Getting Aquainted With The GPX 6000

[phrunt]

Yesterday JW suggested we take our GPX 6000's out and compare them to ensure mine is now working properly as I've had no confidence in it after my woes.   Unfortunately we were unable to compare our 11" coils like for like as his coil is still away for warranty replacement, it must be 3 weeks now and no sign of a replacement, they just have no stock to swap it for which is pretty poor, but with the number of faulty ones I've seen on Facebook I'm not at all surprised they have no stock as it's not a coil they'd make a lot of as extras seeing everyone gets one with the detector.  JW suggested we go to an area he's used his 6000 a lot with the 11" before it died so he would know how mine should behave to see if anything is out of the ordinary.

I just wanted to use his detector for a bit to see if EMI was as troubling with it as it was with mine, so I took it for a spin with the Minelab 17" coil on it, I found it was no different with it's EMI behaviour to mine, in fact I thought it was worse but I guess that's to be expected, a bigger coil.  We were quite close to a standard normal power line, not the high voltage transmission ones like at the other area that I wanted to wrap the GPX around a tree and say goodbye to it for good.

JW had a fair while on mine checking it out and doing factory resets and just experimenting with it, he thought it ran similar to his with it's EMI behaviour so I guess it is how it is, he had my threshold running reasonable, much better than it was at the other location that's for sure.  The other spot with the transmission lines is my favourite area but it just suits the GPZ better as it doesn't care at all about the transmission lines, even right near them its as if they barely exist and you can run it with the normal coil you'd use and your normal settings.  The GPX requires the DD and adjusted settings so it makes no sense to use the GPX there, the same reason I didn't like using my 4500 there.

Once JW had approved my GPX I felt a little more confident in it, knowing that more ratty threshold is normal, I'm just not good on ratty detectors and feel I'll always miss the faint targets with them by comparison to more stable detectors where as JW doesn't mind a more ratty detector, experience level differences I would guess.

I had another confidence booster, the Avantree Torus speakers, I've never been much of a headphone person and the ML-100's that come with the GPX have a high pitched hiss all the time once connected to the 6000 which would give me a headache listening to that all day but the Torus speakers are perfect sound, no hiss and very clear audio and easy to hear even in a noisy environment, where we were has a rushing river nearby with quite noisy water sound in the background but the Torus was fine, perfect in fact.  Quick and easy to pair with good sound quality and volume level, I was able to turn the GPX volume right down to minimum to stabilize the machine even more and run the Torus on the volume level that suited me.    One thing I will point out is with the Torus on you'll like finding 22 shells, sure the noise is booming but the Torus gives you a shoulder massage every time you sweep over one so you'll find yourself swinging over them multiple times enjoying the vibrating massage 🙂 

I like the Torus so much I'm going to use my Bluetooth transmitter on the GPZ and use them on it too, so I can finally retire my harness that was only there as a way to hold my SP01 and speakers.  The neck gap on them is huge, designed for someone with a neck like Shrek I think and my Pelican neck is a bit skinny for them but they held on perfectly fine and I had no concerns of them coming off.

I'd highly recommend anyone considering these things to give them a try, I doubt you'll be disappointed.  They even talk to you 🙂  It started to rain a bit while using them and they're not water resistant but I just put my jumper over top of them and the sound came through it perfectly fine (not sure what Americans call it) and Kiwi's never even know what I mean when I say jumper as it's a Queensland/Australia term as far as I can tell.

Once we'd done tinkering comparing detectors we started detecting, I wandered off 20 or so meters away from JW so I didn't interfere with his detector and started detecting some bedrock.  I was running my GPX in Auto as if I tried manual 10 or Auto+ it became a bit too unstable for my liking I guess due to the nearby power lines.  It wasn't long and I had a good target noise, super faint but very repeatable and after scraping away all the soil off the bedrock I was pretty sure it wasn't a pellet, I started breaking away the schist to try get down to it, I was attacking for for about 20 minutes and I guess JW noticed as he came over, I told him what's going on and showed him my target response at that time, it had improved to a point it was very obvious after smashing some bedrock away. 

He said lets check my 17" coil over it and see how it responds, so he waived the coil over it, nothing at all, he pushed the edges right into the cracks in the bedrock and nothing, he spent a bit of time trying to get a response from the target and he couldn't get one.  We fired up my GPX again and waived it over it and straight away a reasonably good response.  After seeing that I'm glad I didn't buy the 17" coil seeing we mostly hunt smaller gold it's not near got the sensitivity of the 11" on this stuff. to be completely blind to this piece when the 11" was getting it pretty easily.  JW had also lost a couple of targets he was recovering with the 17" coil so we went over to them with the 11" and tried to find them, the 11" found one of the two lost targets straight away.

