jasong

I posted this before but it probably got missed. That is not the real FCC site. The real FCC site has updated it's links including the manual, photos, etc, but the new links content aren't active yet for whatever reason, not sure if ML requested or because it just takes a while.

You got everything just right and then put the steering wheel on the wrong side! Kidding, that rig looks very well planned out and built. It's satisfying to look at since everything fits in it's place and no space is wasted.

Amazing Goop until someone comes out with a skid plate. On my NFA's I just Goop'ed each new hole until the entire plate was essentially covered in a thin layer of it and never bothered buying new skid plates. ? Easier for spoked coils I guess.

I try for 2 grams/day overall average generally too, or 3 grams when gold is a bit lower. If I start falling behind on a weekly basis I get nagging in the back of my head and start scrubbing old areas as meticulously as possible, try to imagine some new nuggets into existence, just to get back over that number then go exploring again. It's definitely getting harder in a lot of places! It was a good trip and got a lot done and new land explored to build from next winter too. It always clears my mind and puts me in a good mood when I spend some time away from town and out in the wilderness. Got some new coils to field test this Spring now, starting to lean heavily towards getting a 6000 now too. This upcoming year should be pretty fun! Haven't a had feeling like this in the air since the 7000 first came out and new possibilities abounded.

My winter season has officially ended. A total of 39 detecting days, 88 grams (argh, just short of 3 oz I was trying for) minus a couple grams traded for supplies along the way. Definitely no great bonanza this year, but by the looks of it I have almost paid for a new 6000 if I decide to get one. Anyone looking to buy nuggets let me know. 10% under spot if bought in 1/2 oz+ lots and I have another half lb or so at home slated for the refiner soon too if anyone wants bulk. I know it's not the prettiest gold, but it's cheap. ? About half this came from reworking older patches. The other half come from exploring but I wasn't able to find anything except scattered small patches this season so never quite hit the jackpot as in previous seasons. Thank you to X Coils for giving me a new 8" coil to play with, it was responsible for many of the smaller nuggets in the photo, as well as a couple of the bigger ones including the speci. It was nice to swing the GPZ with no bungee when using it and to feel truly mobile for the first time with any "big gun" detector. My field report on that coil is elsewhere on this site, no need to go into it here. For anyone who visited me at my land - I am packed up and leaving and this place is officially sold to a new owner as of tomorrow. So, don't come a knockin' cause he might have a shotgun ? Best of luck to the new owner. I have some plans in store for the spring/summer and next winter, thanks in large part to people who have generously offered knowledge and assistance. So, one chapter ends and I will be moving along to the next now. For now it's time to go home and finish the construction work I left behind this fall, get some money for an RV again to pursue this prospecting thing again when the ground thaws up North. Good luck to everyone I met and spoke with for the rest of this winter season, and to everyone else! Jason

Finding water is magnitudes easier than finding gold. Almost every O&G well I ever drilled hit water, in some cases we passed through multiple water tables. A water table is a plane of water, not pockets that are easy to miss. Determining depth is simply a matter of looking at existing well logs. The water table also varies with topography, which you can view with your eyes. Flow rate is a function of the type of rock, fractures, porosity, etc. A simple matter of geology. Also, how many wells are in the reservoir, a matter of public record. These are all things a driller with only a few years experience will be very familiar with.

I was avoiding mentioning that document release date, in hopes Minelab would forget, and not go file another extension to keep the manual private for another month. ?

Extra Deep silently weeps alone in the corner, the one setting no one ever talks about. ? I've only used it for 2 things really. First, to filter out smaller, shallow targets same way I used Salt Coarse on the 4500. Second I've also switched into it as a sort of target depth or size gauge, which actually kinda works but it's slow navigating so I don't do it often since it's usually quicker to just dig. If anyone has a video of that setting picking up a nugget under 1 ounce in Normal, deeper and with a better signal than any other mode, I'd be curious to see it.

It's not exactly what you are looking for, but I made a video the first month or so of the GPZ release in 2015 to demonstrate the difference between Normal and Difficult, and why people should always run in Normal anytime they can, since I was trying (unsuccesfully at the time) to explain this on the forum. If you want a good demonstration of the difference between those settings, give this a watch. This was on an undug 10 grammer, with some cubic crystalline structure once it was cleaned. Excuse the potato quality $75 cell phone camera I filmed this on, I didn't have any kind of decent equipment or tripods at the time. I was also experimenting with no threshold at the time as well as low smoothing as a way alleviate the wet salty ground issue while still being able to run Normal and high sensitivity, something which worked ok. Especially since some may recognize the horizon that is briefly shown and realize that this particular nugget came out of a spot that some very experienced and respected detectorists had just gridded with the GPZ before I got there in. Pretty sure I remember them telling me they were running in Difficult, which is why this nugget was missed. J Gold did a similar video around the same time on the difference between High Yield and General, I believe Youtube links it in the related videos, but it's here:

What Lunk proposed is a scientific experiment. Throw in a control experiment where no wrench exists, and don't tell the dowsers which experiment they are a part of. Also have an independent 3rd party hide the wrench, and the perform the experiment in a place totally unfamiliar to the dowsers, and we have some science happening from which useful data can be derived! But James Randi already proposed doing just that for decades, with a large cash prize for anyone to prove supernatural powers. I told my sewer contractor about it years back, but he was always too busy.

