Chase Goldman

I don't think even the Dubai guys who are spilling their guts are selling any before the "go" sign from ML in February so you might be better off just waiting for the the local dealers.

Absolutely agree. This is not backward compatible with the SD/GP/GPX coils and other accessories so giving it the GPX prefix I think is going to confuse people down the line. Especially if they try to buy additional "GPX Compatible" coils off third parties.

It could be that the 6000 automatically senses when a DD coil is attached. I agree it could be auto detect but wondering how you switch between the two Double D Modes: EMI cancel (default) vs. Conductive Ground Cancel. Also, on the the legacy GPX's, noise cancel mode on a DD resulted in sensitivity loss and off center pinpointing, so it's curious that is the default DD mode.

Still a mystery to how you get to the "DD" modes and how to switch between them. Wonder if a new icon pops up when you hook up the as yet unseen GPX 6000 DD coils.

Vanquish with its fixed GB is not the best tool for mineralized ground as appears to be the case for your area. Equinox or a dedicated gold machine would do better there as you can balance out the ground noise. Equinox also has iron bias control that might help with the high vdi falsing you experienced. The first symbol you asked about is foil the second is an aluminum twist screw cap (as opposed to a steel crown cap). HTH

I would say yes. The beach modes on the Nox are probably the least sensitive modes as far as small gold is concerned.

No worries, just wasn't clued in to what you were suggesting, and there was no evidence the coils shown in the previews were anything other than what the description said they were - mono coils. But I see what you were driving at with the guitar pickup analogy. Bottom line is a true mono coil is a mono coil, but a DD can be "rewired" through electronic switches to behave like a mono, hard to do it the other way when you only have a single/mono coil winding. The big secret that has yet to be revealed is just what GeoSense-PI is and how does it relate to the coil/ground graphic on the display.

You might want wait for the imminent release of the new Minelab GPX 6000 which appears capable yet easy to set up especially compared to the GPZ 7000. Others to consider are the Minelab Gold Monster and Equinox 800 and the Minelab SDC 2300. Steve has provided reviews of all these detectors right on this website. They all have pros and cons.

You lost me. As egixe4 said, not quite sure what you are referring to. The included coils are clearly mono and it appears that DD coils are supported also by the 6000, but not for iron rejection, solely for noise cancellation. The connector redesign could be explained simply by the fact that 1) they wanted to use a watertight connector housing and 2) the legacy GPX coils are wound in a manner that sub-optimizes 6000 performance so they are using a connector "interlock" to prevent their use.

Unfortunately, Vanquish has a fixed GB. One of the main reasons I parted with it. Made it impossible to use with no disc if there was anything other than neutral soil conditions and I presume it would have trouble in variable salt such as in ocean surf. Your recommendations to dial down sensitivity and dial in some disc while working parallel to the shore is good advice for the OP.

Welcome to the forum. Interested in what attracted you already to the GPZ 7000 as your first ever gold detector. That is quite an investment for a first detector. There are a number of very capable gold detectors that can be purchased for much less, risking less of an investment until you have gained enough experience on the whole gold prospecting scene and what it entails and are certain it is something that will interest you for the long haul.

Great saves! Welcome back to the hobby and wishing you well on your continued recovery. Digging is great therapy both emotionally and physically.

Wishing for a speedy recovery for Joe. As you can see, water hunting at any level from diving on wrecks to swinging ankle deep in the surf and everything in between has an element of risk, regardless of your experience and Joe is one of the most experienced water detectorists I know and he doesn't appear to be someone who is cavalier about safety. Once Joe has recovered and able, I hope he shares the experience online so that we can learn about the circumstances and lessons here. These things can sneak up on you, and the unexpected can happen quickly, and you can be in trouble before you recognize you are in trouble. I read a story of a fatality in the same region just the day after Joe's incident regarding a boater who was ultimately found by the same rescue crew involved in Joe's incident. Be careful out there folks. Very thankful that Joe will be able to ultimately tell the tale, himself.

Depending on condition anywhere from $250 to as high as $500 for the mint DFX/300 seems like the going price. They are relatively rare to find now (compared to say older First Texas machines) and with White's demise (despite being sold to Garrett), Whites die hards seem to be snapping them up as backups or for parts etc. So you should have success getting whatever you ask in that range. Here are some more recent threads on the subject, including Steve H. and Jeff M. discussing recent used DFX purchases. HTH

Whose list, pray tell?

I just noticed that they Trademarked the coil names "GPX 11" and "GPX 17". I get it that "Commander" and "GPX" and "GPX 6000" are separately trademarked, but GPX 11???. Why??? Do they really think it's that catchy? I guess it differentiates them from there Commander cousins (except that there is no equivalent Commander form factor for the GPX 17" elliptical). From Steve's box image capture:

