phrunt

Go on Gerry, give the detail, how'd they miss such a big shallow target? I can see the rock there, might have something to do with it? I love the size/shape of that coil, perfect for around here.

I'm surprised they don't give dealers a machine to try and demo? It's hard to sell something and speak honestly about it without ever using it.

You could always buy one and try one Gerry, you're the one hoping to sell it ? At least then you'd know yourself if it's worth pushing onto customers and you'd be able to speak from personal experience when talking to customers about it. Your hesitations to do so likely match your customers hesitations to buy it too for the same reasons, it makes little sense to buy it. It might be selling well in the African market where it was likely designed for more than anything, if they've priced it right over there lower than the GM it'd sell well, the GM was a huge success in Africa and it's a very similar detector, Nokta know how to price product in markets to sell well. This comes from another dealers page which indicates it was designed for Africa more than anything. Lots of manufacturers seem to be going for the ease of use design philosophy for the African market lately with their models.

Where I would change Doc's scoop for my needs is in the photo below. I would trim off the edge at the black line and sharpen it, this makes brushing/pushing soil on bedrock into the scoop easier for the tiny gold hunting on bedrock I do as curved edges are just useless and flat is much better for having more contact with the ground, so little of the scoop is on the ground surface with rounded edges. Other than that small change I really like the design. Do that and I'd even pay the crazy US shipping.

My scoop has riffles, and as someone that often is on the hunt for absolutely tiny gold I find them beneficial in dry dirt. The biggest thing for me is the scoop having flat sharp edges so I can push tiny amounts of soil into it to get the littlest bits.

I wish USA shipping was cheaper, you make some really good products Doc but they are just insanely priced once shipping goes on top of them to get them to me. Your scoop looks great.

I had it on good authority not to buy one when I asked about buying it. The person was disappointed with it compared to other options on the market in our conditions here. I was told just buy one of the more versatile Nokta 61kHz detectors like the Gold Kruzer If I want to buy a Nokta gold prospecting detector, far better value for the money with better performance overall and far more features. They just wanted a competitor to the Gold Monster making their version of it, you'd be crazy to buy it when the pricing is so similar to the Kruzer. I'm completely with Steve, I want a designed from the ground up Multi Frequency prospecting machine, we all know that's the future of prospecting VLF's as evident by Multi-IQ.

Minelab are very smart, or manipulative... one of the two or a bit of both. The previous GPX 4500/5000 series wasn't so good on really small gold so you had to buy the SDC. At the time I am sure they could have made the timings that would slam on the small gold just as well as the SDC but then few people would buy both, or buy the SDC at all. Aftermarket coil manufacturers started to release coils like the little NF Sadie and the flat wound coils that rapidly started to catch it up to the SDC in small gold performance. Along comes the GPZ, the deepest they've made and clearly the most powerful yet they prevented it from being excellent at small gold by restricting small coils on it even though they said early on they were going to make a smaller one, they're not going to make that GPX mistake again where the GPX caught up to the SDC on small gold by aftermarket coils, perhaps they had the GPX 6000 plan way back then. Then comes the GPX 6000 which hits small gold similar to how the GPZ with small coil does and has many of the other attributes of the GPX 5000's performance except any of the setting as they decided people don't need settings, the machine is smarter than the people using it at selecting settings for them. That opens them up to making a GPX 7000 at some point with the performance of the GPX 6000 but with all the settings added back onto it along with the fully auto mode, and perhaps of course the discrimination on it again and once again it will sell very well as people get back what they miss from the 5000, so I'm sure the GPX 6000 won't be the last of the GPX series and the GPX 7000 will be significantly better by just doing that. The GPZ 8000 will come out with both big and small coils to retain it's top position in the line up. So yes, people are telling you the 6000 is making detecting fun again and finding lots of tiny bits of gold, that's what it was designed to do, find the small bits their previous models were designed to miss. We are just pawns with wallets ? Out of interest you said you didn't like the GPX 5000 as it was missing gold?, what timings were you running in when this took place? There are some timings that are far better than others on porous specimen type gold so timings could have something to do with it too. Yes the GPX 5000 isn't the best detector on that type of gold, but it still does pretty well when setup correctly. See the bottom line of this chart. This chart doesn't have Fine Gold as it was made for the GPX 4500 however if you were in Fine Gold you'd be missing gold no matter what, it's a very aggressive setting cancelling out hot rocks and bad ground and with it some gold will be missed. If you didn't need to be in it you shouldn't be in it. I think it's a shame you offloaded your GPX before really getting to know it as it's not as bad as you think and now you don't even have a PI to use at all without a very large investment to buy another one. You can easily make the GPX look poor on various gold nuggets by selecting the wrong timing and this is where the 6000 has an advantage, all gold, all the time and that's what they mean you don't need to be in the right timing anymore for the gold in the area you just turn it on and go. I think if you were to buy a 6000 you'd need to intend to use it outside of that junky area, it's very sensitive to small surface junk so you'd be digging a lot of it that you just skim over with your Nox and its discrimination. In areas like Rye patch it seems the 6000 would serve you very well getting the smaller bits others have missed in the past (by design) ? It's a very good detector and great at what it's designed to do and I'm sure you'd be happy with it if you were to broaden your detecting areas or have a lot of patience where you currently hunt.