I drilled a hundred or two oil and gas wells in Wyoming and Colorado. I could, in these two areas I worked, walk to any adjacent ranch and tell the owners with a very high degree of certainty exactly where to drill a well and at what depth they might expect to hit oil or gas. Further, I could with a fair degree of certainty tell them where to drill a water well and at what depth too. That's not magic coat hangers though, it's just basic geology and many well's worth of drilling experience knowing when I hit water, oil, and gas in specific areas I'm familiar with. Yet, if I held some bent wire and told people it is magic then they'd almost surely believe me, for no good reason at all. Another example: I've replaced a lot of sewers on houses I've worked on. Just by watching where the contractors dig I have a pretty good guess where they are going to be now based on the neighborhood and style of house and year pipes were installed. Coincidentally, the one contractor I know who "witches" pipes always guesses wrong exactly when I guess wrong. Why? Because he's not dowsing anything, he's just going off experience based on what he's seen before. Just like me. So when he encounters something totally new and unexpected, something that diverges from his real life experience, dowsing magically no longer works. There is nothing real in this universe, to my knowledge, which defies any kind of explanation. Anything that completely defies explanation is magic, and magic is not real.

I remember reading something along those lines too. When daybreak hits Australia if JP is around, I wonder if he might go into more depth there? Like, it doesn't actually increase the TX or RX sensitivities right? It's still adjusting only the processed audio feed right? Or does the volume control on the GPZ actually have some tie to the actual sensitivity too?

I was in the only manual transmission camp too and now love my automatic. Been stuck a few times and wished for manual but still made it work, but 99% of my driving auto is the preferable option. On the other side of things, each new "simpler" version of Windows or newer versions of Android OS seem to get harder and more frustrating for me to use than the previous because of their constant push for simplicity and hiding features they think others won't need, or outright eliminating things I still need to use. If the 6000 is more automatic transmission and less Windows 10 over simplification, then that's a win in my book.

Was that a Chemehuevis nugget Lunk? Just curious cause I was just out there running the GPZ and 17". Is there a place there that needs Cancel?

I think you found a spelling error in the manual too. (to/too) ? But I agree, they have it backwards in the manual from a human/human ear perspective and the numbering system on the machine itself. Low/High seems to match the diagram in the sense that they are speaking about the threshold level relative to the expected lowest or highest target or EMI signal levels though.

It comes from the decay of the B field portion of the signal in the near field of an antenna. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_and_far_field

Are the dealers/trainers getting them significantly ahead of the general public or is it all going to be exactly the same time? I remember when the GPZ came out most people were stuck in Difficult for a long time after and so it was easy to grab some nuggets in the usual patches just by running in Normal in NNV, even being late. Problem with an ease of use machine is that kind of advantage disappears and it just mostly turns into a race between who gets a machine first for the easy pickings. If such a machine creates such new pickings, anyways.

I'd try one out if they want to send me one. ? But, I'm hesitant to buy one because it seems to me the SP01 filter is doing something similar to Smoothing in that it's pulling out some information from the audio stream just like Smoothing is. If so, then I might as well just use Low Smoothing for free. The problem I see is that people insist on running no smoothing because it's a filter. But then they compress or filter the same audio stream with the SP01 to solve that problem. And I'm not convinced enough that's a problem I need to pay $300 or whatever to find a solution for since I personally have no problem running Low Smoothing when I need to. If you disable the filters, the SP01 is now just an audio booster. But I personally have found the WM12 to be more than sufficient for me, or head phones when it's reaaaaally windy and I'm not wanting for more volume.

I think something similar happens here too with all the air traffic. Jets flying in to Vegas all the time and low since they are on landing approach, tons of helicopters doing Grand Canyon tours, planes flying low for tours. Then Nellis Air Force Base nearby. I don't know if the jets make noise like the big old C130 engines but those military choppers I can hear on my detector. And of course Area 51 north of Vegas, but I can't talk about that and you never saw this post and aliens making noisy devices just to slow my detecting down definitely don't exist. ? I actually found a string of broken circuit boards and antenna components this year all in a long 2 or 3 mile line like a meteorite strewn field. From the 60's. Near as I can tell it's some sort of missile telemetry system, or from an experimental jet or something which they self destructed in the air? No idea. Found 3 weather balloon sensor thingamajigs too but those are just interesting and not really noisy or odd.

