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So I managed to squeeze in another half day outing to my spot up in the mountains. More digging and moving boulders uncovered another 3 pieces of gold for 1.5g. The larger piece is 1g and is quite coarse / rough for this area. The black material is slowly being dissolved by hydrochloric acid. The first photo shows the creek. A little bit of water with a lot of boulders. Historically this creek has produced nuggets up to 12oz, I'm sure under one of the boulders there will be one for me. Will probably be a month before I get time for another look. I'm trying to finish building my house extension in my spare time and my two young daughters keep my busy....

Here are two photos of gold found over the last two trips. This gold was found by removing the gravel in the steam bed and exposing the bedrock. The bedrock was then detected. On both trips several of my gold hunting friends came along. The bigger nugget was 5g and very tricky to recover. Lodged deeply in a crevice under white water. The other pieces total 1.3g. I hope to have time for one more outing before I have to go back to work. I'll keep you posted. Merry Christmas!

Howdy from Montana Newbie, I am in the market for a GB Pro. Going to Arizona and escape these brutal Montana winters for 4 months. Have a buddy down there who is a snow bird also. He explores abandoned mine shafts and old mining operations. Figured I might as well swing a detector while exploring the area. Amazon had a GB Pro 5" coil as "used with box damaged" for $470.00. I decided to pull the trigger and see what was in the box. The unit looked good...but...I could only find the single 1/4" headphone jack, need the 3.5mm jack for the headphones I am going to use. The manual stated this as well, only 1/4" jack. Didn't turn it on, just reboxed it and returned it immediately for full credit + $85.00 additional credit to buy a new unit with dual headphone jacks from Amazon at $549.00. Any thoughts? Thanks.

Ran across this while watching YouTube videos on gold prospecting:

Note from moderator: The following posts were all moved from this thread to this location. It is worth a separate thread. Seeing you're new to detecting you probably don't know about the pitfalls yet, there are fakes, fakes of many of the best detectors, here is an example Whatever you do don't buy one, it won't work well for you. Also if you're buying second hand Minelab are extremely helpful in verifying the detector you're buying is genuine, contact them about it! get the serial number off the seller, they can name the seller and where they purchased it from for you if it was a real one. I hope you purchased your Gold Bug Pro from a reputable dealer as it's also a highly faked detector. Here is a fake Gold Bug Pro for sale It looks like they're clearly made to be sold to the African market, note the Depar sticker on the shaft Since its origins in 1976, DEPAR has been, and still is, Middle East, Africa and Turkey leader in distributing quality metal detecting technologies for consumer with its experienced personnel and succesfull dealer network and serves as an authorized technical service.

Had an outing with a good friend to a Local creek yesterday. We dug a huge hole and moved some big boulders and found the 1.3g right at the start of the process. Diligent detecting elsewhere in the creek produced the other two. The 1.7g was right at the start of a crevice that seems to run under a virgin bank... Might dig that out some time but there are some fridge size boulders in the way. Cheers for the fun day out buddy.

I had an idea some time ago to add a switch to my Gold Bug Pro for easy changing between Disc mode and All Metal mode without having to adjust my threshold every time, I got the idea from seeing KiwiJW flicking between All metal and Disc on his GB2 to check targets when we were creek detecting, I thought that's a good idea, it's a shame it's annoying to do that on the Gold Bug Pro.. I also wanted an easy way to be in Disc mode and do a ground balance without again having to switch to All metal to do it so I thought a 3 way switch with on / off / momentary on would be perfect for the task.. I mentioned it here and EL NINO77 pointed out it's been done already but just with an on/off switch on this thread here Anyway, I had myself some spare time today so I ripped it open and started modding. You'll see on the photo I indicated what needs cut to add the switch No, that's not a short and curly ? This seemed the best location for the switch, it was a tight fit but it's by far the most comfortable position for the switch to be once it's all assembed again All done, now lets assemble it again and test it out And there we have it, I can now use the switch to change between Disc and All metal modes so you don't have to keep messing with your threshold, Disc is in the middle, All Metal pushed forward where it locks in position and if I pull back on the switch it goes to All metal and as soon as I let go the switch reverts back to Disc mode by itself, this is very handy for a ground balance as you pull the trigger switch backwards and hold down the GG button and do your ground grab and then just let go of both the switch and GG button and you're back in Disc mode balanced. Quite a nice simple mod to do but resolves one thing that annoyed me about my Gold Bug Pro. I think my next project will be to backlight the screen. I'm not claiming this to be my idea as it looks like it's been done before using an On/Off switch as someone else has had the same idea, I just modified the idea to have my momentary All Metal mode for quicker ground balancing in Disc Mode. My switch type is an On/Off/Momentary On switch. The switch has an optional water resistant cover which I don't know if I'll put on it, as the detector isn't waterproof anyway and it makes the switch feel weird as then it's all rubbery. Keep in mind this will void your warranty, I didn't care about that as I bought my GBP's in Australia and I would never bother to send one back for repair as postage would be a killer, if it developed a fault. I'd try fix it myself.

