jasong

It'd be interesting to give a concentric a run on the 6000. I wonder if NF and/or Coiltek tried to make one, they are notably missing from their lineup but it's early still... I seem to recall seeing something about X Coils already had some sort of coil out in testing for the 6000 already, I'm guessing they will make one if it provides some measurable advantage. 2 adapters required on the 6000 though right? DD chipped adapter for concentric and the monos would require a separate mono chipped adapter? Also, not trying to be overly pedantic but "CC coil" is like saying "PIN number". The coil is already in there. Ok sorry.

I'll try the 12" test this summer when winds die down. I couldn't even get a final nugget shot sitting on the coil at the end of the day without the wind blowing the nuggets off! The pic i got on my finger was early when i got there before the tornado force winds came in for the rest of the day. Other places the wind would blow dirt and everything right out of the scoop unless I shielded it with my body. 😆 Haha yep that is kinda a drumstick looking nugget too. I'm always real bad at seeing resemblances, they all look like shape 1 or shape 2 to me until someone points something out.

Also: my transmission went out in my warrantied Ford. Ford said "parts shortage" prevented them from supplying customers with replacement transmissions, which is total BS because they have thousands of F150's and F250's stacked in the Kentucky Motor Speedway parking lot with transmissions in them and they are still selling new trucks. They were saying it might be 4 months to 1 year to get my truck fixed and that my only solution was to buy a brand new truck, which I had literally just done. Totally unacceptable. You'll note I have my F150 back. The day I decided to contact my attorney and forward Ford copies of relevant federal warranty laws and how they were in voilation, all of a suddent the "parts shortage" ended and I got one sent to me. Companies are starting to use this crap as excuses for their own mismanagement and to do less for their customers IMO. Anyways, just letting people know who might find themselves in a similar situation with truck warranties in the US. We have laws protecting the agreements manufacturers made with us when we paid for what we bought and fulfilled our part of the agreement. If they offshored their entire manufacturing to make shareholders a bit more profit, we aren't the ones that have to pay for it, they are.

