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GPX5000 timings/settings in Western Australia
- Thread starter Tony
- Start date
steve herschbach
New member
Hi Tony,
I am not a tuning wizard by any means. I focus far more on working hard and trying to get my coil over targets than finding perfect settings. We did specifically seek out ironstone infested locations and than ran Fine Gold timings 90% of the time. I bumped the Gain as high as I could get it while maintaining a stable threshold, and maybe tweaked the stabilizer a bit. That was it. I cross-checked targets by switching to enhanced or normal. The GPX runs incredibly well in ironstone. I took a real liking to the Nugget Finder 18" round mono while I was there. It was a real pleasure detecting in Australia and I hope to return there someday.
I am not a tuning wizard by any means. I focus far more on working hard and trying to get my coil over targets than finding perfect settings. We did specifically seek out ironstone infested locations and than ran Fine Gold timings 90% of the time. I bumped the Gain as high as I could get it while maintaining a stable threshold, and maybe tweaked the stabilizer a bit. That was it. I cross-checked targets by switching to enhanced or normal. The GPX runs incredibly well in ironstone. I took a real liking to the Nugget Finder 18" round mono while I was there. It was a real pleasure detecting in Australia and I hope to return there someday.
Tony
Member
Steve,
Thanks very much for the reply.
I don't own the GPX5000 (yet) but from my observations, many users are over complicating things by trying to tweak every setting possible....inadvertently "hobbling" their machine somewhat ????
Your "keep it simple" philosophy is great with everything hinging on a quiet/stable threshold so the machine can report back to you.
I'm sure you will be back to WA.......a million prospectors over a million years will never cover the gold bearing ground down here !
Regards,
Tony.
Thanks very much for the reply.
I don't own the GPX5000 (yet) but from my observations, many users are over complicating things by trying to tweak every setting possible....inadvertently "hobbling" their machine somewhat ????
Your "keep it simple" philosophy is great with everything hinging on a quiet/stable threshold so the machine can report back to you.
I'm sure you will be back to WA.......a million prospectors over a million years will never cover the gold bearing ground down here !
Regards,
Tony.
steve herschbach
New member
Just because they give us more adjustments does not mean we have to use them!
I think there is a desire to find the "magic" settings that make gold pop out of the ground, especially on the part of those who have not found much gold. Having been around a lot of novice nugget hunters by way of my involvement in pay to mine operations I can promise you that novices have a big problem with this. They go some time without gold and so start fiddling with controls, and before you know it have the machine so screwed up it will not find half the gold it passes over!
My biggest complaint on early Minelabs was the famous "Minelab warble" and the ability now with the GPX to adjust for the cleanest and steadiest threshold is probably the single largest improvement in the series in my opinion. That ability to hear a whisper in bad ground is what gets targets missed in the past.
I think there is a desire to find the "magic" settings that make gold pop out of the ground, especially on the part of those who have not found much gold. Having been around a lot of novice nugget hunters by way of my involvement in pay to mine operations I can promise you that novices have a big problem with this. They go some time without gold and so start fiddling with controls, and before you know it have the machine so screwed up it will not find half the gold it passes over!
My biggest complaint on early Minelabs was the famous "Minelab warble" and the ability now with the GPX to adjust for the cleanest and steadiest threshold is probably the single largest improvement in the series in my opinion. That ability to hear a whisper in bad ground is what gets targets missed in the past.
What Steve said is correct about fiddling with setting the best way to over come this is for new comers is to go to custom A and place the settings you are using there , then go back to normal general and no matter what you do or how far you mess it up all you do is just got to custom A and you are back to the original settings.WA MONO COIL fine gold don't for get to switch it in to special,motion slow,gain 15-17,audio quiet,audio i like 42 but that up to you depends on your hearing,stab 10-14,signal 16,target vol 10-13 the higher you run this the detector will run noisier ,response i switch between normal and inv depending on the ground depth,track med and disc off.Each detector runs different depending on the coils used and the operators experience the setting above work for me i also run in fixed.
Jonathan Porter
New member
I have found the GPX 5000s to be very consistent from one detector to another.
The reason I recommend using Fine Gold in WA is two fold, one is it allows the operator to focus on mostly good target signals without the pain of the constant intrusion of LOUD hot rock signals (highly mineralised/magnetic iron rich rocks littered all over the surface). Fine Gold effectively deals with the vast majority of them whilst at the same time allowing just a few to get through the audio to alert the operator that the ground conditions have changed somewhat, this then leads to the second advantage of Fine Gold, namely that the timing allows a small amount of mineralisation signal through which is very important when patch hunting for gold. In West Australia in a lot of the areas the soils are pretty benign, once you ground balance them they don't constantly change like they do in places like Victoria, however the surface rocks do change a bit and so does the cap rock layer under the soil layer, so you need a timing that deals with this whilst at the same time providing good depth and sensitivity.