So today I thought it was about time I took my 2.5 year old daughter out to my gold claim. The claim is in reasonably rugged country with steep slopes and dense vegetation. Most of the gold is found as small nuggets on or near bedrock. There was one spot I could think of that was within 100m of the road where a river bank had been washed out and bedrock was exposed. That said I knew I'd have to cut a bit of a track through the vegetation to get the little girl through. We got to our location after a bit of a scramble down a short but steep slope with the aid of a rope. Was a bit of a performance with a backpack on my back and carrying my daughter. I set her up on a grassy bank next to where I'd be digging and surrounded her with snacks with which to entertain herself. As luck would have it I managed to uncover three small nuggets by clearing the gravels off the bedrock and detecting it. After about an hour she'd had enough and we clamberd back to my car. Needless to say, I'm very proud that she's now big and patient enough to take gold hunting! Oh, we got 0.8g total. However in this case the memories (at least for me) are priceless.

Hi Gals n Guys, First decent go with the Bug Pro fake today! Alot of trash. Bullet shell, lead, pot handle, square nails and plenty of tin. I ground balance to start with then from that point i keep an eye on it. Now, i run in all metal, gain at around 10-11 oclock, threshold only just buzzing. Mild steel trash can read around the 15-20 mark or around the 85-90 mark. I dig everything ATM to get a feel for it. If i was to detect gold, what would it read? With a really strong signal i switch over to discrimination to tey and ID. Have i got it right? Thanks guys. Al.

Hello to all I wanted to work on that project for a while,Fisher has always been synonym for me of Treasure discovery since I started the hobby 26 years ago,reading French magazine Tresor de l Histoire with pictures of Fisher detectors all over the place ...................O0000 boy how many hours I spend staring at the 1266xb.............I really like my F75DST et had a few Goldbug pro and G2 so I decided to start a bid of DIY .I am im Europe so parts aren't as available as on your side of the pond,i contacted couple of dealers and managed to get the parts for the handle,Arm cup is XP as it is 100 gr lighter than the fisher one,all carbon bits bought from Italy and Chian,the Clamp is from Sweden and designed for pole for window cleaning,coil will be an 13" Ultimate it is on her way from Bulgaria anyway here we go : Ladies and Gentlemen (DRUM ROLLS): the GOLDBUG PRO 2 lite:

Will the Gold Bug Pro run well with a Detech 13" Ultimate coil that was made for the "greek series" detectors? Their website doesn't give a whole lot of information https://www.detech-metaldetectors.com/products/coils/81-13q-ultimate-dd-detech-coil.html I want a bigger coil for my GBP than the stock coil that came with it as a Gold Bug Pro DP and I've read good things about the ultimate, and I have a guy willing to sell me his off his Omega 8000 at a reasonable price. I've found the Gold Bug Pro has remarkably accurate Target ID's on coins, almost up there if not equal to my Equinox and possibly better than my T2 so I was thinking if I got a bigger coil for it perhaps my wife would use it for the odd coin shooting adventure, I think at the moment shes a bit put off by me cleaning up with my Nox and her using the T2 and not doing near as well, as she likes I know it's a coin before digging, the T2 isn't such an accurate detector on the Target ID's as the Nox but the GBP seems pretty darn good. The T2 bounces around on the target ID's, the Nox gets a solid 21/22 almost every time. The easier I make it for her the more she may like it and I don't want to spend the money on a Nox 600 for her right now as she'll only use it 3 or 4 times a year so I don't want a fixed lithium style battery detector for her. AA or 9V is more suited to that and I'd rather use what I've got. Thanks in advance for any advice.

