Steve Herschbach

A closer look at the MX Sport standard 10" DD coil internal wiring and epoxy filling. This is what the bottom of the coil will look like without a scuff cover/skip plate.

My V3i just sold so I am in line for an MX Sport as soon as I can lay my hands on one.

It is a good thing somebody finally used that 17" coil. Continued good luck and thank you Rob!

Coil Interchangeability On The White's MX Sport

There are currently around 20 accessory coils that work with the White's DFX, M6, MX5, SST, V3i, MXT, and MXT Pro. It it nice not only having so many coils available but ones that work on quite a few models. A lot of people already have money invested in these coils. It sure would be nice if they worked with the MX Sport - but will they?

There is the obvious issue of the MX Sport using a waterproof connector, and a simple adapter would seem to be the solution. It unfortunately may be more complicated than that. The existing coils all have a 5 pin connector. The MX Sport has an 8 pin connector, and all eight pins appear to be in use.

Here is the inside of the MX Sport and a close up of the coil connection wires, eight in all.

Here are the three MX Sport coils available at this time, including the stock 12" round DD on left, optional 9.5" round concentric in middle, and 10" x 5.5" DD on right.

What are the three extra wires for? My guess is White's is employing smart coil technology to identify different coils to the detector. Cynics will think this is to control the manufacture of coils. Regardless of any motivations there allowing the machine to know what coil is on it allows for adjustments to be made in parameters like the depth reading. This is normally calibrated on a detector to a US dime using the stock coil, but the minute you change coils the calibration goes out the door. With smart coils you can adjust for each coil. There can be differences in concentric versus DD performance that can be accounted for, so this is a good thing from a performance perspective.

If the idea is to control who can make accessory coils then the three wires can sense some sort of id chip code also. The problem if that is the case then existing coils are not likely to work, even if an adapter from the 8 pin waterproof connector to the 5 pin dry land connector can be fabricated, unless that adapter also defeated the id check. Or if controlling who makes coils is not an issue, then perhaps the extra wires can just be ignored and the coils will work, albeit without the extra smart coil functionality.

Lot of speculation based on three wires! Personally I think White's would be hurting sales by not allowing faithful White's owners to leverage existing coil collections somehow so I am still hoping for an adapter. Otherwise at this time there is only the existing stock 10" round DD coil plus two accessory coils available for the MX Sport, the 10" x 5.5" elliptical DD (be a nice nugget coil) and the 9.5" round concentric (be a good low mineral beach coil).

Probably European, possibly Italian, and I do not guess that old. Lots of online resources; here is one http://www.hallmarkresearch.com/

Congratulations, always a thrill!

It is possible that what you do never rises above the level of casual use Tom and so none of this may apply to you. However, knowing and operating under the mining laws can afford you many benefits. If you wish to educate yourself on those laws, you can start at http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/info/regulations.html

Not much to get excited about there I am afraid, though gold can be found at those locations. I will try and offer details tomorrow.

What creeks are the claims on?

Oh well, last try. If the nuggets refuse to go lo-hi then by definition they are of a size/shape/purity that puts them on the other side of the ground balance/setting equation. Mixing gold and silver dramatically drops conductivity putting the nugget farther from the balance point than the size would suggest. Most Alaska gold I have dealt with will not go low tone until we are talking an ounce or more in weight and multi ounce specimens will still go high tone. But as Robby has noted I have seen all sorts of weird shifts with GPX units depending on the timing selected.

Unless you are frequenting areas where there is a lot of large gold (multi-ounce) the vast majority of gold will give a hi-lo tone. In spots I have hunted in Nevada where grammers are the bread and butter it all goes hi-lo and that is that.

I am not speaking for the Aussies or their gold or ground, just what I have experienced in the U.S. Forcing a ground balance on magnetite may not replicate the situation they face with maghemite.

Thanks Robby, I have always enjoyed your knowledgeable posts. I wish it was just novices; I am quite sure I have missed a big nugget passing on a low tone somewhere along the way. The problem for me is most of my digging career was in Alaska in dragline, bulldozer, and bucket line dredge tailing piles. The amount of large junk at depth is unbelievable to people who have never experienced it. Imagine 55 gallon fuel drums buried 6 feet deep and you start getting the picture. I have seen people invest half a day in digging one target, only to find a can. It wears a person down at some point with a PI and all but forces a certain amount of picking and choosing your best bets.

I am extremely appreciative of wide open desert country and the type of ground I encounter there by comparison!

Good point JP about heat and in many places a build up of thunderheads, and therefore EMI issues. Boring dry 60F weather suits me just fine.

Wet ground can go either way. In alkaline (salty) ground it is really going to give your GPZ problems.

Cold ground all I know for sure is the hand gripping my detector also gets cold and batteries don't last as long!

Yeah, I saw that one and got briefly excited until I read the reviews, which almost universally give a thumbs down. Too bad, looks really slick with the digital phone/tablet interface.

There has been no CTX recall. Have you had problems with yours?

The sand seal is interesting

With my pessimistic hat on is this an "update" that by chance fixes some of the water sealing issues?

You asked about the tones Jason so I told you what I think they are about. I personally think the GPZ can be made to discriminate but that the tone observations have nothing to do with that possibility. For the record, I am the one that is suggesting that knowledge of the tones can be applied to discriminate targets but in a manner totally different than what I eventually expect from the GPZ. For me it is two separate subjects.