General Summary: I set out with two goals in mind, but only accomplished one. I wanted to compare the 6000 response on small nuggets to the 12" X Coil, but this was completely pointless due to the 30mph winds making audio on my cell phone completely inaudible. Also, I wanted to try out the 15" CC X Coil I was sent last year but simply have not had a chance to try out due to a number of factors in life. X Coils sent this coil to me for free to try out right as my detecting season had ended last year. I worked over about a 20x50ft section of a patch completely with the 6000 until there were no audible targets left. I use Auto+ in normal. Then, as is my general technique, I set the GPZ such that I was running the maximum gain with the most stable threshold I could acquire. In this case, 18 gain, 12 threshold, low smoothing, normal. My feeling is that these settings average out to something fairly close to what the 6000 is doing in Auto+, if any equivalency can be drawn, ignoring GeoSense. Almost every target was 6+ inches deep with the CC. Whereas most of my 6000 targets were about 1-7" deep. Nothing too surprising here. Initially from this section I got about 40 nuggets with the 6000, and got another 7 more with the CC. The avg size of the 6000 nuggets was around 0.1 grams, and the average size of the deeper CC nuggets was around 0.25 grams. There is both salt and medium mineralization in this ground, and the CC suffered as would any larger coil in the salt. I'm quite sure I left some nuggets in the ground because I got tired of chasing salt signals. The 6000 w/11" pretty much only gave a signal on targets or the buried clay balls and so it was much easier to dig only just good targets. But it definitely missed stuff once it got deeper than 5-6" or so. Here you can see a pretty typical ~7" hole that the CC was finding gold in. This gold looks bigger but it only weighs 0.21 grams. I think the deepest one I dug was around 9". The gold here doesn't often get bigger than 3/4 gram, so physics limits the depth at which this stuff can be found, thus the lack of deeper results. My gold vs trash take. Almost everything was 6"+ deep, including trash. The 6000 got almost everything closer to surface aside from the one smallest pellet. I say almost everything 6" deep because the longer nugget was only like 2" deep and there is no way the 6000 missed that thing. Again, I swear the 6000 is occasionally "hiccuping" and missing some quite obvious targets. I don't know if it's due to electronics bogging down/glitching, or just needing to hit some nuggets exactly the right way and in the right direction. But that one was almost an overload signal on the Z. But maybe I just didn't overlap swings enough...no clue. The gold vs trash ratio is pretty similar to what I got closer to the surface with the 6000. A lot of this surface soil is deflationary, meaning gold is often found right in the grass roots up top, depending how heavy the wind is and how much ground cover there is. My Opinions: Having used the 17" CC earlier in Arizona, I already knew these coils were killer. Seriously, they are like having a GPZ 7500 before anyone else, and I'm not just saying that because I got the coil for free. They are that much deeper. Anyone who has an X Coil adapter already, and who hunts in ground where deeper nuggets have been proven to lurk - this coil will almost certainly find you more gold (as long as the gold is actually there). That said, like any larger coil, they suffer in salt. So this test wasn't quite an apples to apples comparison. And actually, I didn't even fully realize there was salt in the ground here when I was running just the 6000, otherwise I'd have chosen a different spot. But the salt signal was definitely there and obvious when swinging across soil interfaces. Also, I recall reading that these CC's are way better in mineralization than the spirals, which may be the case (I haven't tested), but the 6000 had far less overall response to the iron mineralization than the GPZ+CC, even though larger coils are better with ferrite type mineralization, generally speaking. This is more a function of the GPZ than the coil though, I believe, in this case since the 17" I ran in Arizona didn't suffer any more than the stock GPZ coil in medium mineralization. In summary, I'll end with something I've said before: these CC's (and the 8" in salt) are the only reason I'm still hanging on to my GPZ still. I'd have sold it long ago if these coils didn't exist. They are seriously like having a new GPZ that no one else has access too. That said, nothing - and I mean nothing - can compete with the ease of use of the 6000, and it's quickness and speed. It's built to be a prospecting machine, not a patch cleaner. Yes. It misses stuff. Absolutely, without doubt. And if a person is primarily spending time cleaning up the last remaining crumbs in long dead patches then the 6000 is not a great choice and nothing can compete with the depth and sensitivity of the 7000+ X Coils. But for general prospecting and exploration, nothing on the market can compete with the 6000 either. Two separate machines, two separate use cases. My arm was dead tired after swinging the GPZ again, I only made it 6 hours and normally I like to spend 10 hours if I'm making a trip to the field. And I just have to swing far, far slower with the GPZ both due to the increased ground response and the outright weight of the coil/machine. And in the end, I actually found more nuggets by number and weight with the 6000 just by accepting that I would lose some gold left behind and being ok with trading that for raw speed and ground coverage. I wasn't sure how much gold I left, but I knew I left some. It paid for my gas and back, so not insignificant. And if one of those deeper nuggets was a lunker, well then it might pay for an entire season of gas, never know. But my personal detecting philosophy is to sweep up 80% of the easy stuff quickly and move on to find more places. It just pays better over time. Then come back with the GPZ + X Coils to clean up patches when times are lean and exploration isn't paying off, or when my arm and elbow feel up to the task. This is the reason I'm using the 6000 so much now. And it's also the reason I'm still keeping the GPZ. But of course we all use detectors for different things, and this is just me showing how each works well in their own specific use cases which might not apply to anyone else.

Nice, I liked that one too. Seemed like it ended too early, looking forward to this special!

It's meant to look like the ancient Chinese white jade figurines, don't think it is authentic though. Stuff like these were sometimes recovered from tombs and the lore states that they soaked up blood and got a brownish or reddish tint from that. At least, I know a girl in China who's father collects this stuff and resells it, and this is more or less what I recall her telling me they believe. That one has what appears to be modern saw marks on the bottom and it looks like the blank was cut from a modern core bit. So I'd guess not an artifact. But it might be some low grade white jade with many impurities, or some jade-like mineral amalgamation with orthoclase, zoisite, stuff like that if the reproduction was higher quality. Might take it to a Chinese antiquities dealer just out of curiosity though, the real ones are quite valuable, and I'm no expert by any means.