You could make a range of stickers with different picture designs, even custom printed ones where people could submit photos and you turn it into a coil protection sticker. Would be quite a successful little side business I'd think.

With no chips in the coils they'd have an instant advantage if they did release a new lightweight land model. They have a good opportunity, it'd be a shame if they wasted it, just being able to sell it at a decent price would put a dent in Minelab's sales, especially in the US. What's making the 6000 popular in many places is its finding small gold the other detectors missed being less sensitive to small gold in their retail form. People who were finding very little are starting to come home with a rattle in their jar so naturally they're happy with their purchase because of this. If the ATX is capable of hitting this same small gold, especially with better coils then they really have potential for a decent selling detector. I'd buy their land model in a second if it came out and was capable of hitting 0.027 of a gram targets, and this is with their clunky stock coils, putting newer better designed coils on it would likely improve that small gold depth. The coil in that picture looks more like a concentric than a DD to me.

A vinyl sticker to put on the GPX 6000 coil to stop wearing a hole though the top of it with the scoop?

that's a great deal, I've paid more for an aftermarket Coil for my Gold Bug Pro. You did very well at $250 shipped. If this was their everyday price they'd sell a lot more of them that's for sure. It brings them into fierce competition with the Vanquish, Apex and Simplex where they belong.

I can vouch for his scales being good accurate ones ? I have the same. Yes, I'm quite surprised by the ATX too, if this is the case I have renewed attention towards the ATX. If it had some decent coils it'd probably be a weapon. It's a shame Garrett didn't take all of Steve's hints and remake the ATX as their lightweight modern PI in a new land housing while fixing all of the known flaws with it at the same time, it sounds like it has potential to be a very popular detector after a redesign or the housing and coils designed around light weight and a land scenario.

Now there is a Bounty Hunter Time Ranger pro all other models are a bit of a scam especially the Gold Bug Pro. Let's use Kellyco pricing as an example.... To buy the Gold Bug Pro it is $549 USD, it comes with the 5" coil. To buy the Time Ranger Pro it is $399 USD with the 11" coil. Kellyco don't sell the Time Ranger Pro, I wonder why? Now lets keep in mind the Time Ranger Pro is an upgraded version of the Gold Bug Pro with more features and a back light and with the more expensive bigger coil that costs $149 USD at Metaldetector.com and the Gold Bug Pro comes with the smaller 5" coil that costs $119 USD at Kellyco. So the main differences between the Gold Bug Pro and the F19 uhm, G2 uhm, Time Ranger Pro are Pinpoint in both disc and all metal modes Main volume control Ferrous volume control Notch accept or reject Notch width control LCD back light - With variations between shaft and coil to try make the models appear different. So when you add the price of the 5" coil which then gives you both the 11" coil and the 5" coil to the price of the Bounty Hunter with more features it comes out at $518, still cheaper than the plain featureless Gold Bug Pro and with two coils instead of one when the Bug is priced at $549. Selling the Gold Bug Pro in today's market is almost criminal and I feel sorry for anyone that buys it thinking they're getting something "better" when it is just the name people are paying more for. The Gold Bug, Gold Bug Pro, F19 and G2 either need their prices seriously adjusted or they need discontinued now the Time Ranger Pro is out.

