Lunk

Day one... I headed to the hills this morning to beat the heat and log a few hours behind the control pod of Minelabs' latest offering, the exciting new GPX 6000. Hiking up and down the hills with this featherweight P.I. nugget detector is pure bliss after lugging the GPZ 7000 around for the past 6 years...has it been so long?! Armed with the 11-inch GPX mono coil, I targeted an old nugget patch that I had carefully gridded many times in the past with several detectors, including the GPX-5000, Gold Monster and GPZ 7000. With nearby power lines, operating at a Manual Sensitivity of 10 or Auto+ proved a bit too chattery and required excessive Noise Cancel delays that became rather irksome after awhile. Backing the Sensitivity to 7 smoothed things out considerably without any noticeable loss of performance, and if I got an iffy target response, a quick jump to 10 would provide a definitive yes or no. After digging a few trash targets, the first “nugget” that the GPX 6000 hit was a 0.04 of a gram surface screamer, and the next couple of nuggets were small and shallow; nothing surprising. But how did the Gold Monster miss these? Must not have got that little 5-inch Monster coil directly over them.🤔 It was the next 3 targets that really blew my mind, however... By late afternoon, the temps were soaring into the mid-90's, and despite a nice breeze, it was becoming a tad uncomfortable, and I was thinking about calling it a day. That was when the GPX 6000 sounded off with a sweet, mellow and deep sounding target response. A few scrapes with the pick exposed the underlying bedrock, and somewhere - in a crevice, no doubt - a golden treasure awaited to be uncovered...or so I hoped...could just as easily be a bit of square nail, a bullet or boot tack.😒 Blasting a few inches into the bedrock with the pick got the target out - a nice little golden picker in the scoop. 🙂 After backfilling the dig hole, just one swing of the detector revealed another soft, mellow hit a mere foot away. Same scenario: a small golden goody a few inches deep in a bedrock crevice. Then, about another 4 feet away, a faint response. Quickly jacking the Sensitivity from 7 to 10 brightened the signal a bit, so I began digging about 6 inches through a layer of gravels before hitting bedrock and a rather thick tree root. A little more pick work and pinpointing with the edge of the coil located the target in a crevice right next to the root. This one was deep; nearing the 12-inch mark, the target was finally out, and it was screaming off of the coil edge! A quick sift with the scoop uncovered a hefty 1.34 gram nugget. How the GPZ 7000 missed this beauty, I'll never know...it's a head scratcher.😅 Time to call it quits for the day on that high note, for sure! I'll be at it again tomorrow, this time with the GPX 14 DD coil in EMI Cancel Mode; should be able to run flat out in Auto+ Sensitivity with the threshold as smooth as glass.

The box says “26.5 in. when collapsed”, but I can shorten mine down to a mere 26-1/8 inches.🤣

WTG on your Nox nuggets, AG. Thanks for braving the heat to learn from us the knowledge it takes to be a successful gold nugget detectorist. Best of luck on your future adventures.

It was a good time training with you, Sevastras; it’s always a pleasure to see gold being found during the class. I could tell you fell in love with the GPX 6000...it’s nearly impossible not too after swinging one.😍 Just think: all you need to do with your Nox is find just 3.3 ounces of gold, or a nice key date coin, or a diamond ring, and you’ll have that dream machine in no time! Best of luck...🍀

Thanks Bill. So the gloves are are just Walmart cheapies to keep blisters and scorpion stings at bay. 🙂

Yep, wearing the Avantree Torus; works a treat with the GPX 6000.

Bon voyage, mon amie!

Nice chunk, Rob!

That could very well be, since the area is an abandoned gold placer, and the meteorite would have signaled as iron trash for someone using a discriminating detector. But there are no recorded meteorite finds in the area. It certainly pays to be knowledgeable of the physical differences between space rocks and terrestrial hot rocks.

Today found me deep in the Nevada outback, searching for those elusive gold nuggets with my trusty Minelab GPZ 7000. Towards the end of the day, I heard a nice, narrow double target response from the detector, just like the small and shallow sub-gram nuggets make. After pinpointing the target with the edge of the GPZ 14 coil, I plunged my plastic scoop into the loose soil, where it encountered a rock about 3 or 4 inches deep. Removing it from the soil, I immediately noticed that the rock was unusually dense; rubbing the dirt from the stone revealed the familiar rusty tin can color and smooth, regmaglypted surface typical of a weathered chondrite. The stone meteorite had a couple of broken surfaces, so I carefully searched the area with the detector for more fragments and soon received another double target response that turned out to be another stone of about the same size and depth as the first, and around 8 feet downslope. The two fragments fit together perfectly, just like a jigsaw puzzle. This meteorite is my third Nevada cold find since 2008. Area where the two chondrite fragments were dug, one at just 3 o'clock of the detector coil, and the other at the tip of the scoop handle: The two fragments reunited, with a total mass of 276 grams:

Nice bits, WTG!

Hopefully with a little prodding from JP, Minelab will take another look at concentric coil options for their next GPZ incarnation.

With my audio settings, Audio Smoothing set to High gives the most crisp and distinct signal relative to the threshold hum. Running the smoothing off while the Volume is set high to amplify the faint targets results in a target response that blends into the threshold hum, and sounds washed out and weak.

Wishing you all the best, Norm.

Went to another old patch today to try a different tactic; since there was larger gold found here in the past, I decided to run in Extra Deep Gold Mode. It had no problem punching 17” on a sweet, chunky 5 gram nugget, and it handles the noisy alkali soils very well, too.

Northeast, that is good to know. How about when the 11” mono coil is attached; if you turn the machine off when it is in the normal ground setting, does it return to the default difficult ground setting when powered on again?

I was thinking about that post as I raised the sensitivity to insane levels yesterday. We nuggetshooters are insane by default anyway. 🤪

Thanks Sturt, heaven knows this post can use some more and bigger gold.🤪 those are some fantastic finds, well done. Digging some nice lumps out of that beautiful red Oz soil is totally on my bucket list.😎

Well I'm laying over in northern Nevada for some detecting before heading back to Idaho and my summer job, and decided to go revisit an old dink patch with the GPZ 7000 this afternoon. Since I've hit this place pretty hard, I figured I better use a higher sensitivity setting to see if it would light up some bits that were missed last time using a lower sensitivity that helped keep the alkali rich ground feedback under control. Needless to say, I had to move the coil painfully slow over the really noisy areas, but the extra sensitivity started working its magic right away, as I got a faint but repeatable little wobble. Digging down about 3 inches or so revealed the first little bit of yellow. 🙂 Soon there was another signal a few yards upslope; another shiny golden bit, this time a little deeper. I couldn't help but wonder at this point how much deeper the new GPX 6000 will be able to snag dinks like these, and how many the Zed is leaving behind. 🤔 Guess I'll find out when I finally get mine. Just then I was awakened from my wonderings by a sharp response from the Zed; sounding pretty shallow, the tiny target was out from under a bush with just a boot scrape. And I mean tiny! One more golden goodie sitting on bedrock ended a splendid, sunny afternoon in the goldfields. Total weight of todays finds, zero point six of a gram. Good luck out there!

Sounds like it could have military counter-mine applications as well.

Great Scott!

And that was in the difficult ground setting and the sensitivity set at only 4.

Good finish to a good season!

Congrats on a great find!

Good to see you out in the goldfields again, amigo! Glad you scored some of the good stuff during your whirlwind prospecting trip.