My hearing is somehow still great despite a lifetime of playing loud punk rock drums, shooting and using saws and other tools with no ear protection. I hear all sorts of very high pitched noises in buildings, around electrical equipment, etc that other people swear are not there but I can hear plain as day. It drives me crazy in hotel rooms sometimes, things like that where a fridge or TV makes a constant noise and the hotel doesn't believe me. A person's high frequency hearing starts to decline around 20 or so I think, I used to be able to hear a lot more than now.

That's...a lot of stuff.

Agree there totally. I think stuff like that probably accounts for a lot of the disparity between reporting things that are or aren't major issues among different people. An uncomfortable driver's seat can mean two different things to a freight truck driver and a casual commuter.

Not all lead shot of equal size has equal composition. The non toxic shot is made of a wide range of varying alloys and even plastics. Some detectors miss some of these entirely, while other detectors can hear certain ones but not others. This is a big reason some places light up with new shot when using a new detector. They look like lead by eye, but they aren't necessarily lead and their conductivity is highly variable. At least, in the US this is the case, not sure about what is used overseas. Non-toxic shot types approved by the US Fish and Wildlife Service[19] Approved shot type Percent composition by weight Bismuth-tin 97% bismuth, and 3% tin Iron (steel) Iron and carbon Iron-tungsten Any proportion of tungsten, and >1% iron Iron-tungsten-nickel >1% iron, any proportion of tungsten, and up to 40% nickel Tungsten-bronze 51.1% tungsten, 44.4% copper, 3.9% tin, and 0.6% iron, or 60% tungsten, 35.1% copper, 3.9% tin, and 1% iron Tungsten-iron-copper-nickel 40–76% tungsten, 10–37% iron, 9–16% copper, and 5–7% nickel Tungsten-matrix 95.9% tungsten, 4.1% polymer Tungsten-polymer 95.5% tungsten, 4.5% Nylon 6 or Nylon 11 Tungsten-tin-iron Any proportions of tungsten and tin, and >1% iron Tungsten-tin-bismuth Any proportions of tungsten, tin, and bismuth. Tungsten-tin-iron-nickel 65% tungsten, 21.8% tin, 10.4% iron, and 2.8% nickel Tungsten-iron-polymer 41.5–95.2% tungsten, 1.5–52.0% iron, and 3.5–8.0% fluoropolymer

There could be some sort of charge controller/maintainer in the phones and it switches back to red while in float mode when it's maintaining the battery charge when plugged in. Red means charging, so it will draw current during that period, naturally. If this maintaining was happening, the oscillation between red/blue would be somewhat irregular, not always the exact same timing.

GB, I think most of those mini battery pack ratings are arbitrary fiction, the manufacturers just put basically whatever they feel like on them. I bought a wide range of them to test as battery backups for some offgrid crypto (Helium) mining rigs I built and not a single one was anywhere close to even 50% of it's rated capacity, many were seriously like only 10-15% rated capacity. And I was only using the ones that advertised like 10 or 15AH or something like that, these 44AH ones can't possibly be anywhere close to that in a package that size. Those car jump starters like in Valen's link are usually rated around real capacity and work ok for day trips and whatnot, that's why they are so much larger. But you have to remember to recharge them, and remember to put them back in the truck. A friend has something like that which also comes with a solar charger, and he was camping out the back of his truck with it for many days at a time detecting and running a small mini fridge as well as his ML chargers, and I believe it jump started trucks too. I can't remember what he said it was offhand though, but I think it was pricey, like $1k or something. If I can ever remember the name of it, I'll post it. I do a 100w (or 50w on my side x side) panel on the roof-->charge controller-->100ah LiPo battery-->1500w inverter, and then I run a switch to put that LiPo in parallel with my main battery in case I need a jump start. $300 to build but prices have probably gone up. Benefit being it recharges itself automatically, always. Even a cloudy day regens enough juice to turn over my starter a bit if I drained the LiPo the night before. Come to think of it, a switch to remove the dead battery and one to put the starter directly in parallel with the LiPo would be even more efficient, then switch the dead battery back in once the motor/alternator is going again...hmm. But all I own are vehicles that spend most their time in the dirt, not the streets, and which I don't care about driving self tappers through the roof or support bars, so this probably isn't much help for street vehicles.

