paint that forms a Faraday shield between the coil and the ground to reduce electric capacitance effects. Is there some kind of shield that is not shown in this photo? I don’t see a shield in the Minelab photo either. Perhaps it is not needed in the GPZ 7000 Zero Voltage Transmission (ZVT) design? Thank you for this interesting photo and have a good day, Chet

If a cheap detector is working then make the Equinox into one. That a single frequency machine is ok is the big clue. Multi can just be too powerful for some situations - that is why you have the single frequency options. So I am with Chase on this one. Go to the single frequency settings and back down on the sensitivity as far as needed to make the machine stable. The setting does go down to 1 for a reason. Start there and work your way up. If you can make a Bounty Hunter work then you can make an Equinox work at least as well. This is just where I would start off the top of my head. Do a full machine reset. Use Park 1, and then start with 5 kHz single frequency mode. Since EMI is a probable issue for the last poster, start with the coil in the air and sensitivity 1. Raise the sensitivity until you get chatter... this is EMI and so sets your upper limit no matter what. If you want try 10 kHz, 15 kHz, etc. using the same process to identify which frequency or frequencies are being most affected by EMI. After learning that pick one that seems best. I would lean lower frequency but that is where EMI tends to be worst, so may need to be 15 kHz or whatever to avoid EMI. Now go detecting by tuning up on a clean patch of ground. Start with sensitivity very low and leave all other Park 1 settings alone lest you mess it up more. Simply use the highest sensitivity setting that allows for stable operation. If that is a setting of 5 so be it. Once you get the machine stable now you can compare it with the Bounty Hunter to see if you are ahead or not. The fact is that in really horrible conditions a cheap lower power detector may work as well as anything because you may not be able to run at higher power settings anyway. Almost all VLF problems boil down to too much power being applied and operator resistance to accepting the need to prioritize stability over power. Once you hit the wall with a VLF a PI is the only other real option, but that also presents issues. Some places are basically undetectable. That’s just reality. Good Luck!

Interesting to say for sure. The round looking coil in the center may be for support but in a way it looks like a dual field coil .. Just what is the weight of it ? Not that I’m going to run out and buy one ? I’m having enough trouble just swinging a 6” one at the other end of my Sport. Chuck

I guess I will pull back on my Kiwi likes to give someone else a chance. By the way who the guy at the top, he must have a tie with the owner.

I believe some of the pre-Columbian civilizations in Central- and South America did know how to alloy gold with copper and other metals, which I suppose could result in something hard enough to be made into a poor arrowhead. But I don't think any of the North American Indians had that technology. Also, electrum (a gold/silver alloy) occurs naturally, but while harder than gold is probably still far too soft to give flint any competition when it comes to sharp pointy things.

If it extended the waterproof depth to say 10m I could see it being useful. Otherwise I just expect the nox to do what it says it will or minelab to make good on it, which it sounds like they are pretty good about.

Hey Coota, nice work!! I had to laugh a little bit because they looked like turds at a glance. But man, those are going to be gorgeous with a little scrubbing. Gorgeous gold turds. I'll dig turds like that all day and night. I digress.... Sweet work all around!

Nice gold, Norvic! I lost two picks before I learned to really keep tabs on it. I even put yellow reflective tape on it every other 2 inches so that I can measure depth more accurately. It can still be tough to find in the day time … but at night, o man …. it reflects the light like the eyes of a mountain lion. You'll always find it. Hmmm.... now that you mention it, I should put some on my WM12. I've almost lost it a few times.

Really enjoyed the video...thanks for posting!

Hit a park that used to be an estate then run by Nuns for many years then turned over to the town as a park. There is approx. 10 acres or so and most of it over grown so I figured I would hit some of the area that has been flattened down by the winter before it grows back in. Surprisingly there is tons of stuff there and doesn't seem to have been detected on. In just a few passes in a small area I found a really old remnants of a button with no marks, handful of pocket change, 18k gold earing .037oz and this old dime in pretty descent shape. New stuff dropped is probably from people sledding down the hill side.

If you only dig 12 and up you will be missing 90% of the gold. Most of the gold is small and falls below 12. Also gold chains fall in the 1-2 and earrings around 2-3. Rusted bottle caps are easy to recognize in the dry sand by switching your swing 90 degrees or bobbing your coil over them. There’s one other method I’ve heard about but have never tried it. HH

Hey Rob you may want ask your youtube uploading question here also, if you already didn't get it figured out..

