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Hey Steve, I have a GPX 4500 and looking at the timing charts I don't see where a GPX 4800 has a advantage over what I already have? Is there a advantage and if so in what way? This lower price on the 4800 is sure to lower the cost and trade in value of the used 4500s. Thanks for any light you shed on this subject........IdahoAl

I recently purchased a new product and found that it works so well I thought I would share. For those of us that use a Minelab we all know how sensitive the coil wire to the box attachment is. There have been a number of attempts to solve this and most use the handle mount to add something that grabs the coil wire. None of those approaches solves the issue of shaft flex and will help but still allow some falseing. This new approach mounts directly to the control box and stops the coil wire from moving when the shaft flexes. I used it for a full day and had zero falseing on my 4500. Too bad Minelab does not put a much better connection on their machines, but this will work till they do. Bill Southern at Nuggetshooter.com sells them and they retail for $42.00.

Fred, I know nothing about West Africa, but in East Africa where the other recent gold rush is, there is no metallic rubbish. First of all, the gold bearing formations in Sudan are in the back of beyond, secondly, every scrap of stray metal in countries that poor is plucked up immediately for re-use or sale. When I lived in Abu Dhabi, for example, there were poor East Asians cycling around the city picking up cardboard to recycle for a few pennies so that they could afford to eat that day. Under those circumstances, discrimination is unnecessary. I'm not even sure that depth is a big deal, nor do I know if mineralization is a factor limiting VLF use. The gold rush in Sudan which pushed the price of ML 4500’s to absurd heights did so in an atmosphere of ignorance as to the correct match between requirements and tools. It may well be that for those poor artisanal miners in their flip-flops, a Tesoro Compadre might have been a more rational tool considering cost/performance. Now we have Garrett and ML each leveraging their "Armadillo" mine detector package into a gold detector. I have to believe that the 3rd world with its possibility for sudden explosions of detector sales is the real market. The pity is that if the actual requirements could be studied, then a battery thrifty detector like the Tesoro Diablo μMax might hit the sweet spot!

As many of you know I owned the placer operations at Moore Creek Mine in Alaska for many years. We ran a very successful "pay-to-mine" operation there. I am still an owner of the lode portion of the property but sold the placer and pay-to-mine operation in the winter of 2009. As part of the deal with the new owners I was to run the first week of the pay-to-mine with them on hand to show them the ropes and ease the transition. Gerry McMullen of Gerry's Detectors booked a group in the first week of 2010, my last week of running the show. Real nice group, and some very proficient operators, a guy named Spencer among them. It was a great week with a pile of gold found, but like all good things had to draw to a close. On the last day everyone was out looking one last time, and Spencer got a signal directly across the pond from the camp in an area where quite a bit of gold had been found in the past. The little pile there was pretty well mowed flat, but Spencer got a nice faint low tone target. He dug. And dug. And dug. Now to his credit he knew there was also some deep trash in the immediate area, and the tone was more likely to be junk than a big nugget. And he was tired. But he came over to the camp and borrowed a long handle shovel and went back to it. It was his last target and he was going to finish it. I am in camp and I hear some whooping and hollering. Spencer hit the big time! He had dug a lot of gold in his nugget detecting career, but the nearly one pound nugget he had just found blew away his previous finds for size! It is always fun being around something like that. The excitement is infectious. I went over to see the hole and frankly it was amazing. We all sat around taking pictures and here is one I got of Spencer standing in the hole the nugget came out of. The nugget weighed in at 11.88 ounces. Spencer with 11.88 Ounce Nugget at Moore Creek, Alaska (click on photo for larger version) The nugget was found with a Minelab GPX 4500. There was over 30 ounces of gold found that week and Spencer's was one of the larger ones ever found in my years at the mine - it was nice to go out with a bang. Spencer really earned that nugget though, many people would have decided it was a can and walked away. More about Spencer Sadly the new owners were not able to keep the pay-to-mine going. Hosting people in the middle of nowhere Alaska is not for everyone and 2010 was the last summer people could pay to visit the mine. The owners shifted to a pure mining operations and were successfully operating through the end of last season. I may stop out and visit them this summer. Has to be another big nugget lurking at Moore Creek!

