First trip with NF Xceed coil

I have just returned from a two week trip out from Meekatharra. I was using my GPX 6000 that had the speaker mod done and fitted with The NF 12” x 7” Xceed coil.
I mostly ran the detector in Auto+ mode with audible threshold and always with the Minelab BT headphones.  The coil is a little heavier than the standard 11” coil, but the threshold was nice and stable and seldom needed a noise cancel.  The coil is ridiculously sensitive on tiny near surface targets and the elliptical shape makes for accurate pinpointing.

In the area that I was detecting, most of the gold was small sub surface targets, though several targets were deeper.  It has been several months since I last detected using the standard coil, but I seem to think that the NF coil was giving much the same depth as that coil.  I will need time using the NF to make a more informed comment.

Late one afternoon while detecting, I heard a sound like a gust of wind or a willy willy going through the trees.  It turned out that the sound was coming from a massive flock of several hundred green budgerigars.  They would land on a patch of ground turning it green like an area of grass.  After several seconds they would en masse take to the air and the flapping of their wings sounded just like a gust of wind.  It has been many, many years since I have seen budgies in such numbers and it was a magnificent sight.

Also in massive numbers were the flies, this year they were particularly friendly.  Even with the draw string on the fly net tightened to almost choking point, one or two flies managed to sneak in!  In past years, I have been able to get away with wearing a pair of wrap around sunnies and smearing on some Nature’s Botanicals fly repellent, but not this time.  I seem to think that either the NB cream is less effective than it used to be or the flies have developed a taste for it.  I would rather not use a DEET based product, so if anyone has their own recipe for an effective repellent, I would be happy to hear it.

Except for a couple of days when a cold north easter blew, the weather was perfect with warm sunny days and chilly mornings.  It doesn’t get any better than standing around the campfire with a hot cuppa as the sun rises over the trees.  

We did not get a lot of weight with the gold, but did get a lot of bits.  I am looking forward to the next trip with the 6000/NF combo and hopefully the big one!

Hi Pebbles,

Sounds like you had a good trip, we had a similar trip to you...we were north of Cue and the missus with her modded Detectronics GPX5000 with the 12x8 NF coil ...i think she ended up with 55 nuggies mostly sub grammers on ground we have done to death, even the GPZ 7000 had been over the ground...so it appears that keeping up with new tech brings in the yellow

Budgies, mostly in small groups but plenty around....flies, we found because we had 13 shifts of camp within the 5weeks we were out that some areas had more flies than others...more cows in the area the more flies......I mostly wear a black fly net or drive faster on me quad bike but the missus has them crawling up her nose and doesn.t even blink an eye

I.m glad we have been home for a bit...bloody chilli weather to be out and about....Will go out again soon but not decided on where to go

Anyways gotta hang up, got some coil makin to do...experimenting

Cheers, Ron and Sherri

Hi Guys,

It was great to catch up the other day. I'm hopeless at remembering people and their names so sorry about that. I'm too busy most days with mundane things so I haven't enev visited this site in a long while. Perhaps I need to up my game a bit.
Anyway, thanks for dropping by.

Phil & Sandra

Flouro wrote:Hi Pebbles,

Sounds like you had a good trip, we had a similar trip to you...we were north of Cue and the missus with her modded Detectronics GPX5000 with the 12x8 NF coil ...i think she ended up with 55 nuggies mostly sub grammers on ground we have done to death, even the GPZ 7000 had been over the ground...so it appears that keeping up with new tech brings in the yellow

Budgies, mostly in small groups but plenty around....flies, we found because we had 13 shifts of camp within the 5weeks we were out that some areas had more flies than others...more cows in the area the more flies......I mostly wear a black fly net or drive faster on me quad bike but the missus has them crawling up her nose and doesn.t even blink an eye

I.m glad we have been home for a bit...bloody chilli weather to be out and about....Will go out again soon but not decided on where to go