Even though your question appears as a “general” coil question, since this is a GPX thread, I will answer your question in the context of a GPX PI detector. We are talking primarily the GPX 4500/4800/5000 models. We haven't seen iron rejection advertised as a feature on the GPX 6000 and although it appears the GPX 6000 can utilize DD coils based on the menu settings, we haven't yet seen any DD coils announced or pictured that are compatible with the GPX 6000. PI detectors typically use a single Monoloop winding that acts as both the transmit and receive coil. Pulsed Induction as the name implies, uses pulses instead of a continuous wave like the more common VLF induction balance (IB) detectors to transmit the magnetic field into the ground. A brief pulse is transmitted and then the delayed receive signal is analyzed before a new pulse is transmitted into the ground. The process is so fast that the rapidly repeated pulse/receive cycles appear to be continuous to the user. DD coils on a PI enable the use of separate transmit (left “D”) and receive (right “D”) coils to be used analogous to the IB detectors. The DD enables use of the iron rejection feature on the GPX 4500/4800/5000 model detectors released before the GPX 6000 (GPX iron rejection cannot be used with monoloop coils). But because of the pulsed nature of the transmit signal, the coil can also be re-wired on the fly (on GPX detectors) using a switch to make the DD emulate a Mono coil by making use of both “D’s” to comprise a “bigger” receive coil that can enhance sensitivity (at the expense of iron rejection accuracy) or wire the two “D’s” in opposite polarity to enable EMI noise cancellation (also at the expense of iron rejection accuracy and overall target sensitivity). So in effect I have heard of using two receive coils (as described above) but not two transmit coils. I don’t think there would be any advantage to doing it that I could see. Using two transmit coils would seem to be inefficient from a power usage standpoint due to the resistive power losses in the copper and the whole point of the transmit pulse is to pump as much power as possible into the ground to maximize penetration depth, while the objective of the receive coil is to maximize sensitivity and that is actually enhanced by more copper.

Per Steve’s GPX 6000 info page, the controls and settings support a menu option for: Double-D Modes - EMI Cancel (Default) / Conductive Ground Cancel So I suspect ML will offer DD coils as well, perhaps having different form factors from the Mono coils offered in this particular bundle.

I’m rarely messing with settings even on a GPX 4800/5000. You set it up for the desired target and soil type and go, only adjusting the operating channel as necessary to avoid interference that you may subsequently encounter. Flip a toggle for a new timing if necessary.

Don’t know anyone who actually has one but we discussed it at length in this thread.

With the Mono coils provided as standard equipment and no mention of iron reject, I suspect iron reject is not an included feature and possibly also not compatible with legacy GPX coils (ML or 3rd party). If that is the case, it won’t be very popular with the relic hunter crowd other than the fact that it does appear to be lighter, weatherproof, and no cables flopping about. If it had/has iron reject and legacy GPX DD coil compatibility - no brainer for me, there would be a used GPX 4800 up on the classifieds board tomorrow. But without it, would have to wait for a highly discounted, lightly used “oops why did I buy this?” unit. But Simon, it has a built-in loudspeaker!

EL NINO who posted just before you did thinks there is still room for improvement in the scenario you mentioned by using a higher top -end frequency. I guess we'll see. Unfortunately, it looks like we won't see anything from Minelab along these lines until 2022.

You've mentioned this several times, Chuck. Mostly, this has been addressed primarily by improved responsiveness also know as recovery speed, taking advantage of improvements in processing power. The Equinox does a pretty good job also with target "spills" (multiple targets "in the hole") by alerting to multiple target IDs and using coil control to "zero in" on the desirable target. Signal processing advances and disc/target ID improvements a la FBS2 might be able to help here - so there might be some ability to wring more out of IB tech through improved filters (a la iron bias), audio, and possibly graphics. But what about targets that are masked vertically? Then there is not much one can do about that. You can't necessarily see through an iron "wall" by improved signal processing. In that case, you have basically reached the limit of the induction balance principle and have to use something else. OTOH - if you can detect the masking target in the first place, your best bet is to just recover it and clear it out of the way. In this case the detector did at least reveal the presence offending target in the first place. Nevertheless, I personally am amazed at what the manufacturers have wrung out of the frankly "crude" induction balance principle to bring it to today's level of sophistication for treasure hunting. Besides masking, if there are ways to improve IB ultimate Target ID depth in mineralized soils, that would also be a good thing.

The DP thread that points to that discussion in the Dankowski forum is here. Don't know if Minelab is really interested in that "new technology", but it was actually Tom Dankowski's reach for the moon idea. It's nice to dream but not something that is likely to be able to be accomplished using the induction balance principle alone. Lunk explains one method for doing it here. We've really just about hit the top of the curve of what you can do with induction balance (more commonly called VLF detectors as differentiated from the Pulse Induction principle). Perhaps you can continue to tweak signal processing and bring in some of the target ID and discrimination sophistication of the FBS2 detectors. But once everyone starts releasing their own flavor of simultaneous multifrequency (first Garrett, next Nokta (?)) then there really isn't that much more that can accomplished with the technology short of bringing in some sort of hybrid technology device that incorporates induction balance and say...ground penetrating radar. In other words, something that can sense target density would really not look anything like an Equinox or any other VLF detector because the technology required would be radically different.

Apples and oranges - Bluetooth 5 has higher data transmission rates which just means it crams more audio information in the data stream resulting in better audio fidelity (not really something that makes a huge difference on the relatively narrow bandwidth associated with detector audio versus listening to high fidelity music) but that does not have anything to do with latency (other than the processing time associated with the higher data compression needed which tends to INCREASE latency/delay). But I totally agree with you that having a multitude of audio options/choices like they provided on Equinox is a good thing.