phrunt

yes, Night and Day between a Commander coil and a spiral wound coil and a reasonably cheap upgrade to do that certainly enhances performance especially on small gold, a good point Ryan.

Joe, good post, I'm glad you've got a Vanquish now, I must be out of the loop as I didn't know that. If only the Equinox had the Vanquish coils ? I'm sure in some circumstances what makes me do better with the Vanquish than the Nox is the elliptical coils. I've never even used my V8 coil other than for testing on gold nuggets and some rudimentary depth tests in comparison to other detectors and coils. I should fire it up some time and see how it really goes. I'm been so slack on posts lately and you've inspired me to get my act into gear, it's not that I'm not out finding stuff, I just haven't posted about it. Thanks for your post, and good work on the silver as I know how much harder silver is to find in your neck of the woods and I'm glad your trotter is getting better.

I find it quite a light detector too, especially after converting it to a full carbon shaft and seeing I'm anti cords I first started using the DD leather cover with battery mounting on the side which I still found light compared to the GPZ. I've since gone to a lightweight lipo battery on the side which weighs next to nothing. I then have a JBL wind speaker on it to give me nice loud cord free audio with the speaker cord just running on the detector across to the side mount battery but also have a Bluetooth low latency transmitter if I wanted to use any other bluetooth cordless audio options. These are all quite cheap things that Northeasts friend can do to "modernize" his GPX" to get it cord free and wireless audio for very little money. Especially just mounting the battery on the side using a DD leather case and getting rid of the big heavy curly cable and using a short battery lead. They were the things I didn't like about the GPX and easily fixed. I do mostly find small gold around here, under a gram is 98% of the gold, with a good 50% or more of that under .1 of a gram. For me the GPX has found 0.05 of a gram nuggets with the 10" round X-coil which I think is quite respectable. The GPZ obviously finds smaller as I've regularly been getting 0.03 of a gram and sometimes even smaller depending on how solid and round the bit is and the GPZ is certainly deeper on the smallest bits. Yes, the GPX 6000 is possibly the best on small gold of the high end Minelab options in their stock form, other than using a VLF but is it wise for your buddy to sell his free 5000 and buy a 6000 for the purpose of finding a bit smaller gold when he doesn't even know if he's going to stick with it and is finding that small gold really that important in the cost vs benefit ratio? It appears we don't have specimen gold around here, so I'm not all that concerned about that side of things but that's what Gerry was talking about, knowing the gold in your area so you know you're not using the wrong detector for the job. A cheaper VLF like the Equinox. GM1000 or Garrett 24k combined with the GPX can be a reasonable cheaper remedy for that. The GPX 5000 with an anti interference coil (figure 8 windings) is just crazy how good it is in high EMI areas, you can take it places you'd never expect a detector to work well and still have PI performance, my 11" Coiltek AI coil seems to me very similar in performance as the 11" DD Commander, but with virtually no EMI anywhere showing the versatility of the GPX. This anti GPX 4500/5000 stance triggered something in me as I find both of them to be excellent detectors and I'm sure your buddy will too Northeast, once he gets over the small learning curve he'll be fine with it and I'm sure he'll start finding gold too. Just don't let him get lost in the settings as he really doesn't need to. Advise him to bury a few nuggets and experiment with the settings to see what he finds suitable.

If someone can't work the GPX out they just need to ask their grand children to do it for them. ? A joke by the way...

I respectfully have to disagree, the GPX 4500/5000 are very good detectors, yes, the GPX won't find some odd unusual types of gold, nor will many PI detectors, nor on occasion will my GPZ and a VLF certainly won't find a lot of gold either, as it's just not deep enough of a detector to do so. I have a nugget that barely gets a hit on my GPX or GPZ even though it's a decent size and yes of course the Equinox gets it. That doesn't make my GPX and GPZ useless detectors, perhaps if you lived in a specific location that had that gold type they're not good on another detector might be the better choice like the SDC or perhaps the GPX 6000, if you don't have that gold in your area or very little of it then it makes no difference if it will respond poorly on it. The GPX for many years has found a majority of the gold around the world. Yes, the Equinox is simple, it's also very shallow in bad soils, even my soils which are milder in the gold areas here than most peoples the Equinox has a dramatic depth loss than if I was just park hunting, the GPX would destroy the Equinox on any reasonable size gold that has some depth to it that's not this unusual specimen type gold. As Northeast's buddy is in Australia I wouldn't think advising someone to sell a GPX 5000 to buy an Equinox or any VLF for that matter for prospecting would be a wise move. For me having a GPX and a VLF is a good idea to cover all bases, fortunately the VLF's cost very little. Just having a VLF and not the GPX..... not such a good plan. This guy with the GPX can just do a few simple settings changes to adjust the detector to his area the first time he uses it and go, he doesn't need to be a settings guru, I set my settings once and that's it, if he hunts the same area with similar soil that's all he'll need to do too as it remembers the settings at power off. If not, adjusting a couple of settings for a different area is no big deal if he puts in 10 minutes to learn the basics of the GPX. The GPX is as hard to use as you want it to be.... I think it's very simple to use unless you want to get tweaking to get even more out of it and when you're ready to do that you would understand what you want to tweak.

