A Few Nuggets For The GPX 6000 And GPZ 7000

[phrunt]

On Sunday JW and I went back to one of our old detecting spots, it's the place I've been to the most and have detected it with various detectors all the way back to my GPX 4500 and Gold Monster and JW goes much further back than that with his detectors.  It seems no matter how hard I try there is always more gold to be found in this spot, especially when new detectors or coils are involved.

The place is heavily covered in shotgun pellets and unless you've got extreme patience you're going to miss some tiny gold by ignoring the small surface pellets which means you'll likely ignore the smaller surface bits of gold also.  I used to dig and recover everything that beeped but I've lost patience for that in this spot, remarkably JW did just that on this day, he had a good handful of pellets where as by rejecting everything that moved in the first couple of pick scrapes I only ended up with about 10 pellets all day, I certainly detected a hundred or more though.

It's good going detecting with JW, you can't buy experience and he has a lot of it so I always end up learning quite a bit on days detecting with him, he's a wealth of knowledge on the local areas. 

As I was seeing the GPX 6000 for the first time I took along my little test sticks that Geotech sent me for testing my QED on shotgun pellets to compare the result to other coils and detectors.  I only bothered with the #9 and #6 lead shot as they especially the #9 are the most difficult for detectors to pick up.  So JW turned on his GPX with the 11" Mono coil and we went to see how it responds on those pellets, it wasn't meant as a scientific test I just wanted to get an idea of how the GPX compares to the 12" CC and obviously other coils I'm using.  Unfortunately the GPX was a bit unstable when first turned on, JW has been normally using headphones with it and not the speaker but we needed to use the speaker so we could both hear the response.  A few retunes and me turning my phone off helped a bit but it wasn't overly stable, we pressed on and tested anyway in manual and auto+ and the results were somewhat of a surprise to me and not what I was expecting.  Unfortunately the little #9 pellet fell off the stick into grass somewhere in the area as I was walking around so not as much testing was done as I would have liked to have done.

I guess I'd hyped the GPX 6000 up in my head to be much better than it ended up being by comparison to what I've got and I guess I did this due to all the talk of Gold Monster type sensitivity with it, there is no chance its as sensitive on tiny gold as a GM, it is however like a supercharged GM once the gold is a bit bigger.   I'm pretty confident with my current setup and coils along with the fact I can run in HY/Normal with a high gain and not be troubled by EMI so I'm really not missing much, if anything at all so I'm quite glad I didn't let my excitement of a new product make me jump onboard with a GPX prior to at least seeing one in action.  I really don't think I need one now so that saves me some money, the light weight was fantastic though, it felt like a VLF in weight, although it seemed to me build strength has suffered a bit because of the weight, it's lost that solid feel of the GPZ.  It's not that I don't like the GPX, I thought it was fantastic, I just don't see the cost / benefit ratio adding up at all.

In saying all of that the difference for someone in hotter soils could be very different, the GPZ performance in difficult on small gold as is not near the performance it has in normal so the 6000 may well shine then, the difference in mild soils is less telling especially with the coils I have to use on my 7000.  I'll wait and see what future coils add to the 6000 and revisit the idea of getting one then if necessary, I am sure JW will want to get his hands on the 10x6" X-coil once it's released.

We decided enough messing around and started detecting, I just turned on the detector right where we dumped our backpacks and started detecting there, I figured I may even find the missing #9 pellet, and it was not even a couple of minutes and I had a target, it survived a couple of pick scrapes so I was confident it was less likely to be pellet and started to get a bit excited, surely not, gold already?

It did turn out to be a little nugget.

My photography skills let me down, it's sitting o nthe coil above the O in X-coils 🙂

I went over and saw JW and showed him the nugget, he was about 50 meters away I guess, we were both surprised I got one already, especially with how often we have detected this spot.

He was in the middle of recovering a shotgun pellet at the time with the 11" Coil still on.

I went back to the spot and detecting around it hoping there might be another one, and there was!   This time I was more prepared as once I was confident it wasn't a surface pellet I turned on the video on my phone to capture it.

I'm no Hollywood producer, so you'll have to put up with my rudimentary video skills, I didn't do any editing just stitched a couple of parts together to make it a single video.

I'm pretty sure this is the photo to match the video 🙂

and the nugget.

