phrunt

Let's not forget the original post was asking the easiest and best ways to setup a GPX 5000 that he was given for free, so the idea was to help him set it up and get it up and running for him to find some gold and not talk him into buying a different detector, especially spending another 8000 AUD on one so he may or may not pick up some specimen gold that may or may not be in his detecting area which is probably unrealistic anyway for a guy that was just given a detector to get him started with prospecting with a detector. As stated earlier he can always get a VLF like the Equinox, Garrett 24k or Gold Monster to complement his GPX if he decides to stick with the hobby and do very well with the combination. He can always choose to upgrade later if he finds it necessary to spend that sort of money. As Northeast said at the start of the post and I quote, "2 issues arising is that Jim has been given the 5000 but I am unclear if he has it to do whatever he wants with or just given 'the use of it' for as long as he wants. The second issue is that Jim needs to spend some time getting out and prospecting to see if he actually enjoys it before investing his own $'s in some new equipment. Hence why I'm just trying to get him set up and working in a manner that is going to effective but not overly frustrating re: ground noise/ghost signals/EMI. " As for saying the VLF is better at this type of gold, that's all well and good, but someone in Australia where Northeast and his friend live is going to miss a hell of a lot more gold swinging a VLF than they are going to miss swinging a 5000. It's like the guy saying Question: How do I setup and use my new GPX 5000? Answer: You don't, you need to buy another detector, your GPX may miss some gold in some circumstances, you need a better detector.

I plugged in a mufti meter to verify, pin 5 is the charging pin, putting out 24v on the charging power cord. No other pin has voltage output. So the lighter socket would be 12v on that pin 5 if your car does 12v, some cars do 24v too I guess. I don't have the 12v car charger with me to check as I'm away from home at the moment for a few days.

Yep, your guess is probably right, heavily notated gives it away 🙂 It's fine to put 12v straight into the battery, the standard plug that comes with the GPX is 24v 1 amp. From the manual... Be careful soldering a GPX coil connector, if there is a short or you wire it incorrectly you can blow the detector. Make sure you do it right.

Yup it was a killer deal, the 18x12" might be a decent beach coil too. So the Americans understand, it was $1250 USD for the GPX 5000 with 3 coils including a Coiltek Elite, 18x12" Coiltek and the 11" Commander and 3 months warranty. A pretty good deal.

Did you buy the one at Cash Converters? It seemed a good deal that one especially with the coils, I was going to buy it but decided I didn't want a second GPX 5000 and was concerned it was missing quite a few things that a new one comes with like chargers, glad it came with the battery though as when I asked what it comes with they sent photos and there was no battery. 🙂 Yes, the charging circuit is in the battery itself, so you just need to get the 12v juice to the battery using the Pin 5 as the power input. Jaycar sell all you'd need to make one. The Chinese sell made up ones too on Aliexpress for about 20 bucks as the NZ ML dealers don't carry stock of them as the GPX comes with it when new.

You could buy one of these T-shirts off Aliexpress, sometimes I really don't think the Chinese sellers understand what they're selling, something gets lost in translation 🙂

I don't get sore legs detecting often, I think because my legs are so sore from skiing I don't even feel pain in them anymore 🙂 You're rapidly becoming the coin king! That's a bucket load of coins, that would be a fun day. The V8 will miss the deep stuff so when you go back you'll end up finding all the deep silvers with the V12 🙂

Yes, they're hollow tubes. These photos give a better idea of size. Maybe it's a part of Alf's spaceship.

Well, today I was having a bit of a go with my CTX 3030 and come across a target that seemed odd, it was a big target I knew that with the abundance of Target information the CTX gives and the Target Trace pinpoint is cool. I dug it out of interest more than anything, I'd never normally dig something like this but it was rather deep and weird, and I think I found Batman's Binoculars? Does anyone have any idea what this is, it's heavy, solid metal...

Yes, Cors and Nel are the same company, the US tends to get Cors branded coils, and the rest of the world Nel. Not sure why they've done that. Both coil types perform exactly the same and are made at the same factory in Ukraine. I was buying direct from Nel and I was able to choose Cors branded or Nel branded. I'm a big fan of Nel/Cors coils but I found the Sharpshooter 9.5x5.5 to be no better than the Fisher 10x5", in fact I found the Fisher coil to be better. While my experience is with the Fisher Gold Bug Pro rather than the F75, I don't know if there would be much of a difference. It's very unlike me not to recommend a Nel over a stock coil, but in this case I think it's probably a good move to go stock. The Fisher coil was more sensitive (to small gold), both had similar if not the same depth on coins and I preferred the solid design of the Fisher, neither perform noticeably better than the other in EMI either. In a coin hunting scenario where needing the hotter tip of the Fisher coil isn't as necessary as gold prospecting it probably doesn't matter so I'd just buy which ever was cheapest. As for build quality, I'd likely give that to the Nel... the Fisher ears scare me being thin but so far I've had no problems, they just look like they'd break easily. The Nel is just tough.

On a Windows PC pressing CTRL and P at the same time generally is the shortcut keys to print from anything. From there you can select the printer, either your actual printer or there should be an option of Save to PDF where you can save it as a file for later reading.

I'd stick with the GB2 for now and try find a GPX 4500 for sale second hand for the price you can afford. $2000 USD would easily buy a GPX 4500 here in New Zealand, not sure about there. In fact there is a GPX 5000 for sale at a second hand dealer here at the moment currently at auction with $1149 NZD (about $800 USD) with a Coiltek Elite coil. I've got my eye on it although I really don't need it 😛 The good thing about buying at second hand dealers though is you get a minimum of 90 day warranty on it. The shop knows nothing about detectors as evident by how they've displayed it 😜

There are a lot of variables to answer that question, Firstly where are you going to be prospecting? This is a good place to start reading.

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.