No, not the lower with the key, it's the...middle I guess? The one you extend. Not sure what to call it. I have to correct it every 10-15 minutes when using the stock (or larger) coils. I'm definitely on the upper end of swing speed when I'm prospecting, compared to most people. It's part of the reason I got tennis elbow, and it puts a lot of stress on the shaft and coils when I'm in grasses, etc. But while I've a little twist problem on my 6000, it's not really bad enough for me to personally consider it a problem, as I only need to correct maybe 4 or 5 times a day, vs like 20 times a day with the GPZ. Clearly something is happening though, if people that didn't notice the shaft twist on the 7000 are all having issues with the 6000. That's what makes me think it's a manufacturing inconsistency, because if anyone should notice it, I would think I would have due to my very fast swing compared to most people I see detecting in the field. Plus I often abuse my coils and just push around grass, bushes, rocks, sticks, etc since I have a harder and harder time getting to the ground these days. Me too, I have to have my coils exactly right, I'll correct them if I notice they are even a little off.

I have an early 6000 from one of the first US shipments, and I don't have enough problem with shaft twist that it really bugs me. I do find I have to retighten it every so often though. Maybe it's just a manufacturing inconsistency between batches? Oddly, I had and still have a massive problem with the 7000 shaft twist, to the point I posted at least 5 or 6 times about it back in 2015, but no one else seemed to have the problem or find it to be a bother, so I eventually I stopped mentioning it, it still drives me crazy today though too. It happened on all 3 GPZ's I owned, and also on a replacement shaft. I think I might also just be increasingly out of touch with the things most the rest of people online find important in the detecting world these days.

I'm confused what you are waiting for, why not just send it days ago to whatever your service center is? Or is that just how it works in the US and not overseas? I sent a GPZ in with video back in 2017, they were unable to replicate the problem but saw my videos showing the issue, and they gave me a brand new GPZ. Took about 8 or 9 days total, I 2nd day aired it to them on the East Coast because I was in a hurry and in the field (I was living off my detecting at the time). Might have a new 6000 back in a few days from today if you had sent it in when you started this thread depending how fast mail goes over there... Are you asking for something very specific and waiting for a response or something? Or in NZ do they just not allow you to send to get serviced until you get a response from corporate?

Agree with most of that Steve. The reason I use the 6000 is ease of use, quickness, weight, convenience of having everything all in 1 unit with nothing extra required, no rig up/rig down or extra equipment required - which is also why I'm so adamant ML should fix their speaker issues, since it's a major part of the machine's desirability in my opinion. The 6000 is the first machine where I think it can be safely said that the subjective experience of using it, or the "intangibles" comprise a significant part of it's desirability. These vary highly between users who use it for different things. That said, I'm glad Simon posted that vid because while the 8" results didn't surprise me, the 12" spiral results do, even if it was a 0.044 grammer and not 0.03. If my gut feeling was wrong, I'd be interested to find out so I can have a better understanding how my equipment works.

