New Customer Scores First Nugget Ever with GPZ7000

[DOC]

Took a new customer out today to train him with his new GPX7000.

He brought his DOG, Roman, to make sure I trained him properly. Trust me with Roman around this customer got the best training class I ever gave.

I have never seen a dog that weighed over 200 pounds, who was so lovable and gentle. Another prospector happened along on his ATV with his dog. His Dalmation jumped off the ATV, and Roman just wandered over to say hi. No aggression what-so-ever.

Back to the gold finding. I took him to one of Hoss Blackman's ol' patches. It's the thrid place Hoss ever took me to, 24 years ago. It has been beat hard.

But I thought we might scare up a small deep one. And my customer scored what I would estimate to be a 2/10ths of a gram nugget at about 6 inches. Just a text book subtle repeatable target that got better when he scraped the top rocks off. Then when he took 2 inches of soil off it improved by about 300% in terms of a target sound. At 4 inches I knew it wasn't trash. The customer was over the moon.

I had some other customers today report to me that the GPZ7000 with the 14 inch coil wouldn't go any deeper than a GPX5000 with a 20 inch coil? You don't say? You have to compare apples to apples. Wait until Minelab comes out with their bigger coil. In the meantime if you are going to do side by side comparisons, the closest coil to compare the GPZ to the GPX5000 would be the 12 X 15 Mono.

I think the GPZ7000 is so easy to use. Very user friendly, and the color menu screen is a piece of cake to navigate. The wireless headphone module works flawlessly. So nice to be able to wear headphones and still be able to walk away from your detector.

BCOT

Doc

[McGator]

Great story Doc. Thanks for sharing.

[Tortuga]

I've been curious how easy the menu is to use.

I got the hang of my GPX 4800 (there was still a few things I couldn't quite wrap my head around), but if I took a month or two off I felt like I had to "re-learn" the whole thing over again.

[gosee]

HI Doc

You mention Hoss Blackman. I first met him in 1989 in Happy Camp CA. He was ready to come back to the desert and sold me his New 49ers membership and as far as I know never went back. A bigger than life person kind of reminds you of Hoss on Bonanza. He sort of got me started on the metal detecting nugget hunting trail at Gold Basin where I found my first nuggets with a White's Gold Master vstat. Like Your Video's And detector Info. Have a good day. Blii C.

[nuggethunting]

Hey Doc,

Great story and find for the new customer. Ya, there will always be debate about detectors and coils and how they compare to the next model. I've heard this for the last 16+ years on the Minelab.

Funny, all the guys that claim their detectors will do just as good, go deeper or whatever will never invite me to their patch!! I guess that tells me they might have some fear the new unit might be doing something beyond what they have .....

All that being said, just get out and hunt with what you can afford and enjoy it. There is plenty of gold out there still near the surface, a smaller percentage is that deeper, larger gold that everyone wants to dream about.

[DOC]

The menu is super easy to use because it is all visual and in color, and right there in front of you for easy viewing.

No more complicated soil timings, or deciding how fast you should say you are going to swing.

Turn Detector on. Do your Noise Cancel or tuning. Ground Balance the machine.

Now you pick what kind of gold you are looking for:

1. HIGH YIELD - Going to find the little deep stuff.

2. General - Going to go deeper and find a wider range of gold but you may miss some of the little stuff

3. DEEP - Reserved for large deep pieces that you may have missed. Probably best after you have cleaned out a patch and want to make sure you did not miss anything.

Now pick your ground.

1. Normal - Best suited for non mineralized ground

2. Difficult * Most gold is going to be found in this kind of ground

3. Severe

Sensitivity

I ran at 14

Smoothing: This quiets the machine down. It's similar to the Stablizier on the GPX5000

Off

Low

High - I like this setting

Manual Tune - Allows you to tweak the auto Noise Cancel that you did originally.

Ground Balance - Auto or Manual

It also has volume, signal volume, tone, etc. But all very easy to understand.

The wireless headphone module can either be used as a shoulder mounted speaker or you plug your headphones into it. Lay your detector down and you are completely free of your detector yet you can still hear your detector in your headphones.

To select a function on a certain menu you use the up down left right arrow key and select what you want by hitting the large CHECK mark.

To go back to the previous menu you hit the BACK button.

There are no switches and selection knobs to pick a function. It is all push button driven. Everything has a visual icon, along with a text description. So High Yield shows an icon of a lot of little gold, General shows a picture of different size pieces of gold, etc.

It takes about 5 minutes to learn with the provided Quick Start guide.

Really simple. Really stable. We had a lot of helicopters overhead which usually cause havoc, NOTHING with this machine.

Take care!

Doc

[moonlight]

yep all of the above hard to say what we found with this new machine happy hunting all is great paul some were in the mother load

[Tortuga]

Good write-up Doc, thanks.