I kept detecting around the little area and had a 3rd target, this is getting weird, I just don't understand how we both have missed these in the past, that's gold prospecting for you.

As I was again confident I had a nugget I also filmed this one.

This was the one I think, hopefully the photos match up to the video, it's hard to tell as all the gold bits look similar size 🙂

This is the area my first 3 pieces came from, the hole in the front of the photo is the second piece I found, the pick is where the 3rd piece was and the second bit was behind that rose bush between where the pick is and the big rock.  They're all sort of running down hill from each other.

At the end of this video I looked up and showed the dirty great big high voltage transmission lines above us, these seemed to act up a bit on the GPX where as I was completely immune to them with the GPZ, JW had all three GPX coils with him to try them out at this spot, he'd never even used the 17" or 14" DD before and the 17" felt a bit heavy without a harness which he didn't have with him and also acted up more with the EMI.  After the morning part of the day and him sifting through a handful of shotgun pellets and finding 3 little bits of gold he decided he'd give the 14" DD a go after lunch.

He was very dedicated, digging so many pellets to get his bits of gold where as I was ignoring all these little surface to a couple of inch type targets aiming instead for deeper targets, I wasn't hunting the bedrock instead going for the grassy deeper soil areas.  We were discussing the depth advantage these Concentric coils give us so I wanted to stay off bedrock and hunt the deeper ground hoping to find something.

We were now on 3 nuggets each and decided we'd have some lunch.

Once the DD was on his GPX is really quietened down, it ran really nice, the performance on small gold seemed good too, and we were able to detect near each other without the GPX being bothered by it, the GPZ is no issue, especially with the Concentic coils.

I'd just found my next piece of gold and walked over to JW who was now able to detect quite close to me and he was digging a target, his first deeper bit of the day and it was with the DD, a similar size to my pieces, it was good to watch the recovery.

You'll see someones quite substantial dig hole just below my smaller dig hole where my coil is sitting, this was my next nugget.

My smallest bit of the day, a reasonable depth too, and the target really stood out, unmistakable.  Whoever dug the hole below it missed this one.

Hard to see the dig hole in the photo.

Here is a photo of the power lines, it's a shame they look a lot further away in the photo than they really are.

It's only a short walk up to them, I once found a piece of gold right under them with my Gold Monster, I've not taken any of the Concentric coils up under them but I should, it handles other power lines fine and I may find gold others have missed with detectors that struggle more under them.

Things were starting to dry up for both of us now, we had 4 nuggets each at this stage so we stopped for a drink and snack and decided we would walk over a little gully into an area I haven't detected as much, I'd been over there with my Equinox some time ago, I don't recall finding anything except a zillion pellets.

As I was largely ignoring shallow targets I was likely missing some small gold but I wasn't worried about that, it was too hot to recover so many targets when almost all of them would be pellets, I admired JW's determination doing that, his pellet collection was getting huge.  I then had a quite shallow target, but it was not a pellet, I thought it might be a boot tack as it was a loud booming signal.  I figured I'd recover it as you never know, at least it's not going to be a pellet.

The hole was quite shallow, and it turned out to be a bit of gold, glad I dug that one.

It really screamed too.  Around a similar time JW had found his 5th nugget too, we were neck and neck all day, once one was ahead the other caught up, the challenge of keeping up with JW on gold finds works as a good motivator to me, the little competition is pretty fun but I rarely could keep up with him, this time I managed to.

Anyway, here are the weights of mine

This is the second last nugget I found, the smallest one of the day which is no surprise as I was avoiding shallow targets on purpose, it was the one that had someone elses dig hole just below it.

This is quite funny, two the exact same weight, vastly different looking nuggets though.

and my total, almost a gram!

And here are JW's nuggets, mostly smaller than mine with him targeting those surface targets but it's hard to tell in the photo, we checked his smallest one on my coil and I was able to get it.

We just put all his nuggets on the DD coil, 3 of them were found with the 11" Mono.  The biggest one was with the DD.

So all in all a fun day out, and we both managed to get some nuggets in a place that we didn't expect to really get anything much if at all so can't complain about that. 

These last two photos are just some shots of the area we were detecting, the grass is quite an annoyance but smaller coils handle it fine, I just use the GPZ to squish it down as I run over it, JW has a bit of trouble with the shaft twisting on the GPX doing that sort of thing.