Is that the same 0.03g piece of gold? I can try a similar test on Tuesday with a 0.03 grammer. I definitely don't think my 12" spiral is that much better than the 6000 on that small of gold(it definitely is on bigger stuff) but I'd be interested to see, definitely good to know if so. Only thing I can think may be unaccounted for, given the tiny size, is how specific pieces of different geometry/composition might hit harder on the GPZ than the GPX and vice versa, since they are different tech and different coils. You found that piece with the GPZ, so I'll try one I found with the 6000. I say that because there are absolutely nuggets I could hit with my 4500 deeper than the GPZ, odd shapes. I sent a video of one such nugget to Minelab back in 2015 to demonstrate such an effect. It's just so hard to tell from videos what is or isn't happening with each swing, but easier to understand in person. I'd do it sooner but my trucks transmission is out and my WM12 is in my truck at the shop which is closed tomorrow and I got an MRI on Monday. Ford is "no ETA" on tranmissions, might be a YEAR!! Speaking of parts shortages and company warranties...new truck under warranty and their only advice to me is buy another new truck, unbelievable. I haven't been able to prospect for 3 weeks already due to it and may lose an entire season.

I definitely agree, best to send to Minelab service and get one back that starts fresh with no issues. It's not fun 2nd guessing equipment in the field, leads to second guessing yourself eventually too. I owned 3 GPZs. The 2nd one I sent back to Minelab service with some detailed videos about what seemed pretty major to me but was probably a subtle thing to most, they were unable to replicate the issue there but gave me a new GPZ anyways. Just being able to get my mind off the question about wether some problem might be my machine was worth the wait since I never had to question that machine again. Re: EMI, I've had my 6 go completely unstable while it was just laying immobile on the ground running doing nothing. There is something happening with them where if you exceed a certain number of EMI sources in the air, it can't cope or find a proper channel anymore. The speaker is one of these EMI sources and so running it means this threshold number of EMI sources it can deal with before losing stability is reached quicker, I believe. I think the noise cancel is actually searching for quieter channels, but I don't think it takes a large enough "noise snapshot" sample for a long enough time span (which is why it's fast) while analyzing channels, and thus sometimes it ends up on a very noisy channel again where/when EMI is somewhat intermittent (even on the millisecond time frame), and the scanner just happens to intercept a "quieter" period on that channel and chooses it.

Oh also meant to say, the smaller coils on the 6000 should help clear up a bit of EMI too (plus make the 6 even lighter still). Smaller coils are always better with EMI than bigger ones, and that's another reason the 8" is buttery smooth. Well, aside from the GPZ just being a quieter detector than the 6 too. So anyways, give 'er a chance. You know my posts, I'm outright with every opinion and observation I have. And I think the 6 is a pretty good machine despite some really pretty bad flaws it also has as well. Also - my headphones have some weird background noise too, even when I'm not close to the coil.

If you are a big fan of smooth thresholds then I suggest you give Auto+ with no threshold a try. It's not exactly "zero" threshold, technically speaking. Might take some getting used to if you are a threshold guy though. It's all I use with the 6000, and I detect in places that are EMI central fairly often. I have always sought to get the most stable, quietest threshold I could, while maximizing sensitivity as much as possible in those constraints. The perfect detector makes no noise on anything but targets to me - no ground, no EMI. The difference between full manual and Auto+ is minimal in sensitivity, and in some variable grounds I think it's actually better since Geosense is keeping things optimized. But the lack of like 75% of the normal EMI and background drone - sooooooo much better and easier to pick good targets. Auto+ with no threshold is basically like running the GPZ at a threshold of 5-10 with low smoothing on (incidentally the settings I posted/used on my GPZ and copped years of flack for). Except, there isn't nearly as much sensitivity hit as you would otherwise take running low smoothing on the GPZ. Best of both worlds IMO. I only use threshold for really detailed patch cleaning now - and at that point, I just use the GPZ instead anyways and the 8" or 17" CC X Coil. So, my 6 pretty much always stays in auto+ no threshold now. I carried both detectors with me everywhere for the first month I had my 6000. I no longer take my GPZ at all anymore though, unless I'm specifically trying to ward off the skunk detecting old patches, or working deep washes. It's because the performance compared to the 8" is so close, the extra depth from the 6000 on bigger (1+gram? untested) nuggets is useful, and the 6000 is so much quicker to use and so much lighter, that it just ends up being what I reach for out of sheer convenience. That's why I was saying a while back that the concentric is the only reason I still keep my GPZ (and the 8" for salt). I'm curious if you end up finding the same thing. Glad you can see the EMI/speaker problem yourself now so someone outside the US can vouch for the issue now too. It absolutely has everything to do with where you are located and how much EMI is in the air. And people that insist it doesn't exist are either not paying attention or in places that have very little EMI to deal with. I've been posting this since the 6000 came out, since I travel quite a bit and detect many different places I noticed the pattern quickly. I think I have a good idea why it does it and why the speaker affects it, I outlined in another post. I can't prove it, but I am familiar enough with MCU's and similar processors (FPGA or whatever they are using for Fourier analysis) that I just "feel" the 6000 occasionally does too much and confuses itself, gets overwhelmed, or glitches/bogs. I can't explain it, but it's the same feeling I get when I just know something is wrong with my truck because I'm so used to it even though I don't design trucks.

