Running The 15" Cc X Coil Over A 6000 Patch

[jasong]

30 minutes ago, cobill said:

Jason, 

I thoroughly enjoy reading the in-depth posts you write and discoveries made in pounded patches. I also enjoy the light-weight GPX 6000, that's why I traded in my GPZ. Those CC coils on the GPZ are impressive, almost makes me want to go back to the GPZ.? Looks like you're in the salty NNV??? 

Bill

Hey Bill, I'm in some terrain that in many ways resembles that around Rye Patch. I would say as a whole it's less salty though, or more patchworked alkali anyways, with areas of more extreme salt and less extreme salt. Also, the ground is more mineralized with regards to the ferrite component here too. But similar conditions.

I think the 6000 is a great detector for NNV, and also for Colorado. If I only wanted one detector to primarily work those two places, I'd personally choose the 6000 so I think you made a good trade. In fact, when I detect down in your part of Colorado later this year, I'll probably just take the 6000 with me. The steeps...too gnarly with the GPZ unless I have some very specific, small areas to concentrate on.

But yeah, these concentrics are definitely deep in the places you can run them. Heavy salt is not particularly their forte though. But they are doing good with the ferrite mineralization (no worse than the stock coil anyways, maybe slightly better), and these things just absolutely slay the deeper ground and have literally produced deeper gold every single patch I've tried them on. For places like Arizona they are amazing. 

For people that have a stable full of good, deep, productive old patches, these things are literally like having a GPZ 8000 to me, a tool that is clearly more capable than anything else on the market right now. I'm actually pretty surprised there aren't more AZ detectorists using one, but that's just fine with me. I hope I'm the only one in the US using them because they are a major advantage to have. 

17 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

Lots of speculation about constraints on Nugget Finder and Coiltek here, when people have absolutely no idea if there are any, or what they might be. For all we know they have access to the chips, and can build any coil they want using those chips. Maybe optimism is an option, rather than assume the worst.

I'll admit to being a bit speculative here myself and other threads. I got a bit concerned we might just see some size variation and no focus on improved performance when I saw Coiltek say something along the line that he didn't know what flat windings were. Maybe a semantic mixup, and not technical? Unsure. Lack of clarity leads to speculation though, naturally.

That, plus no post about upcoming concentrics from either manufacturer. It naturally leads to a bit of speculation wether we will see some things or not that we are all discovering this last year can add some significant boost in performance to the Z, and wonder if maybe the same can apply to the 6?

Add into the mix that neither Minelab nor coil manufacturers have stated if there are specific restrictions on what can and can't be made for the 6000, and people are gonna start wondering on their own if such restrictions might exist, based on history. Since we clearly saw restrictions on the 7000 limiting aftermarket coil manufacturing, even if it's unclear to this day exactly what the restrictions were, it's easy to assume restrictions are potentially in play with the 6000 too, especially since the chip still exists.

[phrunt]

I think time will tell, they've each said they're going to be releasing three coils with no sign of more to come, Coiltek released three Nox coils and two CTX coils if history is anything to go by on chipped coils.   So there are three confirmed sizes from each brand which seems a coincidence all similar sizes to their competitor but different enough that they're not having to compete with each other, that was well planned seeing they didn't release their sizes to the public until they were near ready for sale so they obviously conspired in the background to ensure they were not competing with each other or it was a huge fluke as I'm sure Nugget Finder would have wanted to make the 14x9" being one of their more popular GPX coil sizes.

It seems like Coiltek got the first pick selecting the commonly popular sizes of 10x5" and 14x9".  Being far more simple coils to make you'd think they'd come out with the best first for their brand to encourage people to buy others in their range.

NF is near the point of releasing their second GPZ coil, and their website updated to reflect this after saying that size will come shortly after the 12", then it changed to coming in 2021 and stayed that way well into 2022. Finally the website updated a couple of weeks ago saying a new larger size is coming soon in 2022 so struggling to get it across the line I guess. 

I'm quite happy with the range of 6000 coils available, plenty of sizes in the sizes I like,  I would love a concentric coil though as it might tame the beast and add some depth.

I think if there are no constraints Nugget Finder sure missed a lot of opportunity with the GPZ by doing what they've done.

[jasong]

I am able to browse my broken phone as a hard drive on my computer now. Still can't find my AZ concentric stuff, not sure why it isn't stored in DCIM as it should be.

Anyways, I totally forgot that I gave the concentrics a very brief run in NNV though, and found a few pics, they aren't the greatest photos taken right at sundown and hard to see the dirt encrusted gold, so I never posted them originally. But here they are anyways since I'm digging through old stuff and on the subject of concentrics. It was a short trip as I was there for other purposes, but I stopped for an hour at a heavily detected patch on the way back to my hotel, this patch is so depleted that I don't even detect here anymore except to test new equipment since the ground is basically lacking any real targets anymore with existing equipment. Heavy salt, and heavily detected by every detector since the first SD. I had to work glacially slow through the salt groan, but still got one.

This one was a grammer or something, don't remember exactly at this point. I'm posting this stuff going off rough memory at this point.

It definitely suffered in the salt, but not really any more or less than I'd expect any larger coil would. Targets were still recognizable in the salt groan, just as with the stock coil. I also ran the 8" out here another trip, and it did great in the salt, better than the 6000 w/11" in my opinion.

Tried another similar well flogged patch which I'm sure a number of forum members are familiar with, about an hour here.

