If your GPX appears broken, try this.....

[Reno Chris]

So a couple weeks ago I was out detecting with my GPX 5000 and all was going well. Steve Herschbach and I were hunting a spot where there are several patches in a comparatively small area a few hundred yards up to a quarter mile apart. At the last place of the day, I took out my GPX and turned it on, and it sounded weird (the 5000 goes through a specific set of tones on boot up and I know what is normal). I looked at the display screen and it was off - it looked the same as when the detector is off. It was making some faint sounds and I waived some metal objects past the coil and it did make a weak sound as the metal went by - but it was obviously malfunctioning and with the screen off, I could not adjust the sound upward even if I wanted. I tried a second power cord and that made no difference. I tried another coil - also no change. So I sent the unit into minelab for repair. They rebooted the unit to all the factory presets and it worked fine. Apparently this happens sometimes that the computer gets itself set to some weird setting and it wont run right unless reset to the presets. Turning on and off is effectively a partial re-boot, while restoring factory pre-sets is a full and total reboot. Sometimes that is what it takes.

So, the moral of this story is.........

if you find that your Minelab GPX 4000 to 5000 model seems broken, try a different power cord, try another coil (both these I already knew), but also try rebooting to all the factory preset settings.
Here is the procedure from the GPX 5000 manual:

To restore all Factory Preset settings:

1.Turn the detector off.

2. .Press the On/Off switch down and hold until the Reset Defaults menu appears (approximately. 5–6 seconds).

3. Turn Function Select to the right to select All Settings (as shown on the diagram).

4. Turn Setting left or right to restore all Factory Presets.The detector will restore Factory Presets and re-start.

Just thought this falls into the category of stuff worth knowing if you own a GPX detector.

[fi4451]

That's good info, I wasn't aware of that. Thanks.

[oldies1955]

Thanks Chris!
I would have been going spastic if mine started fritzing out.

Good info
Tom H.

[nuggethunting]

Hey Chris,

Great information. I had a similar experience with one of my GPX 5000's as it got real noisy one day. I decided to resent all settings back to default and it really made the detector quiet again. I re-adjusted the detector back to the settings I like and it was stable. It's worth giving it a whirl if you're GPX gets funny.

[Roo]

Good info Chris.

Now here's what not to do.

A number of years back a guy I know of, not a friend, had his VLF keep playing up so he hanged it up in a tree and shot it with a shotgun

It was left hanging in that tree for several years, blown to bits.

Another guy I know well that has a bad temper, I wouldn't detect with him but speak to him now and then, had his coil on his SD 2200 making false signals. So instead of simply checking that the connectors inside the plug were not too far apart and push them back in to get a better contact, which is the first thing you'd do or try, he put his pick end right through the middle of it. He showed me the coil and when I had a look at it, hole and all, you could see those connectors were simply too far apart

[A Sasquatch]

My 4500 has done that more than a few times and I found the factory reset worked to correct the problem. Last time as an added bonus I was able to use a mono coil in an extremely mineralized area.