I had the opportunity to do some testing yesterday with Minelab’s newest SDC 2300. I need to log more hours on the unit, but thus far I can say I am impressed. I took it to one of my old nugget patches here in central AZ that has been walked across many times before. This particular spot has some really nasty sections of mineralized ground which is a mixture of red clay, granites, schist, and lots of surface ironstone. I started off with the Mode Switch in the 2 position and had zero trouble getting a ground balance. I kept pushing the level until I hit a 4. This was the cutoff point and offered a good balance between background noise and stability. It behaved very similar to my GPX 5000, so there was essentially no learning curve. The verdict is still out on the amount of depth penetration, but I will say the sensitivity to tiny targets is awesome! I dug five targets from the patch and all of them were incredibly small. There was a tiny lead BB and several shards of decomposed tin can, all of which had been missed before.
I did squeeze out my very first SDC gold nugget and it was actually the biggest target of the day. It weighed in at a whopping 0.4-grams! OK, maybe noting to write home about, but gold is gold, and the fact that it came from an old patch was certainly noteworthy. The following day I revisited the patch once again and was able to pull yet another nugget. It was smaller than the first, but still gold nonetheless. The only thing about the SDC I struggled with a bit was the coil design. The angle (or position) at which it sits on the lower shaft is a bit odd, but I think in time it is one of those things a person can get used to. I will be doing a lot more testing in the days to come, but so far I think Minelab has once again produced an incredible PI gold machine…
Chris Gholson - Arizona, USA