... Is Fisher Gold bug-pro / TekneticsG2 a suitable meteorite detector..?

Back at the end of 2013 I made a post about trying to choose between the Fisher Gold Bug Pro, Garrett AT Gold, Minelab X-Terra 705 Gold, Tesoro Lobo SuperTRAQ, and White's MXT. The real point I was trying to make was not that any were better than the others, because in my opinion in all metal prospect mode they are all so close as to hardly matter. My contention is that you should choose one based on all the other features included, such as weight, waterproof or not, tones, coil selection, etc. In my case I just wanted a light, simple detector for looking for gold in the middle of ferrous trash. I went with the Gold Bug Pro mainly because of the simplicity of the machine combined with the under 3 pound weight. Since then I kind of went down the rabbit hole. The Makro Gold Racer came along and at 56 kHz versus the Gold Bug Pro 19 kHz and about nearly the same weight it ended up replacing my Gold Bug Pro. Then I picked up a good deal on an XP Deus with 11" coil in anticipation of getting the new high frequency coil. Then the Nokta Impact came along and now the Minelab GM1000 plus there are more on the horizon. Then there is the fact I am a sucker for a deal and an impulse buyer! First Texas started aggressively blowing out some models at exceptional low prices recently, and the temptations for me have been continuous. I sort of missed that Gold Bug Pro and so when this deal on the basic Gold Bug came along at $337 I was really tempted. However, I wanted a larger coil and so I passed. Then along came this smoking discount on the Teknetics G2 for only $390 with free shipping. Or less. The deal is offered by First Texas direct on eBay and they included the "Make Offer" button. I decided to offer $375 and leave it up to fate. If they accepted the offer it was meant to be, if not I would pass. They accepted! Who knows how low they might go? I guess I should have started lower then ramped it up but $375 at half original price seemed quite fair to me. So why the Teknetics G2? Well, it is exactly the same machine as the Fisher Gold Bug Pro (DP 11" coil version) but with a different rod. It sports what is basically the same rod and handle as used on the F75, which fits my hand better than any other I have ever used. Something about the unique design of the handle that tapers to the top and angles forward. And I like the gray color after all the gold and black machines I have used. The main thing is the Gold Bug DP and G2 both come with the 7" x 11" DD coil as stock, giving me that larger coil. I might have preferred the 5" x 10" coil but First Texas only sells that as a stock coil on the Fisher F19 so this was as close as I could get at a great price. (Click on all images in this post for larger versions) Long story short though is to this day I consider the Fisher Gold Bug Pro to be the best starting unit for anyone wanting a VLF for gold prospecting in the U.S. It is nearly as hot as a Gold Bug 2 on small gold but with better depth on large gold, and easier to operate, lighter weight, lower price - just can't go wrong starting out with all that. It is also very popular, and that being the case it is a benchmark detector against which other machines can be measured. With all the new units I have or will have soon I decided I needed the Teknetics G2 mostly to use as a baseline for comparison tests I am doing this year. At the price I got it at if I decide to ditch it later I will not get hurt much, and who knows, I just might keep it. Especially with the second coil I picked up to go with it. The Nokta Impact I have came with two coils, a 7" x 11" DD coil almost identical to the one on the G2, plus a great little 4" x 7.75" (10.5cm x 19.5cm) DD coil. The closest I could get to that with the G2 for comparative purposes is the slightly smaller NEL Snake 3.75" x 6.75" (9.7cm x 17cm) DD coil. Both are epoxy filled and just 0.7" (1.8cm) thick with coil cover. The G2 is a bit nose heavy with that 11" coil but light as a feather with the little elliptical mounted. Anyway, that's my story and I am sticking to it. The G2 will be used in the field alongside the Gold Racer, Deus V4, Impact, Gold Bug 2, Gold Monster 1000, and whatever else comes along over the next year as the baseline test unit. What I often do is overload myself with new models and then let nature run its course. As time goes by I will grab certain ones I like for various uses, and others will tend to sit in the corner. It may not be efficient but it does work for me in deciding what I like to use. And that is the final thought I want to leave you with when it comes to VLF however is this. It is not all about just sheer performance, as these machines are all so hair splitting close these days. That is why each model has thousands of fans on the internet - they all work well. Like a good pair of boots you just have to find the ones that fit you best. At the end of the day the only way that has ever worked out for me is to try them out myself. I will let you all know what I think over the course of the year.