Hi Steve, thanks for the explanation. On the Deus or Nasa Tom forums(can't remember where I read it) there has been some speculation that the Deus uses a different type of GB technique rather than the ground signal subtraction found on other detectors. Speculation only, no hard data, interesting.............. I tend to use a similar technique when patch hunting as you do. I will typically put the stock 11DD on my GPX 4500 to take advantage of it's quietness and ability to discriminate shallow ferrous targets. I want to dig more good targets, not dig shallow nails or disintegrated cans all day. I am just looking for that one shallow nugget that most patches seem to have. Once I have found that nugget I put on the mono's and start digging. When I was trying to decide whether to purchase the Deus while mulling over your advice you had offered me I realized that I was willing to fork over a sizable sum of cash to accrue ONLY for coin and relic use the benefits the Deus has to offer. I am glad I did! I can hunt much longer with the Deus just listening to the tones and only looking at the TID occasionally to verify what the audio is telling me. This machine is the most ergonomically correct detector I have ever picked up, it is a joy to swing. Just as the advice you gave me in the first thread I posted on your forum helped me solidify my thoughts I think I will follow your latest suggestion and contact XP. If they would make some mod's to the goldfield program I could cut down on the number of detectors I take on certain forays. After too many hours of getting the skunk nugget hunting I like to switch to coin and relic if there are any old sites nearby. It always refreshes my attitude as I dream of the cool finds I could make. The Deus has the potential to become a first class "all-a-rounder" with a few changes.

I had a few hours out with my new Deus today. Picked it up from UPS at 0830 a.m. and I was hunting dirt by noon ;-) I had read the manual 3 times, Andy's Sabsich's book once, and a lot of posts on the internet including watching videos so I had the barest grasp of what this machine will do. This part of the Mojave Desert had very few people in it up until the 1930's and not a large population after so the coin and relic possibilities are slim. I had decided to detect around an old club house that I was certain had been pounded. I am staying in the clubs RV park so I walked out the door and fired the Deus up. I was not to concerned with finding good stuff, I just wanted to learn to navigate the menu tree, settings, and the tones. I started detecting in a fairly clean area then as I familiarized myself with the machine I worked my way towards the club house and into more trash, changing settings over targets to see the effect of different combinations. I ended up only recovering one silver coin, a 1950 quarter that was almost touching a nail and about a bucks worth of clad. The education I received from the Deus was the prize of the day. I used 4 khz to discriminate iron, I did the backwards wiggle to discriminate bottlecaps and to pinpoint. I dug a lot of pulltabs since there wasn't much for coins but plenty of co-located tabs to learn on. Most of my detecting has been gold nugget hunting with PI machines. I have 3 VLF's but don't use them much. I had tried a F75 about 3 years ago and never could seem to master it, to be fair I did not use it much as I preferred my GPX 4500. If it beeps, dig it. I was a little nervous about buying the Deus for coin and relic and ending up with another machine that did not suit me. My fears were unfounded as that Deus is one sweet machine. Although I only have a few hours on it, the programs, tones, and settings all make sense to me instilling confidence that this machine will produce some finds. Regards, Merton

Shasta, the Koss are my favorite as well on my 4500, as I can regulate the volume where I want it with my Gold Screamer. I have good hearing so the dual volume control doesn't make any difference as I have the right and left side on the same setting anyways. It's just one more thing to have to dink with...plus the stock Koss headphones are by far the most comfortable for me.... but I can definitely see the benefit of balancing out the sound with dual volume controls for a person whos hearing is worse in one ear than the other. I've tried most the others brands mentioned above and don't really notice much difference in them as far as sound quality. The main difference is comfort wearing them all day, but the preference there will just depends on the person i guess.

