Jonathan Porter

Went out with the CTX yesterday and had mixed results… no gold but there were a few exciting moments that could have been interesting. I didn't do anything special with the CTX, just selected a high trash mode and went for it, will return with a different pattern once I get time to hook up to the PC.

The large piece of lead really had my heart pumping for a moment as did the piece of brass, its amazing how sweet a non-ferrous target can sound even to an inexperienced ear like mine to coin/relic detecting.

JP

If you're running a Mono coil in Mono mode then the Mono mode does an interesting thing to the way the detector presents its data received back from the coil, because the electronics are expecting two pieces of information back based on a DD coils transmit and receive sections, the electronics are expecting to do an averaging of the two. However with a Monoloop coil in place there is only one stream of information returning, but the electronics will still do an averaging of the signal anyway hence a slightly smoother detector compared to running in DD mode. Basically its acting like a filter when in Mono mode with a Monoloop coil attached. 

I personally prefer a raw information stream from the detector so have always promoted using the DD mode over Mono. With the GP and GPXs up till the GPX 5000 this was quite important especially on days where EMI and Sferics noise was high, however with the 5000 it is not so critical thanks to improvements in the circuitry.  

JP

Hey Steve, thanks for the feedback. Just for the record I'm a total newb when it comes to the CTX, out of interest would it be possible to do a setting-by-setting/blow-by-blow description on how you would go about setting up the CTX for just such an endeavour? Once done we could share the settings via the Minelab Xchange2 shareware for other forum members.

I've just received an email from Nenad at Phase technical with just such an attachment for the CTX so am excited by the prospect of sharing others settings experiences etc. (I assume a shareware file with settings would be considered confidential so will touch base with Nenad on this, or perhaps he can reply here)

Will definitely give the GBII a go over the same ground…… I have a bed made up for you, let me know when your flight comes in. :-)

JP

Steve, I have the perfect place for you to test, I just did up the road into my property and the road passes right through the gut of a major set of alluvial diggings, tried my 5000 on the graded portions and was absolutely swamped with trash signals, if ever there was a case for a good discriminating VLF this would have to be it.

An old guy I know who was detecting these parts in the early 80's said he got nuggets up to five ounces in and amongst the rubbish so I know there is good gold to be had there, problem is it is VERY HIGHLY mineralised!!

Care for a trip out to OZ and

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 spending time testing out mid-frequency, do it all detectors in the gold fields?

Do you think the Gold Bug II you kindly gave me in conjunction with Iron Grunt be able to handle this ground? Or should I go for the CTX 3030 and try to find a pattern off the net for nugget hunting in trashy ground.

JP

Definitely run a slightly higher threshold amount to smooth out the threshold (3 to 4 is best for external booster speaker use), the SDC has an elevated Motion mode compared to the conventional Slow setting for the GPX 5000, so keep that in mind when your assessing EMI, threshold instability etc. 

JP

I'd recommend the 11" Commander mono as well, probably one of the best coils to learn with size wise. Definitely get a Monoloop coil now, like Steve said that's what the GPX detectors are all about so may as well learn the 4800 with the best coil for the job.

JP

Steve very instightful comments, living in a country where it's not really an option to stray to far from one single company it's nice to read other players still have a foothold elsewhere. I started professionally prospecting with a metal detector in 1993 initially, with a Minelab XT 17000 but then also a Whites Goldmaster VSAT (I loved the challenge of the VSAT especially in highly mineralised dirt).

In all that time there were 3 metal detector manufactures that held sway in my profession, Fisher, Whites and Minelab (Garret were on the downturn when I first started out in 1987 after the release of the awful Gold Stinger). I never really got use the original GoldBug but met lots of West Australian and Queensland Pros who swore by them, especially in the noisier ground, so consider that an opportunity missed. Unfortunately for Fisher they released the brilliant Gold Bug II just after the release of the SD 2000, I got to play with a pre-release one up on the Palmer River in North Queensland and was really impressed with the gold it picked up in old haunts, but the SD 2000 was kicking goals all over the country at the time so I had to ignore that experience until I got to spend time with you in WA many years later.

Since 1995 there have only been a handful of real attempts by other manufactures to have a serious crack at sharing the PI "King of the Castle" position with Minelab, Eric Fosters GS5b, Whites TDI (same family as the Eric Foster unit), Garrett Infinium (not a bad detector but fraught with issues in the gold fields) and finally the Garret ATX. In all that time the ATX is probably the only PI detector that has offered any real competition in my field of work, in my experience it and the Infinium were the only ones I actually found any gold with in mineralised dirt, the Infinium was a night mare but the ATX wasn't half bad so deserves a heart felt pat on the back for having a red hot go.

Rumors can be fun when looked at in the right light, I love all the debate because it means our industry is healthy and demand is strong, all good incentives for metal detector manufacturers to spend money on development. Let's hope 2015 brings on lots more rumors with serious weight behind them, not just the innuendo and whispers kind.

JP

There is a pretty neat control box cover for the SDC available here in Australia, I stole this pic off Robs detector sales so he must be stocking them as well. I'll be getting two of them soon as I've bought a couple of these amazing little detectors for my sons for Xmas.

