first impressions :)

Picked up my 5000 this morning, was swinging it in the afternoon. I only had an hour for a quick swing as it's a 4.5hr drive home and lots of crap to do before work in the a.m.

First impressions it seems to run smoother and balances quicker. No big learning curve from the 4500, switch on and go. The upside down front plate is a brilliant idea! Tilt your head, kink your arm a tad and there they all are right side up!

As time was limited I hit a spot I have absolutely flogged senseless and within 15 minutes using the new Fine gold timing pulled out a nice little 1.5 gr from about 9" down out of one of my boot scrapes I'd previously dismissed as charcoal and ground noise. I was using a 17" Nugget Finder eliptical.
That impressed me! I now know I have to go back over that spot again.

Didn't have time to try out the other timings apart from enhance which seemed again to run smoother and quieter. Next weekend!

I also dug about 6 bird shot which shouldn't have been there either.

Thanks for the info, i would like to try hiring one soon.

madtuna wrote:
.....The upside down front plate is a brilliant idea! Tilt your head, kink your arm a tad and there they all are right side up!.....

I'm keen to hold one and have a look at this as that is what I do now and no problem, maybe it will be all backwards for me now.....I am a bit different!

mate of mine rang tonite...he got a 5000 today....only got a few hours in....no gold on an old patch that he had got hundreds of bits of over the years........he found it a bit noisy..but not used to it yet.

im with tuna here. got mine yesterday and the day was windy as hell with rain on the horizon and thought here we go, but was very suprised at how stable the 5000 was. i think it was definately smoother in enhance a tad bit noisier in fine gold but i was told this. over all for a few hours use i am happy with jumping in the deep end early.
cheers chad

madtuna wrote:..... and within 15 minutes using the new Fine gold timing pulled out a nice little 1.5 gr from about 9" down out of one of my boot scrapes I'd previously dismissed as charcoal and ground noise. I was using a 17" Nugget Finder eliptical......

Correction. Was looking at my 5000 this morning and noticed the switch is in enhance. As I have not changed it since I came back there is a good chance it was in enhance and not Fine when I found that little fella.


My appologies

I have ordered one and should get it soon. Sounds like it's a goer.

I will be using an NF 17" as well.

Thanks for the info,

Jig

Even though I knew the weather was going to be against me I went out to HE to give the new 5000 a run.

Saturday was a loss, spent the day huddled in my coffin hoping out occassionaly for a leak, to stoke the fire and stoke the stomach.
Sunday was showers, with thunderstorms in the back ground and winds that would blow ma off the dunny! All up, only about 5 hrs detecting.

The 5000 handled it in its stride!! An occassional spike from the thunder in the background but apart from that it was smooth as a babies bum!

The ground was that water logged, you did a hole and it filled with water and pretty much every pull out of the pick had to be banged on a rock to remove the stuck mud. Then it was a matter of squidging through the mud to find your target.
A few targets were a pain to find as they stuck to the pick in the mud.

All up a tad over 9grms including a .15gr sunbaker and a bazzillion BB's in flogged ground.

So second impression? I love it!!

good on ya so it sounds like they are going to be an awesome detector...wish that i had the cash to get one...
cheers
stoppsy

Without a difinitive side by side test, I did feel it handled the conditions better than my 4500 did. I felt it handled the waterlogged ground smoother with less ground noise than I was used to.

Here's a couple from the day 1.85gr, 2.10gr and the little .15gr sunbaker....uploading the yootoobs of the digs of these three at the moment.

Good looking nuggies and info tuna, well done.

Cheers kon61.

Thanks madtune for the 5000 appraisal

Looking forward to the Youtube uploads

Thanks fellas...here's 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TiLcalYr60


and the sunbaker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEsLCoPw2TE

The 3rd one I'll load tonight as uploading in HD really slows my comp down and it's a big file from boot scrape to recovery. It does give you an indication of the smooth threshold though in horrible weather conditions.

cheers

great job love watching detecting vids on you tube..

Nice madtuna - don't you love that soggy muddy ground

ha! the next vid I am uploading now...will take about 4 hrs grrr! my hole is filling with water as I'm digging and you have to bang the pick to knock the damn mud off!

i hate that.it has been very wet..can't wait to see that vid...
cheers
stoppsy

Nice going Tuna, good videos of the 5000 running in very average conditions, wet ground usually makes a bit of noise but that sounds ok. I reckon your a happy chappy

Thanks for the info Tuna, any gold is good gold.

Cheers

Hi Tuna,
Is the ground you are working highly mineralised? and could you tell us what settings you were running the machine in.
I spent the weekend in not dissimilar conditions in flood ravaged Victoria trying out my new toy. I'm still undecided if I made the right decision in upgrading from the 4500, having gone over several small patches that had produced small gold and not finding the 5000 having any luck picking up some i may have missed.
Believe me I tried all sorts of combinations of settings with almost every timing willing that tiny bit I missed to pop up so I could justify my purchase.
What I found was as the ground was very hot with hotrocks and noisy clay patches, enhance on the 4500 was the reason i could get the little suckers now on the 5000 in fine gold i may as well have been detecting under my car with signals coming in from everywhere.
I did dig or at least scrape a lot of these signals to find them all to be ground noise or hot rock. I tried Enhance and Sensitive Smooth which worked pretty much the same as on the 4500 getting rid of a lot of the false signals but still no gold was won.

