Appreciate your honesty. The modded 5000 may even beat the 6000 on small gold also...I haven't done the tests or comparisons with a 6000 operator...but I've had a least 10 digs of disbelief, in just the first 5 weeks of owning it, digging ghost or faint ground signals that basically didn't exist, where I've said to myself "If this is gold, this is the best detector in the world". And they were all gold at depth up to 1 foot. 0.03 and 0.05 grammers up to 6 inches deep, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5 grammers and species up to 1 foot.