schoolofhardNox

The CTX has one advantage over the Equinox that I appreciated and now miss with the Equinox .... It's ability to numerically separate targets better. The Equinox numbers are all crunched together. On the beach, the CTX can ID a target (within it's depth range) very fast. So after a good storm, you can detect and just pick up coins, being fairly comfortable and confident in knowing what you are about to dig. The Target ID was just more user friendly as I see it.

Great job, as usual. Really turned out nice and solid looking. I envy people who can construct thing like that. I wish Minelab would have made one of those for the GPX 5000. Imagine that being waterproof 🤔 You got some nice looking gold and silver there too!

I had a new machine sent to me in 4 days. That was even before I sent the broken one back. I can't ask for better service than that. 🙂

The 6000 is doing better than I thought it would for tiny targets, better than the 5000. But it still has to prove it can hit a silver dime at 18" at the beach. If it can do that, I will be torn on making the 5000 my back up machine ☹️

That silver disk is a cool piece. It looks (modern) Native made, but with I'm assuming a neat piece of blue glass. Unusual and a very nice find!

The edit button is on the top right hand side of your post. Just click on the three little squares and the edit function along with other options appears.

Nice coins. I love finding coins from that era. Best designs ever. They may have cherry picked the silver a while ago, but I bet there is still a decent amount left there if you go slow and dig some iffies.

Most star sapphires are synthetic, but still beautiful... and apparently valuable too 😄 Great find

Probably a steel backed modern coat / blazer button. Looks modern to me.

Awesome blue star sapphire. Shows you what is sitting down deep. I wonder how many smaller rings we miss at 12" Great find.

Beauties!! Opportunity knocked and you took advantage of it. Great finds 😍

Lucky for me I haven't been out detecting lately, so I had nothing to show anyways 😄 I missed seeing all the goods from everyone else though 🙁

😄 Didn't know where to post this but I'm finally able to log on here. I thought you guys banned me 🙁 Don't know what happened, but glad it's back up for me. Thanks to whomever got the forum back up. 👍 I really missed this place.

I just go in a second time and it comes up. I've had that error message and clicked off and then tried again and it worked.

Minelab should send him a new pod for telling them where it leaks 😄 That would be the last place I would have guessed it leaks from.

In the US, the coils that come with it are the 11" mono and the 14" DD. I'm not sure what comes with it where Simon is.

I don't have gold nuggets to compare where I am, but so far I am liking the mono 11" coil way more that the 14DD coil on small scraps of brass (2mm x 3mm). I'm thinking that the tiny brass and all the lead shot I am finding, probably respond similar to small gold. There is something about the 14" DD that I just can't put my finger on that I don't like. The 11" won the day last time out. Anyways, just my initial observations on it.

That all sounds good. Hit that ravine, you only live once 😄 The fields are your best bet.

Sound like a very interesting site. It may be a site that was occupied for a very long time. It also may be something else, since the quantity of shell is large. I would detect all around that area and inside the shell heaps too. What you find detecting should lead you into the right direction on what is going on there. If it's Native, the shell middens should have all kind of animal bones, broken pottery, probably flakes and stone points, and possibly brass scrap. All depends on how old or how modern the site is. Who knows you may be sitting on a village or trading post! 😍

Most tinklers I have seen are conical in shape and yes they were made to make noise. These are actually long beads. The shorter version is about 1/8" long. They of course also traded for glass beads which they find occasionally when they dig test pits for non metallic items (bone, pottery, glass, etc...) A lot of the brass I found was in the shell middens. If you dig and find a concentration of partially decomposed shell, you may be right next to a place where the wigwam stood. Surprising that shells from 1637 can still be in very decent shape

The wives always seem to pluck the good stuff from us 😄 Nice small piece of gold!!!! Sound like you had a good time hunting. Beach hunting is extremely relaxing for me. Keep posting them beach hunts.