I had never really used my GBP for coin hunting before but on a recent camping trip my Nox ran out of battery at a bad time and my wife was using my T2 so I was left with my Gold Bug to use. I was in a place where ground balancing was needed occasionally and I also like to flick between All metal and Disc mode often but it's terribly annoying to do that on the GBP so I decided I'd get around to modding it when I got back with a switch to make life easier. I only found a dollar coin using the GBP that afternoon but we had already virtually cleaned up the area. You'l find the story on the Gold Bug Mod here Seeing I've now got my GBP modded I wanted to take it for a test run, the weather was rainy today but I had a job to do near a lakefront beach area I had a feeling would be worth detecting due to how busy it gets in summer so I put my GBP in the car. I put my 11" coil on it, first time I've ever used it as I bought my GBP to be a prospecting machine. Seems a decent coil for covering ground but feels nose heavy to me, I'm not used to the coil having a large front with the shaft mount near the rear. It was a quick 1 hour hunt due to the weather and I had no idea about what Target ID number is what on the GBP as I mostly use the Nox. I remembered 78/79 is the NZ gold coins on the T2 and with the GBP having the same numbers it helped find a couple of gold coins, other than that I was just digging stable target ID's. My total haul, not bad for a small amount of time. I got a few older coins, one of them American but it looks like the surface is rubbed off, I can't see a date on it. Not a bad hunt for the time I spent on a detector I'm not overly used to using for coin hunting. My new switch is great, a real time saver. A good bit about living in a tourist hotspot is all the foreign coins to be found. The Queenstown area has about 30,000 people living in it and gets over 3 million tourists a year.

On one of my posts, GM_Amateur asked about the newer version Fisher Gold Bug and Gold Bug-Pro. He wanted to know if they are Gold Detectors or Multi Purpose. I classify the Gold Bug and Gold Bug-Pro as true Multi Purpose detectors. I put the MXT series and F75 in the same category too. To me, it's a detector with medium kHz operating in the teens and having an adjustable Discriminator capable of rejecting ferrous and nonferrous targets if desired. When I tested the 1st prototypes of the Gold Bug I was very impressed with its sensitivity to small pickers (see photo). Then when the GB-Pro came out and I was able to get my hands on the larger coil, I was very happy with the performance. The GB & GB Pro were priced right at the time (less than many others), but performed well. I could take 1 detector on a trip in the mountains and use it for both gold and coin/relics. Your thoughts and input please?