I'm puzzled by your dislike of the 5000 and I recall it's because you were worried it missed certain types of porous gold and while you will possibly find the 6000 easier to use as some people do and it will hit on some gold the 5000 misses I think you should really take up peoples offer to let you try before you buy, I wish I did. Your area sounds a nightmare with a 6000 and perhaps your Nox is the best tool for the job. If you're planning on going prospecting all over the place then a 6000 might be worthwhile, but your 5000 would have been too and you offloaded it. Yes the 5000 will miss some gold for various reasons, so will the Equinox obviously with depth limitations, and so will the 6000. No detector is perfect and your expectations are possibly too high. You've got an offer to try before you buy, take that offer.

If a CTX 4040 came out and for some reason I didn't have the money to buy it I'd sell a kidney to get it as the CTX is the best deep old silver machine I've ever laid my hands on and it feels like I could go out blind folded and pull up a silver. I think if it does come out it's going to be similar pricing to the existing CTX which maybe out of reach for a fair few buyers, I think that's partly why the Nox took off so well, it was more affordable. The CTX being pretty expensive seems like it struggled to get the popularity of the Nox even when it was the hottest new thing in town. The Deus 2 faces the same thing, the Nokta Legend is stealing a lot of the Deus 2 sales because it's priced better, a lot of people who bought it are outright saying that's why they bought the Legend over the Nox and Deus 2 and with the world economies how they are price is likely to dictate a lot more buying decisions over the next year or however long. If a Nox 1000 came out (it needs to now they'll losing their dominance) then it will likely be affordable enough based off the existing Nox prices that it will sell like mad even with bad economies. Hopefully they improve build quality while keeping the price right, they'll save money in the long run with warranties anyway. I doubt the GPX 6000's sold well at all compared to when the 7000 came out and the sales it got are certainly not their forecast sales levels. It came out at a bad time and had a rough release. I wonder if more people are giving up prospecting than are taking it up too, bound to happen at some point as the gold gets even harder to find. There was a flurry of older model GPX's being imported into NZ prior to the 6000 release from Africa with people using them as trade in's for the 6000, I bought one of them but they've completely dried up, they stopped shortly after the 6000 release, I might be reading into that too much but perhaps the Africans didn't find it as good as they were expecting or they just didn't have the financial means to justify paying the price it sells for over what they could get a GPX 5000 for so the people offloading their 5000's ground to a halt. I'm glad I got one of the African imports when I did as I really like the GPX 5000 and the fact it's got discrimination for deep coin hunting and on beaches and the crazy good figure 8 anti interference coils and it handles the bad hot rock areas better than the other high end machines. The Nox was at the end of it's good sales cycle anyway as most who wanted one already had one by now so they're due for another release and the longer they take the more sales they'll lose to the Legend and Deus 2 and people who just bought a new detector are less likely to jump on another one. They either release it soon or wait a year or two and just have low sales figures from the Nox in the mean time.

I'm a bit puzzled by Rye Patch, Obviously I know very little about it as I'm on the other side of the planet but some say it's hunted out and coils been over ever square inch, some say it's not and there is plenty of gold there to be found. The results from the photos above to me says there is plenty of gold left there, albeit mostly small, unless Gerry takes his customers to secret spots away from the heavy detecting traffic that are just unknown areas. Those customers presumably quite inexperienced at least with using their detectors to be there in the first place did remarkably well. The Nox users seemed to pull a decent amount of gold, not much different to others really. It's more getting the coil over the gold than the detector used by the look of most of those results. Yes, there maybe some nuggets certain detectors do better than others on but they all did very well I think. I'm sure some of those Nox users went away from the event thinking they saved a lot of money on their detector yet still did pretty well by comparison. Yes I know part of your course is showing some detectors will hit other nuggets better than others and deeper etc, great tool for up selling and educational purposes as it really is a fact, over all I think all of the customers in the photos did pretty well and deserve a pat on the back, and by the way it was described the Nox users deserve the biggest pat on the back as they had all the odds against them and pulled through with the goods. Did we have any first nugget found people there Gerry? Did you break any in! I'd like to go to Rye Patch some day, It'd be interesting to experience it myself. Western Australia would also be on the bucket list especially if the world hits a global cooling period, too hot for me. I like your story posts Gerry, great photos too. Just one more thing, how does the guy in the 3rd photo not smack himself in the face with his pick all the time with where he positions his pick holder? ?