Sorry, no pictures cleaned up. It may take months for the lab to get to those. They clean things differently than we do 😄 Just think of a brand new sheet of brass cut into strips and then rounded over to have the ends meet or overlap. Extremely crude in that respect since it's the year 1637. They would have probably went to part of a breast plate with lots of them in all sizes. The longest ones we found were probably around 5-6". The ones I found pictured were around 1/4" - 3/8" long. I haven't tried it without the battery attached to see if the balance point changes. I can say that the 11" coil feels well balanced and I could swing it all day. But then again, I'm used to the 5000 with a 12.5" coil, so anything else seems light. The 14DD, if I remember correctly, does feel a bit nose heavy. So far I like the concept of a 14" DD, but not quite sure I like the results. I feel the 14 looses some sensitivity and just reacts odd. The 11" coil went over the same spot (literally the exact same spot) as the 14DD and it hit two targets side by side. So that caught my attention. I 'm thinking the DD coil just doesn't hit as hard as the mono coil does. But I've only used the machine twice, so this is just some off the cuff observations. Also the battery and wireless headphones last at least 6 hours and only lost one bar in that time. I haven't used the machine longer than 6 hours yet. You will dig a lot of iron. It responds to iron very well. I tested it out in my yard and it screams on iron. Luckily for me this village is secluded and there is very little iron there. Only a couple of knife blades were found there. Other than that, there was no colonial iron trash.

So, today was hunt #2 with the GPX 6000 at the Native village site. I wanted to try the 11” mono coil out for the whole day, as I tried the 14” coil all day yesterday. I have never done that well with EMI and mono coils on the 5000, so I was not expecting much. I actually expected that the coil would react to the ground and sound off falsing a lot. I also expected the coil to get a lot of EMI. Neither of those things happened. It actually handled the ground noise very well with just a bit of end of swing falsing. It handled the EMI very well, as I did not have to noise cancel much. It actually did better than the 14DD coil which was designed to do both of those things. I’m a little disappointed in the 14” coil. So, to my shock, the 11 did exceptionally well today covering the area that the 14 did yesterday. I entered that small section, moved a couple of feet, and hit two side by side targets. Probably pulled a dozen plus quality targets from that small section. Not a lot of pictures today because I keep forgetting to pull the camera out. Once I get going, I do not like to stop, hence the reason I do not do videos. So, the 11” coil is a keeper. It responds hot like the 5000’s coils do. It actually picks up my headphones when I dig and hates my pin pointer whether it is on or off. Very sensitive. Great second day for a new machine. I can’t wait to get the 17” mono coil for the beaches.

I did try the EQ 800 there in gold mode. The EQ doesn't not like that soil very much and didn't perform as well as I expected. Originally, when targets were plentiful it would hit the shot gun shells easily but struggled on 22's and 22 casings. So the small brass scraps buried a bit deeper were not heard by the EQ or any other non PI except that an XP Deus hit on some of them. This area is PI country and even that struggled. I tried the GPX 6000 there again today again this time with a mono coil. It found me another 30ish targets with about half of those as solid keepers. I'm going to give my opinion on that 11" coil soon.

So, the maiden voyage for the GPX 6000 is in the history books. The village area hunted is a semi moist undisturbed dirt that has a lot of larger boulders laying around. Typical New England land that the farmer would consider semi undesirable. Kind of low lying and near a source of water. It tends to not detect tiny targets well, hence the reason for trying the 6000 out. Initial thoughts?? I decided to try the 14DD coil there because of the moderate EMI in that area. Running that option on the machine, it handled it fairly well but no better than the 5000 does. I also found I have to noise cancel way more than I do with the 5000. So that was kind of a surprise. The machine seemed to do better as time went on. I think the tubes just need to burn hot for a while 😆 Seriously, once it had a couple of hours running, it started to hit all the targets I would hope it would. WARNING: The following pictures are NOT eye candy and will not be enough to make you get off the couch. No silver or gold, but for some reason the archaeologists love these items. The machine’s weight was a nice gift, as I am used to lugging that heavy 5000 around. Not being tethered to the machine was also a nice feeling. The muddy sounding headphones will have to go though. Just do not like the sound of them. So, final thoughts on hunt #1 is that the 6000 did very well and I was surprised on how many targets it found in one particular area. This is a target rich section that I have cleansed 3 different times with the 5000. I must have pulled 8 different pieces of brass from just that one section. If it had just found 1 target, I would be impressed. 8 quality targets and I am really impressed. Not quite sure if it will go as deep as the 5000, but it sure hits better on tiny, thin brass targets. So pictured are just a couple of the 30 or so targets I found today. I think I’m going back tomorrow and see if the 11” mono coil will work in that dirt. All in all, I did better than I thought I would on the first hunt.