JW then hung around to help recover the target, he's a lot better at getting gold out of bedrock than I am, I'm not aggressive and hack away at it slowly as I'm so scared I'll lose the nugget, it's happened before 🙂 He just smashes the hell out of it and gets it out quickly.  It didn't take him too long and he had it out, as per usual with the GPX once the target is near the coil it ROARS on it, a few inches away and it's a quiet response so once out we had it in no time.

The dug out bit of bedrock is below the coil in the photo above.

The nugget circled.

That's where it was, I was so surprised the 17" coil had no response on this nugget when in there, it was probably on its side in a layer of the schist but still, the 11" performed so much better.

This is the nugget.  I'm confident the GPZ with my favourite little 8" would have hit this far easier than the GPX did, it wasn't what I'd call deep but it was faint on the GPX and missed entirely by the 17" even with some of the bedrock broken away.

Next up I kept detecting around this same bedrock and it falls off a bit of a cliff down to the river below, it's pretty wild on the way down but I went off the edge a bit as I could see an area I could start to get down and detected one of the many ledges on the way down, I found a few pellets down there but also a nugget.

It was very shallow and a louder signal than a pellet.

It was really only a couple of pick scrapes to remove the grass and I had it, it's lucky I wasn't being lazy ignoring the first pick scrapes assuming they're pellets.

The reason I didn't ignore it and I ignore many pellets is the pellets the GPX finds harder to detect, sure it booms on them when you first go over them as they're close to the coil, you do a couple of pick scrapes and move the pellet into a pile of soil and the target signal drops off dramatically to a point they can entirely disappear or be very hard to locate compared to the screaming signal when they're near the coil so you find yourself flattening out the pile.  It's a bit of a giveaway with lead pellets I think as gold tends to remain a decent signal as it's not as difficult of a target as a small sphere like a lead pellet.

Here is a video of the spot the nugget was, not usual for me to go off edges like this I usually leave the mountain goat stuff for JW 🙂

My threshold was pretty savage in this video, I did a factory reset not long after this as it was starting to go wild.  Good ol' Geosense.   It's amazing doing a factory reset fixes it up when no amount of noise cancels will.  I hope its a bug they can fix and a firmware update comes out some day.

I decided I'd go back up to where I found the first one and give it another go, a couple of meters along the same run of bedrock I found another faint target signal that lived beyond clearing the dirt off the schist bedrock.   Because I'd just only done the same thing I knew this was going to be gold so I did some filming.  I didn't film the entire process as I'm very slow getting gold out of bedrock 🙂

This is the better video of the two to watch as it gives a better idea of the recovery

I switch to manual 10 in the video from Auto and you'll see the target response improve, I just preferred hunting in Auto while I'm still getting used to the more ratty threshold of the GPX over the GPZ even though I know I'm taking a performance hit doing so.

And the happy snaps.

This one was a bit deeper than the last one, took me a long time to smash it out. 

A bit more of a ball nugget, again the GPZ would have hit it easily.

It was now starting to rain a little bit and likely snowing on the mountains above us so our day we nearing the end, we only started around Lunch time so I was pretty happy with my results.  JW at this stage had given up on the 17", I guess seeing it entirely miss the first target I got wasn't really encouraging.  He'd put on the 14" DD now, I'm sure he wished his 11" wasn't away on warranty at this stage as he'd not found anything yet.

I went back towards where we stored our bags and started detecting around there and found my last nugget of the day, another very simple target, it was in someone elses dig hole spoils, they'd dug up the nugget and rejected it, I guess they thought because it was in soil and not on or in the bedrock it wasn't gold, so I recovered it and it was my biggest of the day 🙂

It was right near where the cliff drops off to the river below.  I checked with JW, it wasn't his dig hole so someone else had been there, he did point out when we arrived it looked like someone else had been there recently as there was dig holes that were not his so someone donated me a nugget.

So overall my GPX was working much better at this spot, it still had its Geosense quirks and is nowhere near as stable as the GPZ, and the GPZ I know is just as sensitive if not more so than the GPX when its using small coils on the GPZ, it'll be interesting to see the improvements with the smaller coils on the GPX.   Where the GPX appears to be more sensitive is small pellets near the coil with the way it really roars on them, but any depth on those little pellets and reality sets in, it's just hyper sensitive to targets close to the coil, it'd be good for bedrock hunting with that behaviour.

