Jonathan Porter

In locations 'you know' it can be only gold this method is a viable solution to help increase productivity. I have a location where I left 20 targets in the ground and they can ONLY be gold. Kneel down scrape with the scoop, wave scoop over coil repeat a few times till its only the target and a small amount of material in the scoop, tip soil in a pay-dirt bag, get back up and move on to the next target. You WILL save an inordinate amount of time and more particularly discomfort as that last stage of trying to extract a tiny flake from clays is a real time waster.

Wow someone woke up on the wrong side of taking themselves too seriously‼️ 😮. OBVIOUSLY IT WASN’T FOUND WITH A GOLD MONSTER. But it WAS found by me recently pounding on the ground with a pick instead of being like some who love pounding on a keyboard. 🤦 Something I learned a long time ago, you look for negativity all the time and that’s all you’re ever going to find. 🧐 Here’s some pics of some non-faulty Monster Gold, some found by me and some by my happy customers, who if they ever have a problem come to me and I get it sorted.

All I can say is during development of the Equinox 800 I (and others), very quickly discovered Multi frequency was heaps better to use over single frequency even though that single frequency was the highest the EQ8 could go, so it should have been the higher frequency that was doing all the work on the small gold. MF was just heaps nicer to listen to and use on that machine. The GM2 is a true MF machine and has taken a significantly BIGGER step into the MF realm, it requires MF to do what it does so cleverly and uniquely. Kudos to the Minelab Engineers on this one. ☝️

@Norvic my favourite sort of 'fiasco' is banging on the ground with a ruddy BIG pick digging ruddy deep gold nuggets. 😁

Sorry I missed this question @Jeff McClendon. The low Tx power hasn't anything to do with the Gm2's performance (relative to a PI that is), but the nature of Multi frequency is low power consumption compared to a PI. Because it is low power consumption it doesn't suffer anywhere near as much with Saturation or Conductive, although if you read between the lines Conductive signals are a BIG deal with the GM2, so much so that the Difficult mode is more about the removal of conductive signals than it is about mineralisation. I would say they had to name the mode that way to be better aligned with other Minelab products like the GPX 6000, but also most customers think conductive signal's are Difficult ground anyway so it simplifies things from a naming convention POV. Minelab have some very secret sauce going on with the GM2 that is unique to itself based on the Multi-Freq platform. That's why I keep saying why worry about Benign mode we've had over 40 years of single freq VLF scouring the Goldfields that is a flogged dead duck AFAIC, it would be much better focusing on the truly unique way the GM2 deals with ground signals and targeting areas that are conducive to a tech that has never existed before. A bigger coil will help, but we are dealing with 76 kHz so depth is relative. I'm seeing more depth with the 10" proto but the big advantage is more ground coverage with hardly any tradeoff on sensitivity, its currently my favourite coil on the GM2. The heavier weight allows for smoother coil movement which allows better coil control for experimentation on edge of detection, the GM2 has a surprising amount of edge of detection examination information buried within the audio you just need to learn how to unlock it, there is way less filtering on them compared to a QED, Axiom or Algo E1500.

If someone is trying to educate that's not shooting down that's someone honestly and openly trying to lift up. 🤦 Sadly in this day and age there's a tendency to just anchor in pride with a full blown refusal to become openly enlightened hence why others eventually give up. We aren't all blessed with the exact same amount of knowledge or information therefore all opinions can't be equal, sadly in this PC world it is no longer viable for someone with knowledge to bother trying to educate those without. Pics of ground worked and gold found using Benign mode whilst testing. I would still rather use Normal or Difficult with the GM2, even in that dead quiet NZ like ground. Thats were the differences lay in the tech. Minelab Visit (pics used with permission) The CR guys will recognise this fellow from Belgium. HINT: check out his Manticore tattoo. He arrived very confident in his Manticore and left a GM2 convert even in the mega mild soils, he was very open to being educated and left very much more experienced and informed.