In the old days the only option was to revert to a DD coil which came at a price across the board on all gold sizes, the Smooth class of timings go a long way to helping compensate for the hot rocks whilst providing good depth. The main advantage of fine Gold when prospecting for new patches is that quite often in WA a new gold patch is heralded by an increase in hot rocks and also a general increase in ground noise, so you want to be using a timing that allows you to hear these subtle changes rather than unilaterally removing everything. Fine Gold allows a small amount of localised information through that is not too distracting for the operator but at the same time keeps you interest up if you pay attention to what the detector is saying, usually I recommend for this style of detecting a large elliptical monoloop, this way you get VERY good sensitivity to tiny surface gold (any gold is good gold when patch hunting) and at the same time VERY good ground coverage per swing.
These are my day to day settings for the GPX 5000 using small and large monoloop coils when patch hunting in WA (in no particular order).
Soil Timings Special Fine Gold
RX Gain 10 - 14
Motion Slow
Coil/Rx Mono
Tone 62
Ground Balance Fixed
Tracking Speed Medium
Audio Deep
Stabilizer 8
Signal 19
Target Volume 10 (B&Z Booster/dual Speaker use)
Volume Limit 8
Response Normal
Search Mode General
Usually I will make adjustments to the Deep search mode option if I want to experiment but highly recommend you keep things like Tone, Signal, and Target Volumes the same between the tow as it takes a lot of time to readjust to these settings.
Just my 2 cents and hope this helps
Jonathan Porter
The reason I recommend using Fine Gold in WA is two fold, one is it allows the operator to focus on mostly good target signals without the pain of the constant intrusion of LOUD hot rock signals (highly mineralised/magnetic iron rich rocks littered all over the surface). Fine Gold effectively deals with the vast majority of them whilst at the same time allowing just a few to get through the audio to alert the operator that the ground conditions have changed somewhat, this then leads to the second advantage of Fine Gold, namely that the timing allows a small amount of mineralisation signal through which is very important when patch hunting for gold. In West Australia in a lot of the areas the soils are pretty benign, once you ground balance them they don't constantly change like they do in places like Victoria, however the surface rocks do change a bit and so does the cap rock layer under the soil layer, so you need a timing that deals with this whilst at the same time providing good depth and sensitivity.
In the old days the only option was to revert to a DD coil which came at a price across the board on all gold sizes, the Smooth class of timings go a long way to helping compensate for the hot rocks whilst providing good depth. The main advantage of fine Gold when prospecting for new patches is that quite often in WA a new gold patch is heralded by an increase in hot rocks and also a general increase in ground noise, so you want to be using a timing that allows you to hear these subtle changes rather than unilaterally removing everything. Fine Gold allows a small amount of localised information through that is not too distracting for the operator but at the same time keeps you interest up if you pay attention to what the detector is saying, usually I recommend for this style of detecting a large elliptical monoloop, this way you get VERY good sensitivity to tiny surface gold (any gold is good gold when patch hunting) and at the same time VERY good ground coverage per swing.
These are my day to day settings for the GPX 5000 using small and large monoloop coils when patch hunting in WA (in no particular order).
Soil Timings Special Fine Gold
RX Gain 10 - 14
Motion Slow
Coil/Rx Mono
Tone 62
Ground Balance Fixed
Tracking Speed Medium
Audio Deep
Stabilizer 8
Signal 19
Target Volume 10 (B&Z Booster/dual Speaker use)
Volume Limit 8
Response Normal
Search Mode General
Usually I will make adjustments to the Deep search mode option if I want to experiment but highly recommend you keep things like Tone, Signal, and Target Volumes the same between the tow as it takes a lot of time to readjust to these settings.
Just my 2 cents and hope this helps
Jonathan Porter
filternozzle
Member
Jonathan Porter said:
Jonathan, am I correct in assuming if GB switch is in the Fixed position it doesn't matter what the Tracking Speed is set to as it is not operating?
One of these days I might get a chance of Gold hunting.... so information you have given would be very useful. Cheers
Jonathan Porter
New member
filternozzle said:
Even though the Tracking is set to fixed, when you perform a Ground Balance (GB) after the initial forced fast GB when the Quick Trak button is first triggered the Tracking speed reverts to the chosen speed in the menu, the forced GB gets the ground balance to within 90% + of perfect, the last bit is usually generated/finalised by the underlying chosen speed, of which I find Medium to provide the best overall averaging speed option of the three speeds available.
