New Zealand Gold Prospecting & Metal Detecting Forums Archive

Very pleased - my Minelab GPX 4500 turned up today. I'm a little intimidated though - there's so many settings you can play with and a choice of coils. Think it's going to take some practice to master!

I'll be seeking out a dummies guide to the Minelab GPX 4500! :P

There's the choice of a double D coil and a mono coil so I'll have to figure out what's good for what.

Ok, better switch the brain back on - been a while since I've had to do some study! :P

Being more of a 1960s relic dredging era I was always dubious of metal detectors - Got the best Garrett that money could buy though in 1980 or 1981 and headed for the hills - after ten to twenty seconds of finding nothing I then relegated the thing to A & P Showgrounds, Playgrounds, Picnic grounds, Beaches and Race Tracks where I did do extemely well. When I took a friend to the gold claim we had at the time with his Minelab 1700 and he found a small nugget I was sold and bought the best Minelab money could buy - the new Minelab Extreme - ten or twenty seconds of failure in the hills and it got put away never to be used again for ten years - last year my son asked once again for the ten thousandth time if he could use it - hes never looked back and is quickly beep, beeping his way to success.

If you are like my son Gavin then I have no doubt that you will love the device, get used to it fairly quickly and will do well in the hills and along the rivers - good luck but dont be like me and expect instant success!

minelab 4500// hi gavin see you have bought a 4500 is it new or2nd hand you can get a dvd by aguy named johnon porter re // //seta program // he willexplane allthe info on how to set allcontrols and timing s seta stands for // smart electronic timing alignment // covers ferrous discrimination// pre progammed search modes //stabilzer controls // he can be foundon this form GOLD DETECTING@ PROSPECTING FORUM hope this helps in some way exkiwi123

No worries, will do ;) I've only tried it outside the house so far and it just goes crazy with non-stop signals / noise. Apparently it needs to be 200 - 300 m away from any interference e.g. powerlines I've been told. Will get it down the beach this weekend for a play. Hoping to get hold of digahole / Nat for some tips too but not managed to get him in yet.

I'm about to sit down and have a read of the manual now. I hate boring manuals, but I think I need to need to read this one! :P

Cheers JW - much appreciated :)

It came with the first DVD - The SETA Project, but I look forward to watching the others too for more tips.

Took the detector down the beach and woods for a quick play today. Relieved to get the thing working ok. Just too much interference around my house to practise. Was a bit worried in case it had got damaged in transit and that's why it was making so much noise! Thankfully not :)

hi Gav, if your detecting around urban areas with lots of emi, use a dd coil, there is a switch on front of the control box (the one facing away from you) it has 3 settings dd, mono and cancel, flick it to cancel before you turn the detector on, then do the rest as normal.

Hi Gavin, I'm home tonight and tomorrow night, give me a call, thurs this week is best for me after 7:30, mornings possible also.

Nat

Thanks for the words of encouragement - much appreciated. I'm actually chomping at the bit to get out there and have a proper look for gold. Put it off this weekend just gone as was looking a bit wet over west, but I'm hoping it's all good to go this weekend! If I'm going to make the long drive I want to make sure I'm going to get some decent detecting time in.

Funny that you were finding gold right on the track itself. I'm always trying to thing of how best to get in to the arse end of nowhere to go looking. Digger showed me his Hennessy Hammock the other day which has got my mind thinking about deeper bush missions :P Good to keep in mind that it's not always in hard to reach spots!

interesting that you found gold on a track. i say this because so many people would laugh at such. if you think about it a lot of tracks, whether a simple miner's trail or something bigger, are bulldozed or hand dug into the land. a hell of a lot of digging when you compare it to what you would do on a day's gold hunt. such cuttings allow a "window" like view into the make up of the ground, ie. they might show faulting, schist veins etc. when the track was made no one was waving a detector about that's for sure. thus making tracks a perfect place to detect (and use to access places of course).

i know what everyone will say - tracks will be covered in human metals (bullets, pieces of vehicles, old chocolate wrappers with the foil, etc. very true. but like elsewhere this should just be a hindrance. if you dig all those targets you never know what you will find.

i'm always amazed when people tell me i'm wasting my time digging such as i get told someone else will have detected there before. maybe they have. maybe they missed something. maybe their detector was inferior to yours, or maybe you know how to use your detector better and can find what others with the same detector have missed. all factors to consider.

i always consider getting right away to the farthest reaches i can but at the end of the day most people don't have the time to get there too often (which is why it is considered higher chances to find gold also obviously). good finds can be made anywhere. as they say, gold is where you find it.