Lunk

Silver has a density of 10.5 grams per cubic centimeter.

WTG Peg & Pup!

Excellent!

Incredible! Nice poke, too.

So awesome!

WTG, amigo!

Poor Brian, he may have to legally change his name to “Brian” now...🤣

I certainly appreciate your discretion, GB_A, thank you.

Thanks for the intro, GB_A. I'm a little late to this thread, so all I can do is add my voice to the already resounding chorus of “NO!” I found out long ago that detecting for gold is feast or famine...not a consistent income...which makes it incompatible with consistently recurring bills. So, as has already been noted, if you live in a tent or vehicle in the goldfields, are alone and without any bills to pay, and are a very proficient and experienced detector prospector, then you could eke out a living, but not consistently. I've done it, but it is only temporary; sooner or later the gold simply runs out. Add to that the fact that having to find gold to make a living really takes the fun out of detecting and turns it into just another job, and you can see why it's better to do it as a hobby for the sheer enjoyment of detecting gold nuggets.

Great feel-good post, Gerry! Congratulations to all three on some nice nuggets found. And so very thoughtful of you to think up those fictitious names to keep things on the down-low. 😀

WTG!

WTG Peg & Chet!

Awesome haul, Steve, and with two awesome detectors!

Spot on, Phrunt.

Sad to see this, Phrunt. FT could have developed a modern tech Gold Bug 3 to compete with the current lineup of 21st century VLF nugget detectors, but instead they merely replaced the two toggle switches with push-pad buttons and an LCD that tells you what modes you have selected. Not only that, but the GB pot is quite a reach for one's thumb on the left side of the control panel compared to its former position in the middle where your thumb naturally rests when operating the machine. Also, the threshold level pot was originally on the rear of the control box for a reason: so it couldn’t be inadvertently bumped out of position like it easily can now on the front side. IMO, it's a downgrade, not an upgrade.

It's elementary, my dear Mitchel: any detector will signal on a car body at a distance of 3 meters, and advertising their detector alongside well-known, proven brands gives it the appearance of being legit. But don’t take my word for it...just buy one; you shouldn’t have any problem reselling it with the help of this kind of advertisement.🙄🤣

Nice skunk-kicking shoes, Mitchel...WTG!

Just ran it in Normal with threshold on and Sensitivity at manual 7, bumping it to 10 on iffy targets...easy as!

Awesome post, Gerry. Warrior Wade was certainly an inspiration to the entire class, and it was very gratifying to see him dig his first gold; too cool!

Good job, Lucky; way to persevere and beat the heat...and the 🦨!

Yes, and while it does help one's sanity, the EMI still breaks through sporadically.

There are infinitely better GPS apps for smart phones than the onboard GPS of the 7000, so no, won't miss it at all. As for visual readout of signal strength? The GPZ 7000 doesn't have that. Just get a GPX 6000; you won’t regret it. Besides, you can't miss a machine you’ve never swung, right?😀

Day 3... The final day of the holiday extended weekend; back to work tomorrow.😞 on the bright side, it's only a 4-day work week.😀 So I did leave the phone turned off and in the truck this time, but I put the 11” mono coil back on; that means no pictures of the digs today, just the final weigh-in. I decided to run in Auto+ sensitivity all day, and got used to doing occasional noise cancels, but there were a few times that the threshold just wouldn’t settle down enough for my liking, even when reducing the sensitivity to 7. In these instances, I would perform the reset procedure to reboot the machine to the factory presets. The audio was amazingly stable after each reset, even after changing the Sensitivity back to Auto+, and would last a few minutes before the EMI returned. This area is prone to bad EMI; it's random and intermittent, and I couldn’t manually tune it out with the GPZ 7000 either - just had to wait until it abated, then hunt until it returned, then wait, etc. The EMI issue was almost negligible when running the GPX 6000 at Rye Patch, so I know it's not the machine. Nevertheless, I was able to snag seven more bits of gold, including a 0.4 of a gram piece at 4 or 5 inches - the largest of the day - and the smallest of the day, a wee 0.05 of a gram. Also dug several trash targets. So in all for for the weekend, 16 pieces of gold in an area gridded several times with several machines, to me is more than just finding missed targets; the GPX 6000 has some serious magic going on under the hood. Oh, another cool thing I noticed is that, of the few hot rocks in the area, the 6k quickly tracks them out.🙂

Good point, JP...I usually keep the phone turned off and in the truck, but since I was taking pictures to post on the forum this time, it was shut off and in my back pocket so as to get some distance from the coil. I'll have to swing the DD again and leave the phone in the truck to see if it makes a difference.

Day two: The goldfields greeted me in the morning with sunny blue skies and a nice cool breeze. I was trying out the DD coil this time to see if it would mitigate the EMI issues I was having with the mono coil. Upon power-up, the GPX 6000 defaulted to the EMI Cancel mode, and I set the Sensitivity to Auto+. The threshold was very unstable, no better than when running the mono coil; I backed the sensitivity down to manual 7, but, although better, the threshold was still erratic. Performing a couple of noise cancels didn't seem to help much, either. Then it finally occurred to me to do a reset to the factory preset, and sure enough, the machine settled right down. Whew, thought there was a real problem there for a few.😅 The threshold still wasn’t ultra-smooth, as it is on a GPX-5000 with the Coil switch set to Cancel, but I guess like JP said, it's the price we have to pay for the incredible sensitivity of the GPX 6000. Swinging towards where I had left off the day before, I encountered a few trash targets, including a 22 casing buried at nearly a foot deep; the initial target response was very clean and quite obvious. Continuing along, I got another deep sounding target, and after digging down around 6 inches, the signal was out of the hole. Pinpointing with the left edge of the coil is required when using the DD coil in EMI Cancel mode, since the coil becomes a pseudo monoloop, where the left side of the coil is now operating as an 8” x 14” elliptical mono, and there is no sensitivity at all on the right side of the coil. A quick sift of the material with the scoop brought a sweet little 0.65 gram gold nugget to light! After digging a few more trash targets, I finally arrived at the spot where I had left off the day before, and almost immediately, a sweet mellow target response from my Avantree Torus wireless speaker had me once again blasting into a bedrock crevice. The target was around 4 or 5 inches deep: a quarter-gram nugget. Just a few feet away, another signal in a bedrock crevice, this time a thin, 0.15 of a gram piece at about the same depth. Not bad for a few hours on an old patch with new technology; covered gas for the trip and then some. Stay tuned for day 3...