After a busy day on the slopes doing some skiing yesterday I managed to score an afternoon around Queenstown area to myself as my wife had some friends staying there and was hanging around with them, I'm not a social bumble bee and very far from it, in fact I'm a recluse, especially with people I don't really know so I took the opportunity to take off and do some exploring. It's a wonder kiwijw puts up with me, It's said I'm very antisocial which bothers my wife, I on the other hand don't notice it. A couple of days ago I went to one of the spots kiwijw had shown me that I've done OK at especially with my high frequency VLFs and he's done pretty damn good at using his GPZ but unfortunately that turned into a skunk for me so I wanted to try find some new ground closer to town that I can get to easier. I used my GPX 4500 with Joey coil on that trip. I had read the previous night about some old workings close to town that could be easily accessed in the time I had. I put my Mountain bike in the back of the car so I could speed up my trek even more rather than walking to these workings. I had no idea where they were and I'm very prone to getting lost, all I knew is a walking track takes me to them so I jumped on my bike and took the track. I wasn't even sure I was going to do any detecting so I just threw my Gold Bug Pro with Nel Snake in my backpack as it packs down tiny and weighs nothing. It also doesn't overly react to shotgun pellets so I thought may as well use that on the scouting missions so I don't spend my time digging up pellets as I didn't have very long. I have had a bit of a love hate relationship with my Gold Bug Pros, I've struggled to have any success with them but I haven't put the hours on them either as I quickly upgraded off them. Today proves they are very capable of finding TINY gold. I found various spots along my ride that looked alright for detecting, some that looked to be bedrock. I wasn't sure so I detected around a few locations along the track and wasn't having much joy. I stopped at a spot right by the river which was very rocky with a thin layer of dirt over the rock and looked promising. After 15 minutes of detecting around I got my first tiny little nugget using the Gold Bug Pro. It was in a bit of a crack in the schist, I had to scrape it out with a screwdriver, my guess it was about an inch in a crack. It was 0.021 of a gram, the size I only ever expected to find with my GM1000 or Equinox 800. I only had about 2 hours all up so after another 20 or so minutes checking the area I decided to call it quits and head back to the car. I ended up only being 15 minutes late for the wife pickup ? I didn't have my phone with me so I couldn't take any photos at the time, I left it in the car by accident as I was in such a rush. What is significant about this for me is it's only my second ever nugget with the GBP, it was absolutely tiny and far exceeding my expectations for the GBP and my first detected nugget that I've had no help with, all my other nuggets I've detected in the past kiwijw showed me where and how to find them. This was my lone wolf nugget, I found the location and the nugget alone. I never did find the old workings but there is always another day. I am hoping kiwijw hasn't found this location yet so I can finally share with him a spot I've found that has gold, he's been a good teacher, mentor and friend. It would be hard to find a person willing to show you how to find gold in an area you work yourself, thereby taking albeit small bits of gold off him that he would of potentially found. A nice gesture that I am grateful of as I really enjoy the hobby and it's possible I would of given up without his help to get me started. It looks far bigger in the photos than it is, it's a tiny spec on my finger tip. The Gold Bug Pro is very sensitive to tiny gold especially when combined with a tiny coil like the Nel Snake.

Had to go over to Monterey the end of March to help my relations move some things back to Wyoming and since the weather was just great at the time on the way home i made time for a day trip to do some detecting with the GB pro and managed a few small ones,all found detecting bedrock cracks and crevices.

I was wondering about the Gold Bug Pro sensitivity to small nuggets, In my testing which is mainly air testing (which is naughty I know) and in ground testing where I've buried nuggets myself (also not ideal) It seems reasonably sensitive but I don't believe as good as my Gold Monster 1000 which I know is a higher frequency which should make it more sensitive to small nuggets. It's just I read this today by TrinityAU who has a lot of experience on the GBP which has now got me a bit confused as hes indicating its as good as the GB2 in finding tiny gold. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You guys still using the GBII, it is a great detector, I have literally found pounds of gold with my three over the years. It was hard for me to change from the GBII to the GB Pro. In my opinion the GB Pro just does so much more when you learn how to use it. It goes far deeper on big and little. It works in soils that the GBII had to fight. It stays balanced better. It is waterproof. It has a far easier learning curve for beginners. The GB Pro is far cheaper, less batteries, longer battery life and the discrimination on anything over half a gram is fantastic. For those not wanting people to know their business it breaks down into a pack better. As stated above I know the GB Pro will find the same tiny sub-grainers as the GBII can, only difference is it does it with more ease as far as I am concerned. These are all my opinions, TRINITYAU/RAYMILLS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ And this one here is a quote from our very own Steve H. So down to two models, the Fisher Gold Bug Pro and Minelab X-Terra 705 Gold. Both under the magic 3 pound mark! Both with extremely powerful all metal modes. So powerful that in all metal mode these detectors give the PI units a run for depth in most ground on most gold in the US. I haven't yet had the opportunity to find a tiny nugget with it although it has found me one single bit of gold some time ago and I will find it hard to pick up and use now that I have a GM1000 and an Equinox 800 but I do want to use it, especially seeing I bought two of them and lots of coils for them. I have the 10" elliptical coil and also a Nel Snake and Nel Sharpshooter for it so I have a decent array of coils. I have found in my basic testing it feels almost as good as the other detectors I own and it feels in some instances better. I was wondering what peoples opinions are on the GBP vs these really high frequency VLFS and if it's even worth me using it when I have the Equinox 800 and the GM1000 if they're much better than it. If they're a lot better I obviously wouldn't want to waste my time on the GBP. My main reason for asking is I'm thinking of offloading them as I'm unlikely to ever use them if they're redundant by my other detectors. I was intending to keep them for my wife to use but shes made it clear she has no intentions of ever gold detecting, I probably put her off with all the shotgun pellets I come home with Thanks