[Gold Catcher]

Thanks, Simon, great report and awesome pictures/clip. Looks like the X-coils are doing a really nice job for you. Unfortunately, I have yet to get more experiences with them, very few are available here (if any). Re 6000, I find that it is as sensitive or even more sensitive than the GM in the grounds that I am hunting in. Unfortunately, it is not mild at all like in your case. Please give JW my regards the next time you see him. He sent me pictures from his hunting grounds that look like out of a fairytale. What an amazing landscape you guys are having.

GC

[phrunt]

Thanks Gold Catcher, yes, unfortunately in most of my photos I can't show the actual places we are detecting in as it might give away a bit too much information but If I could you'd get a real taste of where we can detect, the landscapes are outstanding.   The times it's painful are when you're up high in a hillside sweltering in the heat dripping in sweat looking down on a crystal clear blue lake wishing you were in there or looking up into the mountains seeing the snow caps while you're dying of heat 🙂  If you haven't noticed I dislike heat.

I guess I should elaborate on the Gold Monster sensitivity thing, what I was meaning is if I was to be hunting particularly tiny gold in bedrock cracks or something the GPX wouldn't be my first choice as the GM or other detectors like it are more sensitive to the smallest bits of gold and will find bits the GPX doesn't even see at all.  I had it in my head because of the Gold Monster comparisons the GPX was at that sort of level of performance when it's not and I didn't think all that much different to my GPZ with some of the coils on it particularly the 8" and 12" CC keeping in mind how hot the GPZ runs in our soils, basically maxed out.  Where I think the GPX probably pulls away is when the soil conditions get worse and the GPZ needs tamed or put into difficult.  

The GPX is remarkable in the small size gold it hits on well though, it just wasn't what I was expecting due to my own hyping of it to myself 🙂  The VLF will still be the more capable detector for that type of tiny gold.  That's not anyone's fault but my own, I made myself think it was better than it turned out to be so I would be setup for disappointment if I bought one before finding this out.  I hope that makes sense.

Keep in mind these are just some observations from one day of seeing it in action but it's enough to convince me I don't need one for now so that's good, I'm basically trying to talk myself out of an unnecessary purchase and by doing so saving myself a bunch of money 🙂

[Gold Catcher]

40 minutes ago, phrunt said:

Thanks Gold Catcher, yes, unfortunately in most of my photos I can't show the actual places we are detecting in as it might give away a bit too much information but If I could you'd get a real taste of where we can detect, the landscapes are outstanding.   The times it's painful are when you're up high in a hillside sweltering in the heat dripping in sweat looking down on a crystal clear blue lake wishing you were in there or looking up into the mountains seeing the snow caps while you're dying of heat 🙂  If you haven't noticed I dislike heat.

I guess I should elaborate on the Gold Monster sensitivity thing, what I was meaning is if I was to be hunting particularly tiny gold in bedrock cracks or something the GPX wouldn't be my first choice as the GM or other detectors like it are more sensitive to the smallest bits of gold and will find bits the GPX doesn't even see at all.  I had it in my head because of the Gold Monster comparisons the GPX was at that sort of level of performance when it's not and I didn't think all that much different to my GPZ with some of the coils on it particularly the 8" and 12" CC keeping in mind how hot the GPZ runs in our soils, basically maxed out.  Where I think the GPX probably pulls away is when the soil conditions get worse and the GPZ needs tamed or put into difficult.  

The GPX is remarkable in the small size gold it hits on well though, it just wasn't what I was expecting due to my own hyping of it to myself 🙂  The VLF will still be the more capable detector for that type of tiny gold.  That's not anyone's fault but my own, I made myself think it was better than it turned out to be so I would be setup for disappointment if I bought one before finding this out.  I hope that makes sense.