The Island is very small, I drive around it on a Jetski and it didn't take very long ? Fortunately for people living there if they need to they can catch a ferry across to the mainland which takes about 20 minutes from memory and arrive at a reasonable sized city called Townsville.

He has moved onto different ventures, and Nenad is going to take over production of the SP01.

With regard to the speaker not working well on the GPX for your sisters boyfriend are you sure the speaker is wired correctly to engage the amplifier in the battery? To engage the amp it needs audio to tip and the shield to ring with nothing to the sleeve. If wired incorrectly it will think it's headphones connected and disengage the amplifier so you don't blow your ears off. I had a thread on here with all the information but I had it deleted ? The other thing is the amplifiers in the batteries do have a component that can fail, unfortunately now Steelphase is no longer in business this might be harder to get, he used to sell the little kits to fix it for about $20. He might say where he sourced the parts for the kits, probably Jaycar ? It's easy for him to try another curly cord to see if it's the problem but I doubt it is. You're pretty much covered your own question on usage and done very well to understand the detector quickly. I always found this Phil Beck treasure talk good for understanding GPX audio https://www.minelab.com/community/treasure-talk/gpx-audio-controls Your guy by running his stabilizer at half of his gain obviously likes the smoother running with a lot of stabilization, to me that's not so good as he's weakening the performance on very small gold. I preferred to run mine as high as I could get away with. 1 is maximum stabilizer and 20 is basically off. A lot of people seemed to run theirs with a gain of something like 12 and stabilizer of 10, the 2 digit rule of two below the gain but I never liked that, I ran mine with as little stabilizer as I was comfortable with while still keeping a reasonably stable threshold. When you're just learning the detector though running high stabilizer can be beneficial as the smoother the detector the easier to learn to use it. It's confusing as low numbers are high stabilizer and high numbers are less... kind of back the front ?

The built in speakers mean a lot to me, it's all I ever want to use so it's vital they're good quality and capable of decent volume level and not detrimental to the stability of the detector. If it's impossible to have an internal speaker the WM12 type solution is acceptable for me but I'd rather it be Bluetooth LL or even better Bluetooth 5.2 with LC3 to be more standardized and better performance anyway so if I did want to use alternative solutions I could.

On the GPX you can put on a DD coil which dramatically reduces the troubles with hot rocks. It also has timings like enhance that allow you to work with hot rocks with mono coils. I also found larger mono coils handle them better than smaller coils. Some light reading.... https://www.minelab.com/community/treasure-talk/hot-rocks-part-2 I found the GPX handled hot rocks very well overall. I should add the SDC is very popular in Australia for a reason, it finds plenty of gold, and is sensitive to the smaller stuff although a GPX with a small coil is pretty competitive on the small stuff I think. If you want to try find bigger deeper nuggets then the GPX is the better choice. If you want to consistently find gold having the smaller gold sensitivity of the SDC may mean you go home more often with gold in your bottle as seeing you have the option you'll probably end up running bigger coils more often on the GPX, something like a 14x9"/15x10" was my favourite size for regular use for quite a while and only used the smaller sizes when hunting bedrock. Often having the extra ground coverage helped me find more gold than having the extra small gold sensitivity of a smaller coil. Your GB2 if it handles your ground will be good for finding your tiny bedrock gold.

You're an extremely lucky guy to live a 1 minute walk to Alma bay! You live in a very special place, one of my favourite spots in the world. Alma bay is like a nice warm bath tub, you can just float around in the crystal clear waters enjoying life. Congratulations on your finds!

4500 has far more features and more versatile, is still quite good on small gold and I've found below 0.1 of a gram with it down to about 0.05 of a gram from memory as you can put very small coils on it, it's also good on bigger deeper gold. Just because it has a lot of settings doesn't mean it's difficult to use, it's only complicated if you want it to be. The SDC is more switch on and go, the GPX does require some setting selection to set it up for your location. Look at the size of the SDC coil, and look at the area you want to detect.... The GPX can run coils from 6" to 20+ inch and there are literally hundreds of coils to choose from where as coils are very limited on the SDC.

X-coils are currently working hard on making and testing various models of coils. They've now competed an 8" Coil which is working very well. This one would be one I would have to have for the 6000 as I love this coil on my GPZ, it's really one of my favourite coils, the other being the 15" Concentric although I'm not sure if we will see Concentric coils on the GPX, who knows...... ? Here is a video of it being used. And here is it next to it's 11" coil that went through open heart surgery to allow the X-coils to live ? Things are progressing well for them and another size that I would desperately want is currently being made but until it's tested and verified as a good working size that's kept under wraps.