JP

http://www.robsdetectors.com/sdc-2300-camo-control-box-cover

On just a wild guess. What percentage of the gold do you think you would have missed if you were swinging the GPX 5000 ? I know the bigs would have sounded off with either detector. But the smalls?

Sorry everyone for missing the responses on this thread.

The gold found with our SDCs this season was gold that was missed the two seasons before on a mega rich patch we found, most the big gold had already been removed but there were ounces upon ounces of small prickly crystalline nuggets still laying all over the place. In some cases I would scope the deeper sections with the 5K and we would then roll and dig the rocks and soils back working the area newly exposed in a face (see pic below) to recover the numerous tiny nuggets mixed in with the odd bigger piece.

When we first arrived with the SDCs we could not believe the amount of gold targets just sitting on the surface that had been missed the season before, took us quite a few days just going over old ground mopping up all of these before we even started on the serious work. The 5K with a small coil could have found quiet a few of them, but it would have taken a lot of effort and then we would have had to go over the same ground all over again to get the bits the 5K would not respond to.

JP

The SDC is seeing things a lot differently compared to previous Minelab PIs thanks to MPF, because of this the targets it sees are not necessarily dictated by weight anymore but more to do with time constant, especially the Fast Time Constant targets which sometimes can actually weigh quite a lot. Friable gold, prickly specimen gold anything that resists being "livened up" by traditional PI transmit pulses, especially in ground types that are too mineralised or deep for traditional CW detectors (VLF) or a combination of both are well suited to the SDC.

As far as EMI goes the SDC is far superior to any previous Minelab PI machine, but you have to consider a couple of things before you make that call, one is Mains noise is always going to be an issue with a highly sensitive instrument like the SDC, as such if you get too close you will start to hear it pulse. However Sferics noise is greatly reduced with the SDC, a lot of noise generated by power lines is Sferics noise gathered over great distances, fence lines especially ones that pass under power lines also do this along with buried telephone lines and power cables, all of these tend to gather this type of EMI and channel it. The GPX 5000 is especially prone to this type of noise even at great distances whereas the SDC is very resistant to it.

The SDC runs a much faster Motion filter compared to the Slow Motion filter of the GPX 5000, as such it can sound twitchy to the ear especially at high Gain levels, you combine this with a small amount of EMI being present and it can sound busier overall in the threshold, however if you really listen to the threshold you will soon realize the general twitchiness of the threshold is much more consistent compared to the lunging sporadic nature of previous Minelab PIs.

I sometimes get a bit of falsing off green plants with my SDC too, I think it is a static discharge that occurs in very low humidity areas.

Hope this helps

JP

Hi Steve, your correct, in fact Minelab have always used Iitz wire in all their coils dating right back to the SD 2000.

I get a bit of a giggle sometimes when I read advertising about large nugget finds being found with X brand coil, at some stage people have to recognize that the box attached to the coil might have had something to do with the discovery too!!

The Commander coils are built like proverbial brick Outhouses (stand alone outside toilets for those who don't follow the Aussie vernacular:-) ), but they are VERY good coils, built by people who make VERY good metal detectors.

Very interesting thread Steve thanks for putting this up.

JP

Steve you get caught using that thing anywhere populous and you'll start a rumor mill so big every detector manufacturer in the world will be inundated with calls about what it is they're secretly developing.

Your a braver man than I, but it speaks volumes for your feelings about the underlying product. None of us ever get exactly what we want, but never let it be said it put a stop to Steve Herschbach! :-)

JP

Hey Steve out of curiosity is the ATX as quiet in mineralised dirt with the 8" mono as it is with the standard DD coil? Or as sensitive for that matter?

JP

Hi rumblefish, generally if a target is a long way from the coil it will make a single response as the coil is swept past the target zone, this means the whole coil winding is responding to it and the target is a long way away, if the response is a double beep as each edge of the winding goes past then it is shallow.

The exception to this rule is if the target is very large and overloads the audio, if this is a nugget then it is a delicious feeling trying to pinpoint such a target.

JP

Pic of a nugget that overloaded the SDC.

You guys would freak if you saw the sate of my SDC after two months in North West WA this year, because of the terrain, especially the steepness of it and the fact we were hand digging and rolling huge boulders the detector looks like it's been subjected to a sandblaster, especially the coil and lower shaft assembly.

However I averaged over half ounce a day for quite a few weeks with mine and my mate did the same, so 30 ounces in a three way split has helped take away some of the aesthetic pain' :-)

JP

The SD2200 needs to be run in both channels for maximum depth, as each channel has some pretty scary holes in them on certain sized nuggets that the other one has maximum performance on.

I would hate to have to go back to an SD after all these years so well done for persevering, like Steve said the operator on the end of the detector can make a huge difference in the outcome. Some really nice gold you've got there Glenn, good to see it's still out there even in the well frequented areas.