Hope this helps,
JP
filternozzle
Member
Jonathan Porter said:
Thanks for the clarification JP.
steve herschbach
New member
Just goes to show there are things going on I do not even think about.
Smigo
Active member
I hunt in Victoria and range between Sens Xtra, Fine gold and Enhance. Change it when the ground says to. I like the low tone 30 as my hearing hears signals better with it down there than it does up high. I think tone is a personal choice you have to experiment with to see what suits you personally. My go to RX gain setting which see's me right in a lot of situations is 15 with the stabiliser on 10. I change settings a lot though according to the place I am hunting in and dont reckon there is 1 set lot of settings that is right for everywhere. Some people leave theirs set and forget for everywhere, I dont. Sometimes my gain is lower sometimes higher as is my stabiliser though my stabiliser rarely gets above 11 or 12, and I mean rarely. I check my ground bal often too, especially during and after digging up a traget as it can drift a bit on the odd occasion when putting the coil down a hole or running over a large target. In fixed. When things are quiet and my threshold seems to be purring away without any probs I try bumping the gain up to see if I can squeeze a bit more out of the 5. Sometimes I can, sometimes I cant.
If its reall quiet ill try sens Xtra over Fine, if its noisy ill drop to Enhance. Your hunting environment generally dictates what yo can get away with I reckon. Im always going for stability of threshold with the highest possible working gain to hear the nice faint down deepers.
Cheers.
If its reall quiet ill try sens Xtra over Fine, if its noisy ill drop to Enhance. Your hunting environment generally dictates what yo can get away with I reckon. Im always going for stability of threshold with the highest possible working gain to hear the nice faint down deepers.
Cheers.
Jim Robertson
Well-known member
I found last week that where I was hunting for relic's in Va. that if I was running gain at 11 or 12. I could run the stabilizer at 1 or 2 and the machine would run very sweet. I use to set the stabilizer at 10 and go higher not lower but found out it was the wrong thing to do.
Jonathan Porter
New member
The Stabilizer is pretty important, I would not recommend going much below 8, it would be better to back off the Gain than lower the Stabilizer too much. There is a huge amount of information hidden within the Stabilizer setting so the higher the number the more information you will have assuming the general noise floor is not so high that the information is lost within the overall audio clutter.
Smigo, you are correct in saying that an operator should not set and forget their detectors, however in places like WA for instance you really have no choice due to the large amounts of hot rocks scattered about the areas and the sheer vastness of the gold bearing ground, time is of the essence so its a case of setting the detector up to get the least amount of distraction relative to the most amount of performance in an attempt to cover as much ground as possible in a given time frame. Once a good location is found then you can take the time and experiment with the different settings available on the detectors.
As an example of why you should go over ground with different timings etc check out the video I filmed for the Minelab web site when I had SteveH and Chris Ralph with me in WA a few seasons back, the section in question starts at the 2.12 mark, the nugget was found using Enhance with the same settings as described above, see what happens when I switch to Normal timings.
Minelab web site Blog video
JP
Smigo, you are correct in saying that an operator should not set and forget their detectors, however in places like WA for instance you really have no choice due to the large amounts of hot rocks scattered about the areas and the sheer vastness of the gold bearing ground, time is of the essence so its a case of setting the detector up to get the least amount of distraction relative to the most amount of performance in an attempt to cover as much ground as possible in a given time frame. Once a good location is found then you can take the time and experiment with the different settings available on the detectors.
As an example of why you should go over ground with different timings etc check out the video I filmed for the Minelab web site when I had SteveH and Chris Ralph with me in WA a few seasons back, the section in question starts at the 2.12 mark, the nugget was found using Enhance with the same settings as described above, see what happens when I switch to Normal timings.
Minelab web site Blog video
JP
Smigo
Active member
Ha, Enhance made Normal look a bit Ordinary there
Yeah I agree, stabiliser at 1 or 2 
Only time I drop down the stabiliser and gain real low is to see if im getting close to a target down a mongrel hole im sick of digging out. Wow you'd lose some targets down that low, 1 and 2. I never drop below 8 except for doing what i just mentioned.
Yeah I agree, stabiliser at 1 or 2 Only time I drop down the stabiliser and gain real low is to see if im getting close to a target down a mongrel hole im sick of digging out. Wow you'd lose some targets down that low, 1 and 2. I never drop below 8 except for doing what i just mentioned.