Anyways gotta hang up, got some coil makin to do...experimenting

Cheers, Ron and Sherri

Hello all we are just back from a quickie trip to the widgeemooltha area where we have done well in the past, we went there as there was a weather window of consecutive days of high 20s as opposed to the usual high 30s at this time of year, the dragon got first nugget .43gms with her new 6000, with the std 11" coil, i was using my 6000 with a 12x7 Nugget finder exceed coil, over the 4 days there we got just uner 6 grams of mostley small bits as the area has been picked clean, we found the Exceed coil to be deadley, my tally was 7 bits to her one, the deepest bit was a .73 as just over 400 deep which shocked me as her 11" did not pick it up till we had removed around 20cms of dirt, so now i am going to buy her an exceed coil as well as i have been through 2 std coils and i want the security as i have lost faith in the std 11" coil, a bit of a bitch here though was the amount of holes not filled in the area looked like the moon and the rubbish IE flip tops tin foil and also small tuna tins also stubbie rip tops our tally for the area we chained which was around 2 acres was 163 bits of crap, so in saying this we have decided to stay away from the goldfields area as it appears to be the norm nowadays and we have experinced this over the last few years at (widgee, noresman, menzies mt monger, coolgardie, Goongarrie, Kookynie, sthn cross all fall into that zone), also come on guys can some readers keep this site alive and post no matter how trivial, end of rant stay safe all ok!

Hi Rusty
0.73g at 400 mm is fairly impressive. Were you using manual, auto or auto+?

I have always run on the highest sensitivity possible. This can tend to make the threshold a bit chattery at times, less so with the NF Exceed, but those little repeatable whispers can still be picked up.

A while back. I read an article by a very experienced detectorist (possibly JP) who liked to run his 6000 on manual 10. Expert opinion seem to suggest that manual settings result in a more stable threshold with little drop in sensitivity.

Anyway, hopefully I can get away in May and find out for myself. Trouble is, that when I get a signal, all I want to do to is rip it out of the ground and comparison testing gets forgotten!

Good morning Pebbles in reference to your ask, after three years useing the 6000 i now have found i tend to run the unit at +10 manual and wind it back providing the ground is not to noisey, where we detect in the Pilbara most of the area we dectect is Calcrete clay like and is really quiet, i then wind it back to around 1 pm and find the threshhold is a gentle humm.
The area we mostly detect is fairly flat and is crossed with a lot of gullys and creeks, the larget nuggets in the past have been 62gms,59gms and quite few between 6 grams down, 2 years back we found a stringer that produced 20 ozs over a few weeks, before we ran out of supplys and water, all of the gold from that dig was in the form of quartz pebbles and bits of iron stone, we dug a trench approximately 2m long by 1.8m deep, the initial piece of gold in that hole was almost 500 deep which was a shock, the 6000 picked it up as a loud warbley signal we thought it was a iron or steel object so i bipassed it over several days, on our last day we decided to dig it up after we had packed everything up as the dragon kept on about it might be a big nugget, we got the first large specie at 500 and it hedl almost 3/4 oz of gold then it was buckshot small nuggets and other species galore, we filled the hole in and returned with our mate a week later all re-supplied and re- dugg up the hole and the gold kept coming untill we ran into a solid wall of pinkish quartz, which was hard as hell and the crow bar was just scartching it it also had small visible gold in it, we anticipated going back last year but the Dragon was diagnosed with Bowell cancer so we put that off, thank god they got it all, so now she just has to endure 6 monthly checks for the next 5 years, so come early may we are off back up there to re-open the hole.
So in short iff your 6000 is working well with the exceed or even the std coil go figure,i personally have found more gold and deep gold than all my other detectors combined in the last 10 years or so, my mate uses his 6000 wound up flat out on difficult and some of his larger nuggs would shock you, he regularlly gets ounce or better nuggets, i melt my gold into sluggs as i get a slightly better price and seeing as it hit almost $3300 this morning i cannot waite to get back up there.

G’day guys,
Good bit of reading here on the 6000, and also a little CPR for the forum.
I jumped in and bought one last year before the price rise, I grabbed a 14x9 after all Ive heard with the 11in.
When I finally get a chance to get out and give it a swing I’ll keep you all posted.
Good luck and safe travels for all out this year.
Ty