With the fine gold timing sitting between enhance and normal its expected to be more effected by ground noise and hot rocks, so it seems there isn't a great advantage in the new timings for very hot ground?
Is the new Enhance better than it was on the 4500?
It almost seemed to me that by quietening the new machine it has somewhat dulled the response, somehow taken a little of that sharp edge i got used to with my 4500. Even when pinpointing the sound was a little more mellow and no matter what settings i tried it seemed more of a roll off rather than a sharp peak. Kind of hard to explain but id liken it to listening to a valve amp over a digital one.
Unfortunately I too didn't have a 4500 around for a direct comparison as my detecting buddy also had a new toy to play with. But next weekend I will put it up against the old faithful as im taking the new owner of my old 4500 out with me which will be interesting.

Dont get me wrong im not saying its a lemon, the 5000 is a great machine for those buying into the hobby as a first machine or updating from a GP model , EMI seemed less even with distant storms. It was quite easy to get running very smooth and the ground balance is spot on, very quick.
BUT is the heavy duty bungee and fancy upside down decals on the front end cap worth the $2500 one has to come up with to upgrade from the 4500?? (I liked my 4500 very much ..MINELAB make the best detectors in the word, just to make it clear i am not a MINELAB hater...

It dosnt feel like a leap ahead unfortunately but just a refinement of the previous model, MINELAB like any electronics manufacturer are there to make money and when you have a good product refining it and making it a little better will sell new units.
It does feel a little though like the marketing and the hype have swept me up a little more than I wish the results of their R'n'D department could have.

Had I the opportunity to test drive the machine for the weekend before deciding to sell my 4500 and updating, based on this weekends observations (I did pick up a .5 and a .2 grammer just not off any old patches) ...I would have stuck with the old 4500....

Polak

once you get your head around it and get the settings that you need you'll be right..i'm still mucking around with the settings on my 4000 i just can't find the one that i'm happy with....but i'm finaly starting to get my head around it all.
cheers
stoppsy

Hi Polak,

mostly I was running in enhanced purely to see if I could gauge a difference over enhance on my 4500, though I did often flick to fine when on a target.
Our ground is probably a bit milder than yours though there are patches of heavy mineralization. I targeted a few of them and believe it was more stable than what I was used to.
I'll concentrate on fine on another trip once I've settled in and built up my confidence with the new machine.

Mostly I had gain at 14 to 15 , stabilizer was at factory preset though I did tweek it a couple either way. Usually in the weather like on the weekend the max gain I was using on the 4500 was about 9 or 10.

I did try normal timings a few times also and found on some ground I wouldn't have concidered normal on before that although still noisey, it was workable with a bit of patience.

What I did notice, as you can see in the first video, about 2 feet away is one of my old dig holes. When I find a nugget as a matter of habit I slow right down and thouroughly and methodically work the ground around it. yet I missed this one.

Apart from that, the number of bb's I pulled from spots I know without a doubt my coil had been over amazed me. I know different days, different weather, different approach angle etc... but to my mind many of them should not have been there.

It's early days yet, but at this stage I am glad I upgraded, so far I firmly believe there is an improvement in stability, balancing and EMI handling. How much? Hard to say, but enough to make me believe the upgrade was justified...for me anyway.

Cheers,
Steve

Thanks Tuna for that,
I will definitely be trying to get the most out of the new machine and will try some more areas where I have found gold, maybe it will justify itself for me too. Ill be at Inglewood next weekend and might go down to Kingower where I know the ground is noisy...to look for the other hand...lol
Agreed it is very good to get ground balanced and run smoothly and the EMI didnt seem to be much of an issue....now if only it would find that gold i missed

Polak

Tuna,

Dedication hopping out of that coffin every now and again...thanks for sharing the knowledge and posting the vids...Well done!!!!!

Huey duck.....

I love the way my 4500 will find pieces of gold as small as 0.05 grams while at the same time ignoring all lead shotgun pellets smaller than size 2 or 3
I hate larger shot and the new steel ones, I find it wastes heaps of time fiddling around trying to bag the target, time that could be spent finding more Au.
If the 5000 is going to find even more shot, then I'm afraid it's another tick in the "stay with the 4500 box" The places I hunt are nearly always covered with shot, which was an absolute pain with the VLFs.

Cheers
Grey

added the 3rd video finaly for those that are interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL61NAYfVAU

Thanks for the vids Steve. I picked up my 5000 this arvo.
Jig.

Good onya Jigs!! looking forward to your opinion!

great vid..how deep did you dig? sounds like you love the 5000 then...
cheers
stoppsy

So far so good...was only the depth of the 11" coil.