You need to fix that little advertising thing at the bottom of your posts advertising the hipstick, I click on that and it takes me to some foreign gambling site with spyware on it.

I find it quite painful you're not digging targets 25 and up, I used to do the same thing just to dig all the common coin types that fall mostly between 9 and 22 here, then I was finding minimal silver, I changed to digging everything over 25 and my junk intake didn't change all that much but my silver intake grew rapidly.

That's the ticket, plenty of good spots to find for those on the hunt, that's a decent collection of stuff. Looks like you were likely the first to hit that area.

Depends on your location, have a good popular beach nearby and a poor performing gold field and the beach hunter wins hands down. Have a top notch area looking for gold and a lousy unpopular beach nearby and the gold prospector wins by far. From what I can see a few prospectors do extraordinarily well, ounces and ounces of gold a year easily enough to make a tidy living by, and a few beach hunters find 100 or so rings a year... they're the extreme end of each type of hunting and a lot of it is based upon where they live or have access to that dictates their success. For the average Joe with average areas to hunt it probably makes little difference either way, for me especially.... I am pretty sure I could find about the same amount of rings by weight each year as I could gold nuggets if I spent the time looking, I just prefer looking for nuggets. If I was budget conscious I'd be better off looking for rings, easier to access locations with a shorter drive thereby costing less to do, and to have a top of the line detector for rings sure costs a lot less than the over inflated prices of prospecting detectors. Finding a ring is cool but to me it's just something someone has lost, there is something far more special about finding a gold nugget.

Garrett probably replaced the PCB as a precaution more so than they found a problem with it, we used to do similar in the computer service center I worked for in my younger days. If we were unable to find a fault we'd just replace the component anyway for customers that were sure their unit was faulty, if we missed the fault the problem is resolved and it keeps the customer a bit happier that you did all possible to resolve their problem. It popped up time to time that a customer wanted to play one particular game and the game kept crashing yet the machine was in spec to easily handle the game, yet the game kept crashing and all other games worked fine... Sometimes it came down to an entire machine being replaced for them to see the problem was the game and not the machine. If the problem still exists on the detector after the PCB replacement it's not so much a fault as a limitation, or in the computers case a likely compatibility problem. Sounds like the Apex MF method just isn't up to the same standards of ground handling as the Multi-IQ MF method for your soil type. Garrett did all they can do from a customer service standpoint I guess, other than replacing the coil too although it's harder to reuse that, your faulty but not faulty PCB will likely go into another repair at some point.

Great way to spend a morning! Well done on the ring too.

To top this story off the 6" Concentric coil and coil cover I ordered from the USA never arrived, it passed the Ebay delivery date whereby buyer protection starts to run out so I contacted Ebay and said it never arrived, they did their checks with USPS and refunded me the money, so it's Ebay and Ebays Pitney Bowes shipping company that loses out, not the dealer in the US as they were only responsible for getting it to Pitney Bowes and they did that, then Pitney Bowes is responsible for getting it to me. The things I go through to try buy products that for others are easily accessible... ? In a way it's a good thing as I ended up not needing it anyway after buying one from Australia, I only bought the US one as I thought the Australian one was never going to arrive which I explained earlier in this thread What a nightmare this process has turned into. Shipping with any courier other than DHL is terrible at the moment with Covid going on for parcels to New Zealand. With DHL I would have had either coil order in around a week at the most. Who knows, maybe the coil and cover will arrive in 3 or so months like happened with the Sampson T Handle I had shipped from the US, it was considered lost and over 3 months later arrived at my door but it's tracking showed it made it to Australia then went back to the USA and a couple of months passed and then it's tracking number came alive again and eventually arrived in NZ ?

That is a shame to hear how bad the CTX can be in the water, I've not used mine in the water and never intend to, it's the new model with the gray washers obviously but now I just don't trust it. I can't be bothered dealing with warranty if it drowns. I'm not a big water person anyway and I can use the Nox for that when I do want to get a detector wet as I know my Nox handles water well, it spent two days and two nights in the bottom of my Spa being tested for leaks when I first heard about Nox leaks ?

I feel I'm really missing out not having easy access to these European machines.... One just has to be in my future, although it might be difficult, they are not even on Ebay.

Fortunately we don't have any of those critters and creatures here so I have little to worry about prospecting other than losing my scoop ? They're some tiny little nuggets you've got there.

Gerry, what are your thoughts on the grey seal upgrade kits for the older 3030's, I've seen them around on sale for cheap prices, would this resolve his leaking issues if it's an older model?