Hey Guys, Thanks for all the comments. The camera I'm using is a camera/video recorder. I believe it's a Sony, but now I have to double check. I have been uploading the videos in HD, but it takes 6-7 hours to upload a video that size to YouTube ..... Beatup - Thanks! Alaskaseeker - Thanks! Mn90403 - So for the audio, I lay the WM12 wireless remote under my camera and stand. I place the GPZ 7000 off to the side, as if it's too close to the camera or pick it will scream. I don't place it in manual, just move the detector to the side. I have been using Semi-Auto in the morning to initially ground balance over the Ferrite ring. Hard Prospector - Ya, I need to probably bring in a vac-pac and drywasher and see what type of smaller gold is hidden in the cracks. I have been talking about doing this for years, still haven't done it. Jasong - I have been pretty good, or lucky about not hitting a nugget in a crack in a long time. If I think it's a decent nugget, I won't take chances. However, on the smaller gram and smaller gold, I just hammer away with the pick, but around where the target is so I can undermine and pop it out. The Hermit pick is sharp, so it would easily damage a gold nugget. Swegin - Thanks! Andy - I got the itch to get back out there. That being said, it's getting hot and humid, so I might back it down a bit. Steve - Thanks. I wasn't sure on the video stuff and don't want to make it look like I'm spamming. I will post some more soon, thanks for the encouragement. Hope all is well.

No real rules on this forum Rob except “be nice”. YouTube and links to any relevant information including other forums are encouraged. Great to have you posting here again, and hope to see more in the future! ?

Yeh that’s cause the kiwis have about 3000 more posts then the Aussies, we spend most of our time digging gold , not typing ?.

The Klutina River that flows thru Copper Center has a bit of 1898er stuff in it. Those tough old Prospectors built boats at Klutina Lake sites and floated the river. Many did not make it as this river starts out pretty placid then turns into a monster...I have some campsites to hunt near the main river that is very close to my home...There is a small cemetery there also that I tried to maintain but it is slowly returning to its natural state..These hardy souls had dreams and purposes, many ended at that peaceful serene place very near the river... RIP 98ers...

Awesome finds, keep em coming. Great to see/read something positive, which is what it's all about. So X marks the spot

Steve..... of course im the one who does lol. I found in the wet sand the new version tended to change the TIDs more often. The older version seems to pick up less bottle caps.... in the water especially. The changes made didnt really affect what i was looking for ..... gold. I did test both on a couple hundred pieces of gold......i didnt find a difference in depth when air testing. It doesnt seem to be a good on coins on edge..... but is fair with rings on edge depending on which angle. I still loose to many targets in the hole...... but both programs seemed to do that. I never tested this with the NEW program..... but the old at say 25 on a quarter ....or can... seems to make sizing difficult. Im sure a good bit of it could be .... what you started out on and learned more than real differences..... AND of course im NOT dirt hunting which is a whole different ball game.

X still producing on the little run. Didn’t want to take the 17x12 off the Zed and use the 19. Coiltek 18” pinged a fair percentage of these, punches deep.

Brilliant Coota! So looking forward to butchering my 14"s lead and joining the ranks of the Xmen. Just have to think up a new super hero name

Ok thanks for the response. Yeah here in the us for the GPX, manual was the go to for sharp, sensitive extra, and normal too. I never met an experienced guy in the field who didn't run that way (the trainers I met in the field all said that's what they taught too), the idea being passed on forums at the time was that you could balance out a piece of gold in auto with the GPX in theory (something I tried many times and never succeeded at) and that manual balance got greater depth - something I was actually able to replicate to some degree on my own. Ok, previously I asked for a definition of X to understand the ferrite/ground balance thing better. Now I think I need to understand what G is better. I'm guessing G incorporates salt? What else is there other than saturable and salt signals that the ground balance works on? I'm trying to figure it out because it's the red line in the Minelab ground balance graphs, which seems to be the big difference between running in manual and semi or auto. I definitely do run too fast. But I do know how to slow down when I need to. But I also need to be able to go fast. I've never had people to show me patches, I have to find them all my own, and that means covering a ton of ground in the short amount of time I have away from work. It's absolutely essentially to my success. When I find a patch I slow down. I'm just trying to get a grasp on all this so when I go test these coils out I'm not messing something up by not being current on whatever the ground balance/ferrite procedure is now.

All commentary on the sayings and doings of other people is to be completely avoided. What other people said, did not say, did do, or did not do is wearing extremely thin with me. Expect all such comments to be deleted / erased from posts. There will be no more warnings about this, just expect it will happen.

I think that the retailers need to change some of their advertising for available stock concerning the “lifetime warranty” since it’s non existent. I’ve noticed on eBay, used Tesoros are selling fairly well. People are bidding on them. I just picked up a Mojave which I’m pretty happy about.

99.9% of detectors with a small coil and operator with good hearing can do that. I tested out a Tesoro Compadre for a year in downtown Sacramento, CA small parks and pulled jewelry out left and right and more than a few silver here and there, especially near the meters and irrigation components. Crocker Park parking meter base got a silver @ 2-3 inches and by the time I was done the hole was 25" deep, 15 silver coins and another handful of clad.