Hi Rick, Thank you for the very thoughtful response! I know I am not a big fan of high prices and I am a big fan of competition. The more the merrier. I do think Minelab benefitted from a "perfect storm" if you will of high gold prices and gold rushes in countries where buying practices verge on irrational. There is an almost superstitious belief in certain detector models overseas and the buyers cannot be swayed to try anything else. The GPX 4500 became the object of intense desire and sold far faster than they could be built at one point. An extremely expensive detector in extremely high demand led to the kind of sales one does not duplicate easily if at all. It was a "detector bubble" and like all financial bubbles at some point you reap the hangover.

Hi Steve, Thanks for all the excellent info you post on this forum. Your posts here and on Dankowski's forum have piqued my interest in coin and relic hunting once again. I have recently been using my GB Pro and Whites TDI as coin and relic machines around old mining camps. Not too many good finds yet but a lot of fun none the less. I have actually found my best coin with my GPX 4500 while nugget hunting. Anyway, when using the GB Pro I find that detecting in nail pits with disc 26 to 39 (per Nasa Tom's forum) I get a sore neck from watching the TID. If I am at disc 39 I can't just dig all high tones due to the massive amount of lead and brass at these sites. I have been toying with the idea of buying an XP Deus for these activities and assigning tones and/or notching for what I want to recover (site dependent) to get away from reliance on the TID. Now with the release of Version 3.2 that includes the Goldfield program( basically all metal mode and tighter ground balance?) and the ability to notch out some hot rocks in the ground balance range the urge to purchase is VERY strong. This detector since it runs at 18 KHZ, has the new goldfield program, and can GB notch hot rocks, could be a great nugget detector but there is no info on the net I can find. Steve or anyone else, do you have any input or experience hunting small gold nuggets with the XP Deus? Shouldn't it perform somewhere between an F75 and the GB Pro on gold? Regards, Merton p.s. I have a GBII so I don' t care if it recovers fly poop.

After using a GPX 4500 for a few years I was reading and watching videos of the new Garrett ATX. I was most impressed by how quiet it was dealing with hot rocks. I ordered one from Arizona Outback and received it in a couple of days. I always get excellent service from them. Through the holidays practicing in the yard and a quick trip to a gold location I noticed something didn't feel right. Thoughts came to me like maybe i should have kept my 4500. The ATX handled the hot basalt cobbles and boulders a lot better than my 4500, but the coil was awkward getting around and in between them. After getting home reading some posts on here about using a garrett 5"x 10" infinium DD coil on the ATX, I ordered one. Next came how to mount it. I wanted to use the same rod so i had to come up with a way to have a quick release so i could use both coils. After some engineering problems, I have modified my ATX. So if i want to go back to the stock coil all i have to do is undo the coil quick disconnect then connect the other coil. The last thing that i did was sew a control box cover to protect it. The weight is another issue I'll work out before i head up to Randsburg area next weekend.

Dain ditches a GPX 4500 for an ATX -- If Garrett would stuff the guts of the ATX in a light land only shell and sell it for $1500 with the Infinium coil - they would have the US PI gold detector market at their feet. Who REALLY can justify a $5000 detector for hobby gold hunting? I'm sure there are some folks whose expertise, experience and dedication can land them multi-ounces of gold and need the world's best gold detector to do it with. For the rest however, something else makes more sense. Steve has said that a VLF detector is probably the answer for most of the non-pro crowd. That arguement has logic and merit. However, there has never been a really simple to use PI detector which offers "turn on and go" capability for North America. The Whites TDI machines were one attempt, but I suspect that too many knobs got in the way for many folks. Garret could turn out this machine by summer if they got their ****s in gear but their failure to make a land version of the Infinium for all these years makes me doubt that they will catch this wave.

I have added a new page with various charts and tables about how to select the proper timings on the Minelab GPX 4000, 4500, 4800, and 5000 model detectors. There is also a set of quick links to owners manuals and more. I have enhanced the charts with excerpts from the manuals where possible and will tweak this page as I have time. If anybody has any tips to add they would be appreciated by myself and others, I am sure. Minelab GPX 4000-5000 Manuals & Timings Charts