The EMI situation in places close to massive population centers like in California or parts of Arizona is another level compared more remote, less populated parts of Australia, or even places like NNV. Just California has almost double the population of the entire country of Australia. Phoenix metro area has basically the entire population of New Zealand. Just as two relative references. Lots of military, power generation, air travel, and other stuff that produces EMI that travels some distance. The SP01 is compressing/limiting/expanding the audio. I'm not sure which one exactly since I don't own one. But any kind of compression by definition destroys some part of the audio. So in that way, it's not a whole lot different than what low smoothing and boosting your sensitivity/volume is doing. In fact, before the SP01 came out, I posted about just such a thing on that old 4umer forum and how you could emulate such an idea with threshold and volume controls. The bottom line to me is that those settings are there for a reason and a place. Where we happen to be is a particularly noisy place. And people should not be afraid to use a setting (or hardware like sp1) or say they never will use it, if the results are more gold and less headache. That is after all, one of the principal design concepts of the 6000 from what I can tell based on the limited info we have.

I've also experimented with this a good bit. In the areas I detect I can lower my sensitivity from 18 to 10, take off low smoothing, and still have a bunch of spurious signals clogging my brain up and slowing things down so much that my head gets out of the game after a few hours. The amount of nuggets I miss by going slower and not having 100% focus is way more than the amount of nuggets I miss by jacking the sensitivity back up and then smoothing the mess out with low smoothing. Low smoothing also lets me run my threshold higher (still lower than most people) than I would normally, so I get a little bit back from that too. That said, I do take smoothing off when I'm cleaning a patch. And I hate every minute of it. ? Completely disagree. In fact, somewhere at home I have a video showing this isn't the case on an undug/undisturbed 7 grammer that was a great signal at 20, and almost nothing at 10 sensitivity. Pretty sure I also tested threshold levels and smoothing on or off on that one too. I will look for it when I get back. I've tested my settings extensively in the areas I work, I am confident that for my area, my brain, and the type of ground and gold I find, I am running as near as efficiently as I can. If I thought differently, I would change the way I run.

Oh, the other things I've noticed is that the GPZ interferes with the 5000 from a good distance. But the 5000 has to be pretty close to the GPZ for the GPZ to start getting interference. I think the GPZ must have some EMI filtering going on behind the scenes that the GPX series didn't have, just as standard operation. So that's another area I think the 6000 will definitely excel. Since they've had 6 years to improve what they already improved with the GPZ.

Yeah, I usually run a lower threshold and low smoothing with the 17" for that reason. I often don't go above 18 gain with it. But I also really don't like ratty thresholds. I can kick my threshold up 5-6 notches, keep my gain at 20 with the 8" and have it be nice and stable still. It does great in EMI. When I go on my next trip (in the hotter ground) I'm going to use this 17" at first to see if I can stay in Normal, try gains down to 6 or 8 or so if I have to. Then only switch to Difficult if the ground is still too hot.

Quartzsite actually wasn't too bad for EMI. Gold Basin itself can be medium to bad EMI, though I don't spend a lot of time in it proper anymore. However, Vegas metro area is a city of 2+ million and while it's some distance to drive, as the crow flies it's actually quite close to places I detect. That and there is a steady stream of helicopters and other aircraft doing Grand Canyon tours. Plus a number of large transmission lines from the Hoover Dam as well as various solar projects, and now more recently one of the largest wind farms in the US is being constructed nearby. Plus we have a large Air Force base. The cheeky Black Hawk pilots buzzed me maybe 50ft above my head with a guy waving out the door once a few years ago but mostly they stay north I think. Anyways, yeah. Tons of EMI out there, depending where I am at.

I should have a chance to try them out on what some would consider medium to hot ground here in the US next week. It's not a place I've detected at all with the GPZ so I will start in Normal and adjust from there. It will be a fun trip with a bit of time to detect as well. It's a private invite to private land though so I'm not sure how much I can really show. We do have some pretty hot ground here, places where I was forced to run Enhance or even use a DD. Since I'm totally mobile when I'm in AZ I just chose to seek out and stay in the easy ground (in my 4500 days) since I could run full bore everywhere and I knew most people around me (at the time) were staying in Fine Gold, which meant I was finding a lot that others were leaving behind. I got used to the geology and so as I expanded out, I tended to search for similar places, and so I end up detecting a lot of mild ground. But it will be interesting to see how they do in some hotter ground next week. I'll still try to run in Normal if I can, and then adjust accordingly from there.