My total for the afternoon.  We bailed out because it started raining and only started at lunch time so a good result for me.  JW found one little guy at .19 of a gram and that was once he changed over to the 14" DD, he was certainly digging away all day though, I could hear a lot of smashing on the bedrock!  Damn pellets!

My junk level was really low, I was rejecting known pellets by the strong pellet signal dropping off to next to nothing in the dig out pile quirk the GPX has.

Those 22 shells give a nice massage with the Torus 🙂

[phrunt]

My DD Leather and Canvas GPX cover arrived today, so I can now give my GPZ cover back to it 🙂 It wasn't really an ideal fit.

The GPX cover set is well made and good quality as always from DD.  A very nice fit too.  It even has a well positioned velcro strap where the stupid headphone socket cover is that spends most of its life flapping open in the wind as it just won't stay in place.  I noticed yesterday JW had taped his one shut as it was always flapping in the wind.

It was nice to see the Australian made tag on it, with almost everything made in Asia these days its refreshing to see stuff made elsewhere.

[GotAU?]

Nice writeup Simon, glad to see your GPX working for gold too!  Say- can you expand on what you meant by the signal dropping off on pellets? 

Also, I can’t really see how any adult guy would want to wear a “jumper”- there’s one on Amazon with a flamingo print 🤣  

Is that a wind breaker or slicker in American or common English?  Similar languages can have so many different vernacular meanings!

Pair your Avantree with A Giveet transmitter on your 24k, 4500 and other non-bluetooth enabled detectors- it has aptX LL/FS low latency and works really well:

Giveet Bluetooth 5.0 Transmitter https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07198BBZN/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_NYWHGM55SX2EJA12GNSH?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

[phrunt]

Although I could rock a flamingo print as good as the next guy I figured American's would call a jumper something different 🙂

No one in NZ understands what we are talking about either but after years of saying it, it's hard to get rid of it.  This is a photo of someone in what I'm talking about.

What I mean with the signal dropping off is when the small lead pellet is very close to the coil its a boomer of a target but it doesn't take much depth for that booming signal to drop to a faint one.  The GPZ while not screaming on the pellets maintains a stronger signal on them from a greater depth.  It's hard to describe, it gives you the false impression the GPX is very deep on small targets by how it screams on them when they're close to the coil but you quickly see that isn't the case once the target has moved in your dig out pile and you can't find it anymore without flattening it out.  This doesn't seem to happen so much with gold from what I've seen so far, but with shotgun pellets it does and that's in a way beneficial as you can take the gamble of rejecting a pellet because of it.  That's how I see it anyway and I've dug enough pellets now to see the pattern forming 🙂   All bets are off if its not a small lead pellet though, this is just with small round lead.

I've got a really good MPow aptX LL transmitter that I'll use for my Torus on all my detectors, I'm really happy with the Avantree Torus purchase, the only thing they could improve on it is some  level of water resistance.

[Aureous]

I believe the Americans call them a 'sweater' or in Australia its often called a 'Hoodie' lol

[GotAU?]

Oh, that’s what you meant for a jumper! It’s a “hoodie” as my students call them, and I’m sure what the connected kids all over the world call them. I’ve always called them sweatshirts.  Adult jumpers are totally different- shorts and a zippered shirt all in one.

Interesting note about how lead pellet signals fall off faster with distance from the coil vs those of gold- an effect of being a better conductor? I will have to be more observant of that- I just always spread out the pile a bit more to refind a target and have not noticed it yet.

[Aureous]

1 hour ago, phrunt said:

My DD Leather and Canvas GPX cover arrived toda

Ive got the same setup from Dean but incl the neoprene armrest cover... always quality, Ive been using his gear since the 2000 came out.

[klunker]

 I always enjoy you reports. If I tried writing a report like that it would be full of mespelings and, puntuation. errors/

[phrunt]

26 minutes ago, klunker said:

 I always enjoy you reports. If I tried writing a report like that it would be full of mespelings and, puntuation. errors/

It takes a few edits to get them right, I'm not one to proof read before hitting the submit post button 🙂  Your posts always bring a smile with them.

[kingswood]

4 hours ago, Aureous said:

I believe the Americans call them a 'sweater' or in Australia its often called a 'Hoodie' lol

I'd call that a windcheater 🙂