A Holiday Weekend With The GPX 6000

[Jonathan Porter]

Lunk where do you keep your mobile phone while detecting? 

Nice gold BTW 😊 

[Lunk]

7 hours ago, Jonathan Porter said:

Lunk where do you keep your mobile phone while detecting? 

Nice gold BTW 😊 

Good point, JP...I usually keep the phone turned off and in the truck, but since I was taking pictures to post on the forum this time, it was shut off and in my back pocket so as to get some distance from the coil. I'll have to swing the DD again and leave the phone in the truck to see if it makes a difference.

[Lunk]

Day 3...

The final day of the holiday extended weekend; back to work tomorrow.😞 on the bright side, it's only a 4-day work week.😀

So I did leave the phone turned off and in the truck this time, but I put the 11” mono coil back on; that means no pictures of the digs today, just the final weigh-in. I decided to run in Auto+ sensitivity all day, and got used to doing occasional noise cancels, but there were a few times that the threshold just wouldn’t settle down enough for my liking, even when reducing the sensitivity to 7. In these instances, I would perform the reset procedure to reboot the machine to the factory presets. The audio was amazingly stable after each reset, even after changing the Sensitivity back to Auto+, and would last a few minutes before the EMI returned. This area is prone to bad EMI; it's random and intermittent, and I couldn’t manually tune it out with the GPZ 7000 either - just had to wait until it abated, then hunt until it returned, then wait, etc. The EMI issue was almost negligible when running the GPX 6000 at Rye Patch, so I know it's not the machine. Nevertheless, I was able to snag seven more bits of gold, including a 0.4 of a gram piece at 4 or 5 inches - the largest of the day - and the smallest of the day, a wee 0.05 of a gram. Also dug several trash targets.

So in all for for the weekend, 16 pieces of gold in an area gridded several times with several machines, to me is more than just finding missed targets; the GPX 6000 has some serious magic going on under the hood. Oh, another cool thing I noticed is that, of the few hot rocks in the area, the 6k quickly tracks them out.🙂

[Arky]

Great post Lunk. Fun to see the power of the machine many of us are waiting for!

[Gold Catcher]

8 hours ago, Lunk said:

The audio was amazingly stable after each reset, even after changing the Sensitivity back to Auto+, and would last a few minutes before the EMI returned. This area is prone to bad EMI; it's random and intermittent, and I couldn’t manually tune it out with the GPZ 7000 either

Very nice, Lunk! Re EMI, did you try to run with threshold off? 

[Lunk]

15 minutes ago, Gold Catcher said:

Re EMI, did you try to run with threshold off? It's not ideal but it could help.

Yes, and while it does help one's sanity, the EMI still breaks through sporadically.

[Joe D.]

Hey Lunk, 

    There's this thing I seem to remember called a "camera"! It actually allows you to take "pictures"; without making phone calls on it! Cool, right? What will they think of next!!😜🤣👍👍

[Gold Catcher]

16 minutes ago, Lunk said:

Yes, and while it does help one's sanity, the EMI still breaks through sporadically.

Thanks. So it's not like with the 7000 where you can essentially completely eliminate EMI with Bogenes settings. I guess here is where the more setting options of the 7000 come in handy.

[Jonathan Porter]

Bogene’s setting will will not completely eliminate EMI on the 7000, but they do help to some degree. I found the best way with the 6000 using the 11” Mono is to use Zero Threshold in Manual Sensitivity mode (2.5 second long press the Ground type button) and just keep lowering the sensitivity till the EMI stops breaking through. The 6000 still has pretty good performance on shallower gold even with the sensitivity on its lowest point. 

If the ground conditions are mild Auto+ has the ability to increase the detectors outright sensitivity much further than flat out manual mode, so in variable EMI areas the EMI will sound worse in Auto+ compared to full manual mode. 

If EMI is bad it might pay to just use Difficult mode rather than Normal, Normal is a combination of Difficult and Normal all at once whereas Difficult is a dedicated timing which even though offering less outright depth will help create less confusion in the target signal. Sensitivity to small gold even at depth will remain the same as all the small gold sensitivity/depth comes from the Difficult timing when in Normal anyway.

If you find yourself continually performing EMI tuning then it is a good idea to fully reset the detector from time to time by holding in the power button at switch on, this clears everything back to factory default allowing you to start afresh.

I also recommend giving the detector time to warm up from start up before doing another EMI tune too soon, you can tell when the detector is functioning properly when the threshold stops being dominant. 

Hope this helps
JP

[Gold Catcher]

1 hour ago, Jonathan Porter said:

Sensitivity to small gold even at depth will remain the same as all the small gold sensitivity/depth comes from the Difficult timing when in Normal anyway.

Thanks, JP. How do the Normal and Difficult timings affect bigger gold at depth on the 6000/11 or the 17 in? I guess most 6000 users still want to keep an eye out for deeper/bigger gold as well, although the focus of the 6000/11 clearly is shallow(er) gold. I see this as the biggest difference to the 7000/14 or 7000/NF, which appear to cover more depth as well while still maintaining a fair amount of sensitivity for small/shallow gold (especially with the NF-depending on settings), albeit probably not at the 6000 level.