Happy New Year everyone: 🍻 @phrunt the above is a massive assumption based on what? One location? I get where you're constantly coming from but your opinions and discussions are based on WAY MORE TIME spent thinking and typing about it in comparison to way less time actually spent doing it in a bigger variety of locations. Think about this for a minute, the GM2 is a Multi Frequency VLF, the GM1 is a single frequency unit, on the gold these units are good but they both don't really 'stand out' from the PI crowd for depth, especially the GPX 6000. The other thing to consider is the GM1 is running at 45kHz which has better outright depth as a single frequency than 76kHz on the GM2 especially on larger pieces (assuming Benign on the GM2 is single Freq, but either way its max Freq is still 76kHz!!!). Back in the day the XT17000 was running at 32kHz which had heaps better depth than the White's Vsat at 48 kHz, our ratio in the day was I would get double the amount of pieces with the Whites Vsat (often triple) but the XT 17000 would get double the weight (often triple). The majority of gold I'm finding with the GM2 is in thrashed locations hammered by PI, and the vast majority of it is either on the surface or just under it. The deepest I've dug for gold with the GM2 is 7 inches for a 1.2 gram piece in a wet creek bed (conductive signals killed the PIs there hence why the nugget was missed). Quite often I will get a faint signal with the GM2, dig it up then check the hole and there will be more, hours later I've got dozens of bits with still more signals in the hole and my back is throbbing so I down tools and scarper away telling myself I'll come back (I still haven't for dozens of them, to me the thought of it is worse than going to the gym!!). We are talking thousands of small pieces of gold now and hundreds of fun filled hours picking them up. Yet here we are all caught up in semantics about depth on known test targets in just a couple of very low VRM locations! Its kind of like hitting your head against a brick wall, complaining it hurts, then repeating things over and over expecting the outcome to change. This type of thing is a common error that users make whenever a new tech comes out, losing sight of the bigger picture or worse boohooing something because they can't prove to themselves what others are clearly demonstrating. All goldfields have quiet ground, I have heaps of it here where the only thing that really effects your detector is the conductive signals after rain events. YES the NZ test location ground is really benign, but its just one location and yet its has described problematic areas within that location that sound horrendous. I've got plenty of places I tested the GM2 and got bugger all gold, heaps of them were duffers, I just pressed on and refined my searches till I hit the sweet spot, I'm still refining it, just like with every new detector release I've been involved with over the past 30 years. The Gold Monster 2000 is a totally new Multi Frequency detector that deals with ground noise in a unique way, theres nothing like it in the world and to the tiny gold spectrum of gold detection it is akin to the release of PI back in 1995. I saw plenty of people doing depth test and comparisons with the SD2000 and complaining, one guy who really stood out showed me a piece of cigarette packet foil and said the SD2000 was useless because it wouldn't make a signal on it, I pulled 7 ounces out of my pocket that I'd found the day before and said "who cares, it made signals on these though!!!!" His mouth closed shut, the guy went away and later found a crap-load of gold, that was in Nullagine WA in July of 1995. He just needed convincing. I consider the Benign mode on the GM2 to be a legacy mode, its a harken back to a now bygone era. Who cares if you can't get it to hit as hard or as deep as other single or Multi machines in Benign soils?

Pure gold and the birthplace of my career, I compare all goldfields to the Palmer.

@phrunt its an in-house joke for my many customers who read this forum and a bit of advice I doubt you will ever fully understand or appreciate in your ground, the key point being I always advise and demonstrate during training sessions why you shouldn't scrub the ground with any of the high power Minelab units till you at the very least know how to recognise Saturation signals and fully appreciate their cost to performance on deep gold. Maintaining good coil control is vital with any metal detector, its the physical movement and orientation of the Rx in the 3D space that is so critical. The secret sauce of metal detecting. Even the GM2000 has secret sauce on edge of detection gold if you care to delve. 🤫 I drum in these points constantly during training, so for me to say 'you have my permission to scrub' will be quite funny to some who read this and also a lot of nodding of heads at the same time in agreement. 🤣 73 gram piece I got with ZVT at close to 2 1/2 feet in SATURABLE soils a few weeks back, if I'd been scrubbing the coil this nugget and many others would still be in the ground, missed by me and ALL the other operators who've smashed the hell out of this spot in the past.

