It’s been 12 months since I purchased my GPX 5000 and I feel that as an amateur detectorist I have done quite well in the Golden Triangle of Victoria. Most day trips I have been picking up between 1 and 2 grams of small nuggets in heavily worked over areas.
I didn’t hesitate to upgrade to the GPZ 7000 when it was released and couldn’t wait to get back out there to find some of those deep targets that have been missed over the years. During my first trip I found nothing but lead shot and went to bed disappointed. I couldn’t sleep so re-read the manual by torch light and got up at 2am to test some new settings on a buried sample by the light of a gas lamp. With persistence and experimentation with settings I gradually became familiar with my new machine.
I have just returned from 2 days in the triangle and instead of the usual couple of grams of gold I came back with 3 beautiful specimens with a combined weight of over 25 grams. They were found in a heavily detected area, in fact over the 2 days I frequently bumped into other detectors working the same patch, apparently without success.
One nugget in particular was right in the tree roots and was found whilst I was experimenting with normal soil setting which is far more sensitive but does pick up a lot of ground noise. Each time I detected a target I would switch to difficult soil setting to try and weed out what was a real target and what was ground noise. I swung the coil against a tree and got a clear signal and to my excitement when I switched back to difficult soil setting I got a faint wavering of the threshold that became louder as I dug. It was so satisfying to see the 8 gram nugget sitting in my scoop, my persistence and experimenting with settings had paid off.
For me the goldfields really are re-opened with the release of the GPX 7000 which i now believe is a huge leap forward in technology....
Kevin - Victoria, Australia
