Thai Gold with a GPX 5000 (video)

[GuyFromThailand]

(continued from prev)

Kick those dirt clods out of the way and detect where they were.

The ground was not even at all with furrows so it was difficult to get a full normal swing with the coil, it is hard to see the differential in height of the ground in the video, it is about 35 cm (the furrows are 35 cm deep), in the video it looks like it is somewhat flat with just a few clods of dirt.

Running in DD while using a mono coil is a holdover from the GP series.

Not sure that applies to this video as the coil switch was set to mono matching the coil in use.

you should only move forward at one inch per hour

(note: meaning in the commenters view the coil sweep speed was too slow). This is from the manual 'The Deep Mode should be used when you are detecting a small area very slowly and carefully; such as when chaining or cross-gridding a run of nuggets on a slope. Deep Mode is optimized for a very slow sweep speed to provide maximum depth, on large targets.' He did recently find a 75 gram nugget at more than a meter so it seems like the sweep speed is working in his favor!

With that wind and the other person yacking in the back ground I would deff. be using a headset!

It wouldn't be a very interesting video if you couldn't hear the threshold (ie if he was wearing headphones).

the technicians from Australia finally agreed with what I have been teaching for 20 years. Unless you have a known source of interference, a high power line, or another detector close by, leave your coil on the ground

Sounds like a good suggestion. Would be nice if Minelab updated the manual to show this technique especially if it is known to be superior to the method recommended in the manual.

Whats he growing? Weed?

The crops are tapioca.

I noticed he is not ground balancing correctly. I see him pushing the button and releasing it while the coil is still in mid air. No gross balance adjustment and no fine balance adjustment. Gold must be pretty easy to find as he is obviously running out of balance.

There may also be some confusion on how ground balance works when in tracking mode. Once the 'quick-trak' button is pressed and released a short beep is heard and then a three second fast auto-Ground balance is initiated. Think of it as a 'ground grab'. It is not necessary to have the coil positioned on or near the ground when the button is pressed, as long as the coil comes close to the ground within the three seconds the machine will ground balance. Various techniques can be used, it can be pumped up and down or lowered to the ground once within the time the ground grab is active. Anyway, if there is no or inadequate ground balance done while in tracking mode it would be abundantly clear by listening to the threshold right after starting to use the detector (after the incorrect ground balance). The threshold would initially be erratic and slowly become steady after the machine starts tracking the ground, especially with the slow sweep speed he uses . There is no evidence of this in the video. Also, 'running out of balance' implies a somewhat permanent condition and would imply the GPX was in 'fixed', not 'tracking'. (It may also be that some of the commentors about ground balance thought the GPX was in fixed mode and not tracking in which case the comments make more sense).

Get rid of this video before someone watches it and copies what he's doing…

This video is not an English language training video, just a translation of a Thai language video for general interest. Admittedly it isn't really very good, for one thing the sound is not that good, watching the Thai video gives a better audio and the threshold can be heard more clearly. Part of the comments would just be related to a Thai cultural thing; they tend to like to keep things simple, ie the consistent setting of the iron discrimination. That might appear to GPX lovers as heresy, as iron can't be used on Mono coils, but to Thais it is a convenient way of consistently setting the machine so if the coil is swapped out there is no need to reset it. In that area normally a DD coil is used because of the iron trash but this may be a common practice even in other areas. Yes, it is nice that the GPX is flexible enough that there is no adverse effect from setting Iron on a mono coil, and either setup works fine! Likewise with GB, normally I think the coil is 'pumped' more, but either method will work when in tracking after the quick-trak button is pressed. Just different. Goes to the point 'GPX accommodates different strokes for different folks'.

At some point it would be nice to reshoot another video in that same area. If any local expert is handy would love to shoot another explanatory video in that same location. There was a nearby radio tower removed since that shooting which has had a positive effect on threshold stability.