Looks about right to me, at least in comparison to the 8". I haven't tested them side by side, but my experience is they are pretty much equal in sensitivity. In some cases I think the 6000 edges out the 8" if you swing it at just right angle and over just the right spot on the coil, but conversely in all cases in alkali/salt the 8" is superior. Outside the dinks, I think the 6000 is deeper overall though for larger gold, but again, just a sense, not tested. But that EMI...not good on the 6000. Not sure how it's even a debate. I'm surprised you could run it that long, my 6000 usually goes completely unstable after the first few minutes. Not just noisy - completely unstable with the speaker. A problem I can replicate easily and so I'm also utterly confused how it's even a topic of debate - it's real. It almost never loses total stability with the headphones though, but has happened. The 6000 appears to be highly sensitive to the specific spot on the coil you cover the target with, or potentially the specific angle with which you approach. It's too hard to gauge from a video what height your coil is at, which also makes a difference, but you can hear a wide variance in target response on different swings, some almost silent and some as good as the 8". As I noted in another thread, I miss not only nuggets in my scoop with the 6000, but nuggets in the ground because of this - which is the real problem I was trying to point out. And the fact it almost never happened with the GPZ. And I think a reason is the remarkably consistent target response of the GPZ compared to the 6000. Definitely worth trying a similar experiment in a lower EMI environment though too as you noted, just out of curiosity.

Agree 100%, hotspots exist with certain non-symmetric coils or like Geoff said, with ellipticals. They might exist on mono coils too depending how accurate and consistent the windings are, or if certain components are included inside the coil unsymmetrically. Also, there is a potential that multiple different constructive/destructive interference patterns (and thus hotspots) could exist with non symmetric coils at different distances from the coil as well depending on coil construction, design, geometry, etc.

That sucks man. But I'm glad you posted it. These are ultra premium detectors for ultra premium prices, we have a right to expect the best in them, not shortcuts. Certainly have a right to expect a working detector. Not even sure how that would escape even basic levels of QA/QC... Does the manual explain what that error is? Or like are the batteries chipped too and prone to failure or something? Might try one of JW's batteries just out of curiosity. Hopefully they get you a running one in quick order. It's actually a good detector, performance wise, once it works and I'm guessing you'll like it a lot (once you get a running one).

Interesting, I didn't know you could buy gel pads. The foam definitely lets a ton of noise in. I'll have to measure them and see if there are a set of gel seals that fit tomorrow, I took them to my shop a few hours ago to spray one of the cups with a few coats of Plastidip in hopes to knock some of the noise down.

Oddly, the holes are on the side with apparantly no electronics in them, guess there must be something in that side though. Who knows. I know there are a wide range of 3rd party headphones available. It's a philosophical thing for me though. The 6000 is the first real modern prospecting detector designed to not be used with headphones or any other extraneous gear. Being required to use headphones on such a machine alone is frustrating. Needing to buy a 2nd set of headphones for a $6000 detector designed specifically to not require headphone usage, just to be able to use it in fairly normal conditions in some parts of this country, is illogical to me. I know many people here are headphone users anyways, so it's not much of a deal. But I'm chosing to hold Minelab to task on this one because it's important to me, and I want them to do better in the future here, not go the opposite direction if no one cares.