Hello Alex, and welcome to the forum. Ray is a great guy and might just accommodate you, but the fact is he has been absent from all the forums pretty much the last couple months at least. So he may not see your post for some time if at all. Best bet is to PM him or email him via his website at http://www.trinityau.com

The advice about joining a club is very good advice!

Ah Robby, you are the man!

Now, as I understand it with the SD 2100 we have two ground balance "channels". Flip a switch and ground balance channel one. Then flip a switch and ground balance channel two. Then switch to both.

With the TDI we have one channel, and a nugget that falls exactly where the ground balance is set is tuned out also.

With the SD there is the second channel that is offset so the ground balance point is in a different location than in the other channel. The detector looks at both channels, and reports the channel that has the best target response. A nugget missed in channel one gets reported by channel two, or vice versa. Thus Multi Period Sensing (MPS). Later Minelabs hide all this and make it more automatic but it is still there on all MPS based models.

The ground balance point and therefore the tones should shift slightly depending on the channel doing the reporting. You can purposefully run in one channel or the other and can purposefully misadjust the ground balance setting. With the TDI you can create three classes of targets. Those that are always low tone, those that are always high tone, and those that flip back and forth depending where you set the ground balance. It does form the basis of a discrimination system no matter how crude. I always thought it would be neat to have a detector test somehow via MPS make that comparison automatically and report the three target classes via three tones instead of two.

I have sort of wanted to get a SD2100 to play around with this kind of stuff but at the end of the day it takes time I can use to just go find gold.

Here is one. OSHA recogizes self employed people (sole proprietors) as being separate from being an employee, so if you work alone you can ignore many rules an employer need worry about with employees.

MSHA has nothing that separates the self employed person from the employee. The way they see it, you are your own employee. That means MSHA can cite you for not having a board up that posts safety notices to yourself. You also have to have a duly designated office onsite to contain your required MSHA documents. This can be a box with a sign on it designating it the official office. Lacking the office can get you cited. Lacking the documents can get you cited.

MSHA claims jurisdiction over suction dredges and a guy running a gold pan on a mining claim. There is no action on a mining claim that has sold product that is excluded from MSHA jurisdiction. They are the 10,000,000 lb elephant in the room and will put a serious hurt on the more casual small miners if they ever get the funding to extend their reach as far as they believe they are authorized. They took a tiny taste of what it might take to get involved in suction dredging in Alaska a few years back and the ONLY reason they backed off was lack of manpower/funding to do so.

If you own a claim, and you mine and sell some gold from that claim (engage in commerce), you are a mine as defined by MSHA and fall under their jurisdiction. They can bury a sole proprietor in rules, regulations, and ferocious fines as they are now more driven to cite and collect than help these days.

You guys that have done little group bulldozer pushes on mining claims? Any gold get sold? Did you all have MSHA training and appropriate safety classes, equipment on hand, documentation, etc.? Yeah, I thought not.

True story, but no, I am not going to spend my time posting relevant documentation. The bottom line is there needs to be a sole proprietorship exemption similar to what exists with OSHA.

I like something this video shows very well. The detector sinks - it is slightly negative. White's water machines have had issues with buoyant coils and they got that right on the MX Sport.

It is an accidental artifact of the ground balance system in combination with the other settings and where the gold in question falls in relation to those settings. The ground balance only has a certain amount of range and will only tip a small number of nuggets back and forth as they must be right in the zone where that tipping occurs. Most nuggets will read one way or the other, and that is that. The reference I posted above about TDI relic settings is enlightening regarding this. Reg posted a great chart that tries to graphically show this for the TDI at Link deleted since Findmall Forum update broke all old links The TDI uses a simplistic subtractive methodology for ground balancing plus has a manual ground balance and so makes an easy case study. Minelab units are employing more sophisticated methods so the resulting tones are more complicated but allowing for that mirror what I have experienced with the TDI, Infinium, and ATX plus SD, GP, and GPX detectors.

The fun part is no matter what you do, any particular ground rejection method causes gold that reads just like that ground or hot rock to be lost (or masked). The GPZ is succeeding to some extent simply by being different and therefore exposing gold masked with other ground balance methods. You ever wonder why certain hot rocks can't be tuned out? They can be, but to do so would also eliminate an unacceptably wide range of possible nugget sizes.

Oh boy. I am not interested in this turning into politics. That means no asides or snide remarks regarding liberals or conservatives, republicans or democrats any particular politician or politicians. To quote my good buddy Joe Friday...

With that as a ground rule I doubt you will get much response here Jason, though I may be surprised. Most of what you get on subjects like this is very long on opinions and very short on facts. Those that have facts rarely want to post them on a public forum - maybe you will get some PMs on the subject. If you are dying for an earful I can however point you in the direction of some other forums where that sort of stuff is more meat and potatoes.

A GPZ can't tune out many basalt and andesite rocks either. The main advantage with Gold Racer as opposed to GMT is many hot rocks will target id in specific ranges which can help

Dig it all is always the answer. Except when it is not. Late in the day, tired, lots of trash around, I may just start cherry picking. I am one that says dig it all but who often cherry picks. Reality in the form of overwhelming trash can change my mind pretty quick. It's either that or break out the VLF.

I hate to say it but I have enough pinpointers. I'm fine with my Garrett Carrot.

Lighter could just mean it is not epoxy filled and therefore not intended for underwater use.