Got 3 nuggets. One of them had a nice cube on the tip of it (left most nugget). The middle one came from below a pocket I found in 2015 or so with the GPZ, the pocket was filled with black sooty carbon/graphite, and you can sorta see the carbon on this nugget even though this photo isn't the greatest. Someone has since discovered my old pocket and raked a large area beneath it down, and took a bunch of the dirt home with them. It's really crystalline gold when it's all cleaned up. This stuff all got tossed into CLR and sold a few days later to fund gas back home so I don't have any pics of it cleaned up unfortunately. It was all crystalline though.

The tiny 3rd nugget was the smallest I'd ever found with a large coil and was something under 0.10 grams but I can't recall weight exactly now.

So, about 3 grams from very well flogged patches in about 2 hours of actual detecting. Not bad for places I've given up on years ago. If a person has enough old patches with proven production and depth, it's probably possible to pay a concentric off quick. I've only used mine lightly and I think I'm close to or over 1 oz with them now from just worked, dead patches. However, I think the major value of these coils is for people who have known, proven ground to work.

Here is some of the gold from the original pocket, after I got smashy with the quartz. This wasn't found with the concentric, it was found in 2015 or 2016 with the stock GPZ, just a reference to know what the gold actually looks like and it's character, since my pictures above don't really show it due to dirt covering. It's prickly, crystalline, hard to detect stuff normally.

 

 

[Steve Herschbach]

It is ironic that the GPZ is getting kudos due to unapproved aftermarket coils. I went the other route. Since Minelab reneged on the promise of more coils, I got rid of the machine. I might be shooting myself in the foot a little over that, but the lack of official coil support really upset me, and still does. The GPZ 7000 is the most expensive consumer detector platform ever sold by a mainstream manufacturer, and I expected coil support from Minelab commensurate with that. When they dropped the small coil after bombing with the big coil, my only option was to go X Coil, and chop stuff up. That was and is still completely unacceptable to me, and is the main reason why I refuse to own a GPZ 7000. Take X Coil out of the equation, the machine is just an overweight, overpriced option for what I do. Things would have been far different for me if those coils had come from official sources plug and play ready, as should have been the case. Instead Minelab impeded the performance of the machine by holding back coil development. Shame on them.

[WesD]

I agree with Steve, that was sure a pity X coils couldnt get the chips from Minelab or allow anyone that right. My guess maybe Minelab felt that the gains from the hotter coils on the Z would compete with the release of the 6000, as the small gold performance gap seems pretty minimal between the two detectors when the Z is running the hot rod coils. Just speculation there.

[phrunt]

I think if Minelab gave X-coils the chip the GPZ would suddenly be the hottest thing in town, people would be rushing to buy one so the funny side of it is it's Minelab that are holding back the sales of the GPZ, if people could just plug an X-coil into their GPZ and go detecting the GPZ would be selling like hot cakes.  People have been selling their GPZ to buy a GPX as they want to find the smaller gold better, wouldn't it just be nice to save some money and just buy a small coil and I believe exceed the 6000 on small gold by doing so, I guess that would eat into 6000 sales massively though.

So it's quite funny that Minelab themselves are limiting the sales of their flagship detector to a trickle when it could be selling many of them with one simple change.  People could get their tiny coil, their really big coils, concentric coils and the list goes on.  NF, Detech and Coiltek would start pumping out coils for it too to bringing even more options, if anyone thinks NF wanted to take years between each Z-search release they're kidding themselves, something is holding them back.   It'd be like the good old days again when you could easily get a coil to suit your needs.

I wonder how the shareholders feel knowing Minelab themselves are the reason the GPZ isn't selling near as well as it could be. 

I think it's widely known the GPZ is the better of the two top end Minelab detectors, it's just locked up in a cage, set it free and then let's see which one people want to use.

The GPX is better on smaller gold you say? Is it... or is that just want Minelab want you to believe.

I guess I'm overly optimistic Minelab would come to their senses on this one day, but I think why they'll never do it is they need to leave something in the tank for the next model, and a way to do that is restrictions on coils, it's pretty easy to release a GPZ 8000 which technically is very similar to the GPZ 7000 with more cosmetic changes than anything but with improved coil designs and different sizes and people will buy it.  If everyone is swinging X-coils and other brands of improved coils they'd really have to work hard to make a GPZ 8000 viable.

[jasong]

Agree. The GPZ clearly has a lot of capability able to be unleashed just by some clever coil design. I can't imagine Minelab, the people who actually designed the detector, didn't understand this early on too.

The lack of coils seemed pretty intentional. Given how ergonomically unsound the 7000 was due to excessive weight, and the potential damage that occur to people's arms, if there was an intentional preventing of the release of lighter, smaller coils that could have relieved potential damage to people's arms earlier, then I find that decision to be particularly tone deaf and disrespectful to loyal customers.

I've spent something close to $30k on Minelab products. Yet companies who might get something closer to $3k over the same period from customers seem to care much more about the people who buy their products.

[GR Guy]

I’ll come from another angle. Why should Minelab in the age of Chinese and Russian counterfeits not be 100% protective of their brand and reputation. They are in the business of making the best metal detectors in the world and clearly are doing a great job at it. There will be plenty of aftermarket coils for the 6000 on the way which look to be all verified by Minelab soon. The Zed filled the market where everyone wanted a machine that went deep, now the newer technology comes out in the 6000 that has opened up goldfields of finer gold people expect Minelab to go open slather on older technology to see if another organisation can mimic the 6 on fine gold. Why would Minelab do that. I don’t see Apple opening up the Macs to the rest of the world?

[Norvic]

Down in my backyard I`m having a ball with the 6K finding patches in close I have been walking over for 50 years, the Z did it to those before, the 5000 before it and so it goes right back to the early VLFs. But as all of us who have tried aftermarket coils know MLs developed the go for gold detectors since they started but not for coils. From the user it certainly is a shame they`ve found it necessary to chip their machines for whatever reason.