Paleomanjim Posted December 19, 2013 Report Share Posted December 19, 2013 Hello all. I got my new Garrett ATX a few days ago. The weather forecast for Gold Basin Arizona was good so I decided to head out there for a few days to try out the new detector. Overall, I am very pleased with it. This is my first P.I. machine, I have been using a Gold Bug 2 for the last 3 years. The new Garrett was nice and quiet. As soon as it is ground balanced and the threshold was set it just hums quietly, almost never responding to hot rocks. The sling made the detector light and I used the headphones to improve sound and battery life. I ran the detector around 4 hours each day and the rechargeable batteries finally ran out on the last day, so around 12 hours of battery life. The only issue I had was with ground balancing. Normally the auto ground balancing works with 5 or 6 pumps of the coil. On 2 occasions the detector failed to ground balance. The first time it failed I tried several more times a few feet away and it finally balanced. The next day, Tuesday, the ground balance failed again. This time I was in the middle of hunting and the detector was already balanced but I decided to balance it again as the ground changed and looked hotter. It failed to balance, even after 30 pumps or more. I tried a dozen or more times in different areas hoping to get it balanced because it was more or less screaming continuously. No luck. I finally gave up and decided to have lunch. When I turned the detector back on it balanced fine and was not an issue again that day or today either. I have re-read the owners manual and I believe it may have been a tuning issue. The manual states retuning is rarely needed unless in non-motion mode but perhaps the motion mode can have tuning issues as well. I am still not sure of the case, perhaps if I had pushed retune it would have balanced out. Any thoughts or suggestions from others? On the way home I decided to have one last hunt and and it payed off with a nice 27.4 gram meteorite! All in all it was a great hunt, good weather, met some more nice folks out there, got comfortable using the Garrett ATX, and brought home a nice space rock!....jim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fredm Posted December 19, 2013 Report Share Posted December 19, 2013 Nice gb...why would you use iron-check when hunting meteorites? The nickel/iron is the reason you can detect them...fred Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paleomanjim Posted December 19, 2013 Author Report Share Posted December 19, 2013 Fred, I was hunting both gold and meteorites and I had no idea what the target was, could have been trash, gold or meteorite. Why not use the iron check to get an idea what the target is? The ATX will sometimes give a grunt on larger iron targets, but not so much on small iron targets. At this point in my learning curve I am still digging every target. On this case the iron check did not give a grunt meaning it could have been a nugget, no way to know without digging. I suspect that chondrites will never give the iron grunt on the ATX, but I will need to test some larger onesl If that proves to be true then there will be no need to dig targets that grunt at Gold Basin.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fredm Posted December 19, 2013 Report Share Posted December 19, 2013 Thanks jim...I would never trust descriminate while hunting meteorites-you could passup a solid iron or stoney-iron; such as a pallesite...but, I don't trust it when hunting gold nuggets either. There really is not much trash in most of gold basin, but, there are a lot of sheisty-hotrocks that often sound like a good target...fred Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Admin nuggethunting Posted December 20, 2013 Admin Report Share Posted December 20, 2013 Hey Jim, Congrats. Thanks for sharing the video. Wishing you much success with the Garrett ATX. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bearkat4160 Posted December 20, 2013 Report Share Posted December 20, 2013 Jim, make sure you have the coil cable to the housing attached tightly with no play at all. This can effect coil stability and ground balancing....good video!Bearkat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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