I got a chance today to try out the new Mono Elite at Jupiter Creek. I just recently bought the GPX5000 from Miners Den and today was a training day for me with Nenad as the instructor.
I put the new coil on at home and turned the machine on for the first time at the diggings just as Nenad drove up. Thankfully I bought a fully functioning machine and headed off with Nenad who also had a mono elite attached to his 5000.
Nenad ran me thru the basics and then set the machine up in Deep with Fine Gold timings. EMI was a little troublesome but found a tune setting that worked well after a bit of testing. Nenad went to quite a bit of trouble to sort out settings that suited my preference for volume, tone, etc and I ended up with a unit that was pretty easy to use.
Nenad then decided to look for a first target to demo how Deep setting works and amazingly the first target he hit was deep and gave the inverted tone. He dug done a good 12" then hit a tree root that needed to be chopped out to continue digging. The volume coming out of his speaker had picked up considerably and the coil gave the loud overload signal all around in the bottom hole he had dug. Not sure which direction to dig in as the coil was disappearing pretty much into the hole and just overloading.
Nenad switched the Coil/Rx to Cancel to pin point inside the hole and got a direction (down) and continued digging just a bit more and out came part of an old-timers nail. Pity as the hole was now at a guess, 16" deep and we were both hoping for gold on the first dig for the day. The switch to Cancel on the 14" mono coil worked a treat and dumbed the coil right down so it was far less sensitive and could be used to pinpoint inside the hole. The training day was really good and Nenad is a very proficient detector operator and a very nice bloke to boot.
We both finished up with a bit of a look around with the Deep search mode and Fine Gold timings working really well. Nenad found more deep targets with the Coiltek Elite Mono and I found a few shallow targets, but it was all junk and no gold was found. Interesting to note that there are still deep targets to be found at Jupiter Creek as its a small area and has been thrashed.
Being a beginner with the GPX 5000 I cant give you a comparison on how the coil works compared to others, but I can tell you it was very easy to use. It did not give false signals from wet grass or knocking against rocks, trees or my shoes. Ground undulations had no ill effects and it was easy to ground balance in the soils around Jupiter Creek. I'm pretty impressed with it and cant wait to run it over some less mineralised soil like at Tibooburra. Also up there EMI is not a problem, so where the soil runs deep I can crank it up.
Ian