JP

Steve I'm on the opposite side of the scale here with 9 months of the year where the temps are uncomfortable (30 to 40+ degrees C and high humidity) and due to the monsoonal trough extending down from the north usually after Christmas time the grass then starts to grow making it very hard to get a coil onto the ground. However in hot temps you can always get out in the early morning or late afternoon but in cold climates your grounded full stop, so I suppose I should thank my lucky stars.

Summer for me is a good time to kick back and catch up on movies and maybe write a few articles for ICMJ and take a bit of break from detecting so I'm super keen for the next winter season.

JP

Hey Bearkat, the SDC in my situation proved the better unit so it won out over the ATX.

JP

The SDC is much better than "Sliced Ham" BK, it's the whole sandwich and then some. :-)

JP

Hi Steve, I think our approaches are the same, mine is just due to 21 years based in an extreme environment that requires tweaking of the equipment to drag every scrap of depth possible and the fact I'm HUNGRY for every gram of gold that might be available to help pay the bills. (I'm sure you are too BTW)

Believe it or not the gold I find is generally on the small side too, it is the stuff I'm always chasing as its the gold that keeps me fed. As an example getting a 1 gram piece at 14 inches is very exciting for me, especially if it is due to a deliberate change in the way I've gone about getting it, getting an ounce of small stuff in quick order especially at depth is right up there with my all time favorite occasions.

The ATX was fun for this very reason, it required a lot of input from me, drawing on every ounce of skill I had to be successful, something I found extremely satisfying when I started to find gold with it. I'm sure if I had had the time I could have found decent gold with it, but alas time is something I only have in short supply, so I have to go with the machine that has the most grunt in the ground I work.

Your forum is fast becoming a favorite hang out of mine Steve, keep up the good work, I cherish my morning coffee time reading it's pages.

JP

Can you see the sun baker, heard a tiny little whisper, looked down and there it was.

Hey Steve, really nice nugget. I get the feeling you could find gold with just about anything, even an LRL. :-) I enjoyed the ATX and found gold with it pretty quickly even in the mineralized dirt here in Central QLD, but the falsing was an issue for me. I agree on the Sensitivity for the ATX, flat out was my GO-TO as well.

JP

One million ant farts would equal an awful lot of gold Steve, not sure how my knees and back would cope though. :-) Actually I'm more interested in the patch I might find thanks to an ant fart nugget keeping me in the area long enough to get onto it.

JP

The SDC is in the same family as the GPX 5000, so it has SETA, and is also DVT.

JP

Hi Steve, just to correct a couple of misleading comments made by the poster of the video, the SDC has two channels associated with the single timing it uses, the main channel of that timing does the bulk of the heavy lifting when searching for nuggets and the other channel does the mop up work for any "holes" that might exist in the main channel. All timings no matter what they are have holes in them not just the "Smooth" type ones, this includes what ever is used in the ATX and is the trade off we all have to live by to be able to ignore ground signals (the price we pay for having ground balance). The poster of the video has managed to find a nugget that does not signal well on the SDC in the given ground type at the given depth compared to the more open timings of the ATX, if we flipped things into more mineralised soils that situation would be completely reversed. I would have liked to have seen a reasonable high freq VLF passed over the target in the video, I personally feel it would have smoked both PI machines.

The single dual channel timing on the SDC is a variant of Fine Gold, in other words it is in the Smooth class of timings allowing a Monoloop coil to work in extremely high mineralization. The SDC uses a VERY slow auto ground balance which in quiet ground is barely needed due to the timings removing the bulk of the ground signal, the auto ground balance is on all the time. The SDC also has a pretty fast motion filter hence the jittery behavior at higher Gain levels, thanks to this faster motion filter you are able to find tiny little pieces of gold even in the worst of ground types but it can sound a little unstable to an untrained ear.

Perhaps I need to do a Utube video where I have had numerous gold nuggets in the ground that the SDC was easily sensing even on the lowest gain setting but where the ATX did not even respond? These were not holes in the timing just the ATX's inability to generate a recognizable signal of the gold over and above the ground signal due to its timings not being as sophisticated as the SDC.

At the end of the day we all leave gold behind, this is why we keep coming back. The ATX does a pretty good job of things so long as the mineralization does not creep up too high and the operator can maintain good coil control, whereas the SDC is a true switch on an go detector, you do not need to reset to get maximum performance just pump the coil a few times and away you go, maximum fun with minimum fuss.

JP

Wow that was a long one Steve, but I can entirely see where your coming from and I think you've now made a line in the sand for every one to clearly see. Integrity to me is everything and to be accused of being a paid stooge or to have it even intimated is an insult of the highest order.

In a lot of ways I'm a one detector company guy but that's entirely down to the areas I professionally detect requiring the use of equipment that only one company in the world so far has provided, so my writings on the internet and in magazine articles are very single brand oriented due to my specializing on that companies products. I suppose the difference is I do do this for a living in a country that has extreme mineralization but also plentiful supply's of gold or at least plentiful opportunities of finding good patches, thankfully the money I make from it definitely offsets the public negativity I sometimes experience (putting it mildly).

Steve you have integrity in spades, you write from the heart and you write from experience and passion, all good combinations to assist those people who are wanting to research a product without the marketing hype. I think the bulk of this forums readers never doubted you for a second.

JP