I'm curious as to why Auto2 is constantly being used for depth tests? The number displayed is the sensitivity chosen by the algorithm but its information isn't entirely sourced from mineralisation signals. As an example I have very low mineral ground here in Clermont that throws VERY low sensitivity numbers in the Auto2 mode. The other thing is the Auto modes don't just 'grab' the ground condition, so pumping the coil does not give a clear indication of the optimal sensitivity level required/achieved in any given location, you have to swing the coil close to the ground over time to achieve an average. Getting back to the low mineral ground I have here, I have to use Difficult in a lot of low mineral areas because there is an extremely high amount of conductive signals present which the Auto modes also takes into account. A test you can do to get a feel for the GM2's Tx power is find some conductive ground (example video in link GM2000 Conductive Ground , apologies for the poor voice audio, just read the Captions). If you experience ground like what's in the video you will have no choice but to use Difficult, both Normal and Difficult on the GM2 handle mineralisation equally well (compared to Benign). A way to see the differences for yourself in the power outputs between a PI and the GM2 is just lift the little 5" coil away from conductive ground and you will quickly realise it doesn't react to the conductive signal for very long, this is due to lower power Tx from the coil (compared to a PI) and the small coil, if I was using the GPX 6000 in the same location the detector would howl as you move the coil from ground to above shoulder height and back again, the PI can see the conductive signal meters above the ground whereas the GM2 barely reacts once its above 10 inches (as shown in the video by the way I'm sweeping the coil with only the centre of the swing being near the ground but lifting up and away on the sides). These things are not negatives for the GM2 but STRENGTH's, the GM2 has the ability to work ground the PIs struggle in, it barely Saturates (means you have my permission to SCRUB the coil 🤣), it barely reacts to EMI, it has the ability to handle conductive ground and it barely murmurs on high mineralisation levels. This is a boon for new users as it doesn't punish for bad coil control etc. But its not the be-all and end-all in every circumstance, first the gold has to be there at a depth that the GM2 can operate at, those tiny nuggets have minute Eddie Currents so the distance the coil can sense them from is not big!! In all my testing I quickly learnt the quieter the ground the shallower it needs to be, in a lot of cases I would hear a beep look down and there it would be glinting in the sun, more often that not I would just take a scoop and not bother with a pick. This is because the ground has been done to death for 30 years with every tech and coil combination imaginable. But you NEED to TARGET the right areas and theres a chance your goldfields don't have those RIGHT AREAS, only you can answer that. Any sluiced ground, or surfacing areas known for plentiful gold in the past are ideal, or the old boys digger heaps, but the fine grained ones not the stacked rock piles unless there was specimen gold to be had. The rock piles get rained on and any tiny nuggets get flushed down to the soil layers in the rock piles, far out of the reach of the Monster2 unless you rake them down.

Boy oh Boy don't take it so personally, its not just about air testing, I'm just trying to enlighten you a bit about your home turf and the equipment you are using, shutting down discourse by hiding behind some illusionary unique ground type exclusive to 'only you' is not the answer. There's a learning opportunity here if you care to look. I mean surely you can see you've kind of contradicted yourself in your own thread by saying you have unique low mineral ground where the GM2 is pointless but then demonstrate the horrible greenstones a ML can't handle. What do you think is in those greenstone schist's that's causing all the trouble? How do you think the tiny water worn nuggets work their way down into the interleaved country rock? What do you think happens to the noisy stuff in the schists when the country weathers? Here's a few more clues to try and help you achieve some success with the GM2, the detector is very low power as such it does not have a lot of depth on the targets it's good at (these are targets an Algo, a 6000 or ZVT, no matter what coil you care to put on it, can see), so you have to work to its strengths. I suggest you find shallow clays that are gold bearing..... stop trying to punch into the schists, focus instead on the clay layers in the wash areas the old boys have worked, either in the bases of their diggings or the throw outs themselves. In low mineral ground the advantage is only a few inches so focus on those locations that have had plentiful small gold that a PI can't see. Its there you will really start to enjoy the GM2. Don't bother with Benign mode, use Normal with manual sensitivity at full then go find some shitty ground the Manticore hates.

I think you are still missing the point @phrunt. PI and ZVT are time domain which is how they deal with mineralisation in whichever timing you choose, if a PI or ZVT outperforms a VLF, by definition there has to be mineralisation present. This is why I suggest you do an air-depth test, then on the same target, perform an in-ground test (use whatever mode you feel has the most grunt, Benign is fine). If the mineralisation is as low as you say it is, then the two should be equal, which I doubt because of the historical successes you've had with ZVT and PI. By all means use the Manticore for this with the biggest coil you have. I've not been to NZ detecting but I've been to a hell of a lot of goldfields around OZ and also the US and West Africa, there's low mineral ground all over the place world wide, NZ doesn't have bragging rights or an exclusive to that aspect.

Lunk is the silent achiever on this forum, he just goes about the business of metal detecting, learning, relearning, experimenting and implementing, in essence a true artisan of the craft. 🤙 Don't put your GPZ down for too long mate, that skillset atrophies faster and faster the older you get. 🫠

Missing the point. Do an air-depth test then do an in-ground depth test. If there was no mineralisation then the ground depth would equal the air test and PI and ZVT would largely be pointless other than larger coil size. The Axiom is a good case in point, it has great air-depth but loses most of it when brought near West Australian mineralised ground, even ground that was reasonably benign to a 6000.