ATX V GPX a fair review -

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Grab a cuppa & have a read
Very honest & reputable


Ant   

Not a good comparison in my view as I understand from reading the article he mainly did his tests using DD coils & not Monos which are more used here in Australia for finding gold.

I bought the ATX and was thoroughly p*ssed off when Ktown Swinger found a .2g nugget under the salt with his GPX 5000 and I couldn't get a reading on it with the ATX. Even after it came out of the ground I couldn't detect it so sent the machine back to Perth but it all checked out ok.

While my machine was away Ray (one day) very kindly lent me the Gpx4800 but we had the same result. We couldn't detect my little piece of gold. I ran across another couple with an ATX and a GPX5000. Again we tried to detect my little nugget but no lunch with the GPX5000.

Once again Ray kindly lent us another machine. I took the Eureka Gold because it was much lighter for Sandra to use. You have to play around with the different frequencies because this machine plays every musical note you could imagine if it's not happy. Anyway it picked up the 0.2g nugget that we couldn't detect with the ATX, GPX4800 or the GPX5000. The only problem was working out what was a genuine signal or a bogus one.

I think it's a great little machine for somebody needing something light weight but when it comes to finding gold we've failed badly in all our efforts so far.

Phil from Marble Bar.... Yep we've run out of time. We called every contact we could tonight trying to get somebody to hold the fort at home so that we could stay out here but no luck. We'll be home by the end of the month.
 

A mates been using an Garrett ATX as his main machine and didn't do very well with it at all, all up about 5 grams in about 4 weeks of use, biggest piece was about 3.5 grams, all shallow and around the same spot but nothing else from any other place he went to, including one spot where I picked up about 20 grams of small pieces in two days.

Given that this bloke is pretty new to the detecting game that would of course be a contributing factor, he was running the stock standard dd coil and not a mono coil, he said the 8" mono is available for the ATX but was $800 or so as it also comes with the shaft   its simply not going to be as sensitive to the smaller pieces that we consider as our bread and butter bits, with the standard issue coil, little bits are easily sucked up on the 4500 with an 8 or 11 in mono.

I didn't use it for any length of time but my first impression was its very heavy, feels awkward and makes hideous sounds, one time when I was detecting a hillside I heard what I thought was a goat, later it turned out to be my mate detecting in the creek at the bottom of the hill, anyway I cant say that I am too impressed overall with its performance from what I saw of it anyway.

Another bloke told us that the indigenous blokes around Kalgoorlie are mad on the ATX for use on the salt lakes, my advice to him was to go to Kal and unload the thing, in experienced hands it may be a useful machine but the impression I got of it from what I saw was not good so in all honesty I would not waste my time using one, well not if I had the choice of that over my 4500 or even my extreme for that matter.

au-fever