Looks like a great trip with a good supply of nuggets, the Nox users appeared to do very well even getting some of the bigger bits, you're very good at what you do Gerry ?

yup, latest update is all you need. Firmware isn't like software, you don't patch updates onto it by updating small portions, in fact that'd be extremely difficult, a firmware flash erases the flash rom and flashes on the version you're flashing.

Nenad put up a photo on Facebook of the new 16x10" coil, it looks quite nice. Pretty well defined windings on it.

It lets me install it from here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bleu122.goterrain For people with an Android phone I've dumped the 32bit and 64bit APK installer files on my Google drive. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MR5x0_Q1VbNr0lvqjabBI2OjDXqZar5h?usp=sharing You can just install it with any APK installer like this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apkinstaller.ApkInstaller&hl=en&gl=US

Here is a decent video from Tassie Boys Prospecting, he's actually one of the new Minelab detect-spurts. Tasmania detecting is much like NZ detecting, the bushland looks VERY similar, so it might go some way into explaining why I like certain detectors and coils more than others ? One of my favourite creeks is so hard to get into now it's getting near impossible and like these guys it's full of hot rocks that send detectors wild, the problem is there is gold to be found if I'm patient enough and willing to crawl through the bush to get to it.

You might be right about that version of the adapter causing a problem with the detector seeing it JP especially with larger coils, I secured all of my coil cables with a round lump as you can see in the photo below which stops them moving inside the shaft. On the very sensitive coils like the 8" I also have this lump down near the coil to stop the coil cable moving inside the shaft as much like the 6000 the GPZ picks up the coil cable moving when using smaller coils. X-coils don't recommend that style of adapter, it's just something a few of us have done for convenience of changing coils and is best only used with small coils for the reason you point out above. I have both sorts of adapter and my larger coils are all using the short standard little adapter with my smaller coils on this adapter style. I would always suggest people stick with the standard adapter method not this long style one, I just wanted to try one out. I forgot to mention and people have probably already done it but you'll see on the plug end I have a little white line, this makes plugging the coils in so much easier to line up the plug quickly, worth doing if anyone hasn't done it.

That's correct, I can still use the NF coil if I wanted to, you can see in the second picture a new plug end if back on it. I just didn't care about the warranty on that coil as I'd never use it so it shouldn't fail just sitting there, where as I'd rather keep the original Minelab coil intact which is also under warranty as it holds more value to me than the NF coil. I have so much better coils for my needs the NF coil will just never be used so it made perfect sense to use it to make an adapter. In hindsight I wouldn't have even bought it, but with the reasonably good reviews I thought it might be better than it is.

TV in the UK has, at last, released in full, their 2013 highly successful Metal Detecting series – Hoard Hunters. Metal detectorists Gary Brun and Gordon Heritage are joined by archaeologist Mike Webber as they revisit the sites of known treasure hoards to piece together history and perhaps find more artifacts. The series, from ITV Studios, combines history and humour to show what may have been left behind at the sites, with the boys having the advantage over previous diggers of state-of-the-art equipment, technical prowess, and a proven track record. For many viewers, Gary and Gordon’s passion for the hobby led to their own involvement in the hobby and both remain highly respected around the world. Many hobbyists have inquired about viewing the show outside of the UK. So. It is with great delight, and a helpful poke from Gary, that we introduce you to the full series of Hoard Hunters. Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Episode 5 Episode 6 Episode 7