One concern brought up is how do you know you are not ignoring gold when you adjust the GB so it balances out the hottest ground or hotrock and then operate in all or low.
First, for all practical purposes, most gold will not be ignored in the all mode simply because of the design. Unfortunately, the design does have its imperfections on any ground balancing PI including the TDI. No PI will find all gold with one setting of the detector and the SPP is no exception. Any gold that mimics the ground signal will or could be ignored. So, if this is a concern, then tweak the GB a little and the gold that was ignored, now becomes visible.
Since most gold found is small, under 1/4 oz, then generally there is nothing to worry about. So, knowing more about the gold and size of gold can clearly help as much as knowing the detector. In fact, there are now several videos out that clearly display how even how a high priced PI can ignore gold just by changing "timings".
The nice thing about the SPP is once one learns how gold could be ignored and how to overcome much of the problems then places that are beat to death can be searched again using slightly different techniques and increase the possibility of finding something left behind.
So, adjusting the detector to just ignore the hotspots in the ground will allow a much faster search of an area because one isn't always getting stuck trying to figure out if a hotspot is ground noise or deep gold. At the same time, most detectable gold will be heard.
Then there is the size of the target and what would normally be a gold signal. Knowing when high or low tones will be generated on the gold in the area being hunted is also a recommendation.
Don't expect this little low priced PI to compete in depth with a detector costing 3 to 5 times as much. That would be utterly stupid to do. On the other hand, for 1/5 the price, the ease of use in adverse areas plus very decent depth makes the SPP look really good.
The bottom line is the ideal SPP will be reasonably easy to ground balance in most areas, run with a super smooth threshold as the norm, have very respectable depth, be easy to tweak for the ground conditions, and of course, be light weight.
Reg
PS: Now, I would like this to be the last post on this hiccup reduction mod project or the subject for that matter. So, to one of the moderators, please close closed this thread to further posts on the subject. The reason will become self explanatory soon.