Makes a lot of sense, Simon, thanks, and thanks also for the clarification. I use the GM myself quite often for bedrock scraping, mostly with the small 5 inch coil. And yes for these applications the GM has an edge over the GPX IMO, also simply due to it's versatility for this particular application and the tiny coil size. VLF's have a solid place in my armamentum, and it could very well be that the GM has an edge even in sensitivity over the 6k/11 when it comes to get that super fast gold out of bedrock. Re GPZ, I agree with you that in mild soil with the GZP run hot (combined with your nice X-coil fleet) there is probably no need for the 6000 when performance is the only metric. Even with the NF-ZSearch -(acknowledged that you are not a fan of this coil)-I find the sensitivity to small gold being almost at the 6000 level, when run in HY/Normal/Gain 15 and up. However, the 6k is my to-go detector for a host of reasons (ergonomics, weight, sensitivity, coil options etc.) IMO it's an incredible fun machine with a performance for shallow to mid-deep gold that would only be matched by the GPZ when running really hot with either NF12 or X-coils. If depth is not intended, I would take the 6k any day. However, if you suspect deeper gold then the GPZ is the detector of choice, albeit at the expense of more weight. On a side note, I just wanted to sneak in a homage on the good old SDC (since we are talking about various detectors here). For small shallow washes with high mineralization/frequent hotrock occurrences nothing beats the SDC (IMHO) 🙂

GC 

[phrunt]

Yes, the weight of the GPX was fantastic, I was really surprised as it's not meant to be all that much lighter than a GPX 5000, although it certainly feels a lot lighter, a well balanced design I guess, and the coils are very light too.  Fortunately I'm not bothered by the GPZ weight, I never even used my bungee and rarely do, JW was surprised I even had my harness with me as I usually don't, he commented it looks brand new still 🙂

I figured I'd wear it so I could use my SP01 and external speakers, I had the hipstick connected to it you may see in the video, I don't know why as it's just an accessory I'll never use, by lunch time I'd ripped the hipstick and bungee off and put them in my bag as they were just getting in the way.  I bought my GPX 5000 from Africa and it didn't come with a harness so I bought someones harness that included a hipstick that they'd never used either, basically new so the 5000 at least has one now.  I can see the hipstick being beneficial swinging heavy coils or detecting for days on end but in my scenario of small area, lots of digging it's just a pain in the backside.

I guess the time will come I will start to worry about the weights but at the moment I'm fine, I know I should be using things like bungees to stop wearing myself out over time and if I was detecting all the time I would be more worried about that than one day a week or so and the ground I detect is never level so adjusting everything all the time is a pain.

I guess it's just a bit of a relief to me I don't need to buy another detector and spend that sort of money on one when I don't really need it.   I'm really comfortable on my GPZ and I guess we have to keep in mind we are talking about a modified GPZ vs an out of the box GPX.

[Gold Catcher]

46 minutes ago, phrunt said:

The times it's painful are when you're up high in a hillside sweltering in the heat dripping in sweat looking down on a crystal clear blue lake wishing you were in there or looking up into the mountains seeing the snow caps while you're dying of heat 🙂  If you haven't noticed I dislike heat.

LOL! I can just imagine that. That's the nice thing about hunting in the desert. If you are hot, everything around you will even be hotter, so no mind tease for cooling off, unless you are loosing it due to heat stroke and start seeing things (almost had a few of those moments....).

GC

[Gold Catcher]

8 minutes ago, phrunt said:

I guess the time will come I will start to worry about the weights but at the moment I'm fine, I know I should be using things like bungees to stop wearing myself out over time and if I was detecting all the time I would be more worried about that than one day a week or so and the ground I detect is never level so adjusting everything all the time is a pain.

Wow, GPZ without bungee. I am long past that time. I use my hipstick for both the 6k/11 and GPZ religiously. It's a tricky thing though: When there is too much trash I start cursing my hipstick set-up because I need to constantly get in and out of it. On the other hand, if I forgot my hipstick/bungee (or if I find out in the last second that I forgot to attach the sleeve with the hook on the shaft-ARGH)  and I detect in areas without much trash, my arm get's quickly fatigued and I wish there would be more trash (or more gold!!) so I can put the detector down. 😁 

[Gold Catcher]

Watch the long term damage though of the arm/ shoulder. By the time you pass 50 it comes at you with full force. Someone once told me that when you are past 50 and wake up one morning without pain you are dead.

GC

[Valens Legacy]

Simon,

Thanks for sharing the hunt with us, I felt that i was there with you and enjoyed the hunt with you.

Great skills that you have for being able to find the gold and keeping at the hunt.

Good luck on your next hunt!

[rvpopeye]

phrunt

Some nice looking spots there for sure !

I'm the opposite though, hate the cold times ..it lasts so long here.

Guess it's the extremes that are bothering us. The rest of the year isn't much of a problem.....👍