I have 2 Gold Bug Pro DP's, I have Nel Sharpshooter, Nel Snake and also the 10" Elliptical coil for them, along with the stock coils which are 5" and 11". Both my Gold Bug Pro's run at maximum sensitivity with the Nel's and the 10" and 11" Fisher coils perfectly, if I put the stock 5" coils on and try run maximum sensitivity even holding them up in the air they're finding targets all over the place in the air, this only happens with the 5" hockey puck coils. They quiet down and run fine about 75% sensitivity. I'm asking all the current and former GBP owners if they had the same experience. I found this review saying he can't turn it past the 12 o'clock position and keep it stable and he seems happy with that, for me that's odd as its only half way, I can crank it all the way up on all coils except the 5" and it be perfectly stable. http://raregoldnuggets.com/?p=2420 So I was wondering if my 2 x 5" coils both have issues (unlikely to be 2 faulty ones), or they're just like that. They're still under warranty so I want to find out while they're covered. I checked and both my GBP's run the version 4 firmware. I am fond of my GBP's, they've been taken over now by my GM1000 and Equinox but I still want to use them once I get better at prospecting and see how they do. They were my first Gold Prospecting machines, and they're under a year old so it would be a shame to not use them ever again and retire them. In my amateur attempts at testing them on small gold nuggets I've found with my other detectors they do seem to pick them up to an acceptable degree, especially the larger nuggets. Steve H maybe able to weigh in on this as I know he was once quite the fan of the GBP.

