A Holiday Weekend With The GPX 6000

[Lunk]

Day one...

I headed to the hills this morning to beat the heat and log a few hours behind the control pod of Minelabs' latest offering, the exciting new GPX 6000. Hiking up and down the hills with this featherweight P.I. nugget detector is pure bliss after lugging the GPZ 7000 around for the past 6 years...has it been so long?! Armed with the 11-inch GPX mono coil, I targeted an old nugget patch that I had carefully gridded many times in the past with several detectors, including the GPX-5000, Gold Monster and GPZ 7000. With nearby power lines, operating at a Manual Sensitivity of 10 or Auto+ proved a bit too chattery and required excessive Noise Cancel delays that became rather irksome after awhile. Backing the Sensitivity to 7 smoothed things out considerably without any noticeable loss of performance, and if I got an iffy target response, a quick jump to 10 would provide a definitive yes or no. 

After digging a few trash targets, the first “nugget” that the GPX 6000 hit was a 0.04 of a gram surface screamer, and the next couple of nuggets were small and shallow; nothing surprising. But how did the Gold Monster miss these? Must not have got that little 5-inch Monster coil directly over them.🤔 It was the next 3 targets that really blew my mind, however...

By late afternoon, the temps were soaring into the mid-90's, and despite a nice breeze, it was becoming a tad uncomfortable, and I was thinking about calling it a day. That was when the GPX 6000 sounded off with a sweet, mellow and deep sounding target response. A few scrapes with the pick exposed the underlying bedrock, and somewhere - in a crevice, no doubt - a golden treasure awaited to be uncovered...or so I hoped...could just as easily be a bit of square nail, a bullet or boot tack.😒 Blasting a few inches into the bedrock with the pick got the target out - a nice little golden picker in the scoop. 🙂

After backfilling the dig hole, just one swing of the detector revealed another soft, mellow hit a mere foot away. Same scenario: a small golden goody a few inches deep in a bedrock crevice.

Then, about another 4 feet away, a faint response. Quickly jacking the Sensitivity from 7 to 10 brightened the signal a bit, so I began digging about 6 inches through a layer of gravels before hitting bedrock and a rather thick tree root. A little more pick work and pinpointing with the edge of the coil located the target in a crevice right next to the root. This one was deep; nearing the 12-inch mark, the target was finally out, and it was screaming off of the coil edge! A quick sift with the scoop uncovered a hefty 1.34 gram nugget. How the GPZ 7000 missed this beauty, I'll never know...it's a head scratcher.😅

Time to call it quits for the day on that high note, for sure! I'll be at it again tomorrow, this time with the GPX 14 DD coil in EMI Cancel Mode; should be able to run flat out in Auto+ Sensitivity with the threshold as smooth as glass.

 

 

 

[Valens Legacy]

Great finds on your new machine and it looks like you are learning it nicely! Great pictures and good read, thanks for showing it to us.

Good luck on your next outing.

[mn90403]

Well done my teacher!

I'm sure it is too hot to be looking for new patches.  You have to get the nuggets where you got them before.

[LuckyLundy]

WTG!  👍

Rick

[rvpopeye]

Nice lineup Lunk !

I think that suspect on the left looks very guilty , of being the WOTD ,,,(winner of the day) !

Now make that best of today be the worst of tomorrow's batch...good luck  !!

 

[oneguy]

Nice hunt....  Had a chuckle over you saying   "But how did the Gold Monster miss these? Must not have got that little 5-inch Monster coil directly over them".  I keep re-hunting areas with the Monster I "think" gotta be done, hit it sooo many times...no more nuggs, etc.  Then I step back and see the whole area and try an visualize painting that whole area with a 3" brush (working center of the 5" coil) and realize the reality of how long it would take to "paint" that whole area with a 3" brush....lol

[Lunk]

8 hours ago, mn90403 said:

Well done my teacher!

I'm sure it is too hot to be looking for new patches.  You have to get the nuggets where you got them before.

Definitely too hot for cruising, but I always test new machines on an old patch to evaluate any performance gains.

59 minutes ago, oneguy said:

Nice hunt....  Had a chuckle over you saying   "But how did the Gold Monster miss these? Must not have got that little 5-inch Monster coil directly over them".  I keep re-hunting areas with the Monster I "think" gotta be done, hit it sooo many times...no more nuggs, etc.  Then I step back and see the whole area and try an visualize painting that whole area with a 3" brush (working center of the 5" coil) and realize the reality of how long it would take to "paint" that whole area with a 3" brush....lol

True that, Oneguy!

[afreakofnature]

Right on Lunk!  I think I even see a little quartz in that one gram piece!  I’m looking forward to trying the 6k out on a patch that we have right now. Although we’re in different parts of the country those pictures look very similar to what we’re dealing with. I have had the Z, the Nox, and the SDC over this and my buddy a GB2.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what I might’ve missed with the new tech.  
 

BTW nice new Avatar 😊

[WesD]

Thanks for the great report Lunk! I only had a couple hours trying out my new 6000, here in the  Mortherload county, but can already say, I wont be missing the old 7000!  So nice to have a lightweight super sensitive detector again.  I also noticed Auto plus, runs very noisy, so manual settings may be the way to go?  Still not sure what benefit the auto setting has, but Im sure we'll get things sorted out after awhile.

[Lunk]

Day two:

The goldfields greeted me in the morning with sunny blue skies and a nice cool breeze. I was trying out the DD coil this time to see if it would mitigate the EMI issues I was having with the mono coil. Upon power-up, the GPX 6000 defaulted to the EMI Cancel mode, and I set the Sensitivity to Auto+. The threshold was very unstable, no better than when running the mono coil; I backed the sensitivity down to manual 7, but, although better, the threshold was still erratic. Performing a couple of noise cancels didn't seem to help much, either. Then it finally occurred to me to do a reset to the factory preset, and sure enough, the machine settled right down. Whew, thought there was a real problem there for a few.😅 The threshold still wasn’t ultra-smooth, as it is on a GPX-5000 with the Coil switch set to Cancel, but I guess like JP said, it's the price we have to pay for the incredible sensitivity of the GPX 6000.

Swinging towards where I had left off the day before, I encountered a few trash targets, including a 22 casing buried at nearly a foot deep; the initial target response was very clean and quite obvious. Continuing along, I got another deep sounding target, and after digging down around 6 inches, the signal was out of the hole. Pinpointing with the left edge of the coil is required when using the DD coil in EMI Cancel mode, since the coil becomes a pseudo monoloop, where the left side of the coil is now operating as an 8” x 14” elliptical mono, and there is no sensitivity at all on the right side of the coil. A quick sift of the material with the scoop brought a sweet little 0.65 gram gold nugget to light!

After digging a few more trash targets, I finally arrived at the spot where I had left off the day before, and almost immediately, a sweet mellow target response from my Avantree Torus wireless speaker had me once again blasting into a bedrock crevice. The target was around 4 or 5 inches deep: a quarter-gram nugget.

Just a few feet away, another signal in a bedrock crevice, this time a thin, 0.15 of a gram piece at about the same depth.

Not bad for a few hours on an old patch with new technology; covered gas for the trip and then some. Stay tuned for day 3...