For a bit of a test of my VLF's I put the bits of gold I found on this prospecting trip into small plastic bags and put one at a time in a big bucket of gravel I got from one of the two creeks we found the gold at, I threw a handful of my daughters black sand collection into the bucket and mixed it around to make it a bit more realistic of a test. I also added a 2 gram test nugget I purchased on a local auction site some time ago for the test, in the hope one day I find one , it is smaller than the nugget John found on this trip but it must be thicker. I buried the nuggets down at around the 5cm mark, the same sort of depth we found them at as they were mostly in bedrock, one at a time and run each of my detectors over it, excluding the Go-Find as I knew it had no hope, started at the smallest nugget and worked my way up. I put the most suitable coils for Gold prospecting on each detector that I had and put them in all metal mode when available. Starting left to right Equinox 800, GM1000 with 5" coil, Gold Bug Pro with Nel Snake Coil, Gold Bug Pro with Cors Fortune Coil (Nel Sharpshooter), I also used the GBP 10" elliptical on this one, T2 with 5" Coil, Garrett Euroace with Nel Tornado Coil. I wanted to know which detectors I own would have found the nuggets I found with John to work out which are suitable to do the same job as my GM1000 in that situation with the size gold we found. All were in default settings, sensitivity at max and the Equinox in Gold 1 and all were ground balanced to the buckets gravel. Knocked out of the competition immediately was the Garrett Euroace. Nothing at all from it on all 8 nuggets. All other detectors picked up all the nuggets except the T2 missed the smallest nugget of the 8 but got all the others fine. Moved down to 10cm and had the same results. Moved down 15cm and the T2 lost the smaller nuggets and struggled on the bigger ones, the GM1000 got a erratic on its gold probability meter on the smaller ones and the bigger ones were getting harder to to get a stable probability, The GBP lost the smaller ones on all coils and was getting faint on the bigger ones and the Equinox was really struggling and only signalled on them as the center of the coil past them, the edges of the coil got nothing at all on all nuggets. Moved down 20cm, T2 was out, GM1000 lost the smaller ones completely, erratic on the bigger ones, GBP signal was getting faint but still a dig on all coils only on the biggest ones, smaller were still gone, Equinox lost all but the biggest ones. Down to 25cm, GM1000 was out, GBP still faint on the biggest ones on all coils, Equinox was faint but still there on the biggest ones. At 30cm all were out except the most faint signals on the GBP with Cors Fortune and the 10" Elliptical which I wouldn't dig as sounded too much like normal ground noise, and the Equinox was the same but giving a slightly better signal than the GBP and maybe I would dig it. These were the winners for me! GM1000, then Equinox followed closely by the Gold Bug Pro's with various coil options. With any of these combinations I could find the same size nuggets in the same ground, except the Equinox's big coil would let me down. The T2 did surprisingly well and I see why it was a popular prospecting detector but prefers bigger nuggets, however it's still the most comfortable detector I own. The GBP's are really good machines, I take back everytime I doubted their ability, it was my ability that was the problem, not the GBP, I was just in ground that didn't have big enough nuggets for them. As for tiny nuggets the GM1000 and Equinox are the only suitable machines I own. I really want Minelab to bring out that 6" for the Equinox now as I think it will do very well. This was by no means an accurate test, I was just working out what detectors I have that can find these nuggets so if my wife or anyone wanted to use one I wouldn't be wasting their time using one as the Monster is firmly in my hands when I go detecting from now on until perhaps the Equinox gets a smaller coil. The other reason I wanted to do this test was because I liked John's 6" GB2 coil so much for the task, and my Nel Snake 6.5 x 3.5 for the Gold Bug Pro is the same sort of size and shape. I will try out my GBP at the same creek sometime with that Nel Snake and see how it performs in the real world. Seeing his GB2 in action made me want a GB2 but my next and possibly final detector for some time is going to be a GPX 4500.

An acquaintance has asked if I'd help him find some shotguns he buried several years ago. They are wrapped in oilcloths, sealed in PVC pipes (~3 in = 7.5 cm diameter) and buried about 20 inches (half meter) deep according to him. He says he can show me the approximate location within about 10 m. If all this is accurate it seems like an easy task.... Then again, he also said someone in his family (without him being present) tried to find them with a detector and couldn't. That could be due to a lot of reasons as I'm sure you are already thinking, but my concern is that they may be buried more deeply than he remembers. Which of the following would be your first choice? 1) TDI/SPP with 12 in round mono and 16 V battery pack. 2) X-Terra 705 w/15 in Coiltek 3kHz. 3) Gold Bug Pro (19 kHz) w/15 in Nel Attack. 4) F75 black (13 kHz) w/11x7 in^2 coil operating in cache process. Assuming he has the time and patience I'm going to have all four with me to do a comparison, but I'd like to start with the one that gives me the best chance. Your advice is appreciated.

I found a .026 gram nugget the other day with the GM1000 in manual 10, if you could call it a nugget? a flake perhaps? I don't know what defines a nugget over a flake. I used the 10" coil and it banged hard on it with a nice sound, nothing on the gold chance indicator, it was about 10cm down in fine gravel. I had my GBP with Nel Sharpshooter with me so I ran it over the target before digging to see what it would do, its ground phase dropped right down to around 10 to 12 and made a nice loud sound, nothing showed on the discrimination scale up the top. I wasn't sure at this point what I had found and didn't understand the ground phase drop on the GBP? I thought it should be 35 to 50 for gold? Does anyone know why a genuine gold find on the GBP reported a ground phase of 10 or so? Is that normal, should I be hunting looking for ground phase that low? if this is the case I've probably missed a lot of gold as I always ignored signals that were below a ground phase 35 or so, keep in mind where I am hunting there is only tiny gold, all well under a gram.