Fisher gold strike


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Matt,

I have a Gold Bug 2and a Minelab GP Extreme. The GB2 is by far the best VLF on small and very small gold as well as large gold. Your only limit is depth. The Extreme is also good on small gold with the right coil. The advantage of the Minelab GP series is depth. They will go deeper. Just stay away from the Gold Strike.

29er

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Actually the Gold Strike is passable. The problem is the user interface. You can't just turn it on and go. It also runs without a threshold and the oldtimers who had detected for gold with the other detectors didn't like that silent search part. It works, but not like us oldtimers would like. Not real user friendly.

RSJ

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Hi,

The main problem with the Gold Strike is the iron id system. The Gold Bug 2 can be set to beep on everything. But since it is a VLF hi-freq unit if you get into bad hot rocks it sings off on rocks all the time. So you put it in the iron reject mode, and most hot rocks get eliminated due to iron content. At our mine at Moore Creek the Gold Bug 2 works passably well in iron reject mode.

The Gold Strike uses a system similar to the White's Goldmasters. The Goldmaster in disc mode "grunts" on iron targets or iron type hot rocks. You can't set it to silently reject hot rocks like you can the Gold Bug 2 or Tesoro Lobo. At Moore Creek the Goldmaster series just grunts and grunts and grunts. Sure, a nugget will finally beep, but the non-stop grunting gets old fast.

The Gold Strike is dual tone. Low tone for all targets including hot rocks, and an additional high tone on metal. At Moore Creek it is non-stop low tones for hours. You will finally pick up on a low-high tone when it occurs on a metal target. Because of the dual tones it is noisier than even the Goldmaster system but the tones are more pleasant.

The one guy who insisted on giving a Gold Strike a try at Moore Creek told me he would have thrown it in the creek if he was not sure he could sell it when he got home. I ended up loaning him my own detector to use.

Moore Creek taught me that if you use VLF units, there are some places where having the ability to silently reject hot rocks can save your sanity. It is not that dual tone systems do not work. They operate under the theory that a silent reject method may incorrectly reject a nugget, and that truly is the case. Most nuggets at max depth will read as iron in bad ground. So the theory is to tell you about all targets, but make the tone different on ferrous, allowing you to decide whether you want to dig or not. Silent reject makes the decision for you and ignores the target, which could be a gold nugget.

But when you have multiple readings per swing, you get inundated with noise. A silent reject setting can be more practical under these circumstances unless you are the type of peson who can listen to nonstop noise all day.

If hot rocks are not thick, like at Ganes Creek, where Glenn used his, the Gold Strike is actually a very good unit. At 30 kHz it is hotter than the 15 kHz crowd and yet handles bad ground better than the 48 kHz plus units. My main gripe was the promised 14" coil that never happened. The unit was not very popular at all, and so they gave up making coils for it. I know I was looking for Fisher to come out with a Gold Bug 3, and I was let down to see a unit that cost more, was bulkier, heavier, and did not hit tiny gold as well as a Gold Bug 2. It seemed a step backwards to me, and apparently many others felt the same way. The Gold Bug 2 is still one of the better selling VLF nugget machines whereas the Gold Strike is now history.

Steve Herschbach

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Hi Brian,

Looks like Ganes gold to me...

I saw Fred Brust dig a walnut sized nugget at elbow depth at Ganes Creek. In many areas the unit will really perform for those that learn it. The unit had potential but unfortunately it came out at a low point in Fisher's history when they were ignoring input from customers and dealers. If they had got more input from people before releasing the unit it could have been a success. It only needs a couple changes to be a great unit. Like the abilityto shut off iron responses!

Steve Herschbach

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There are 2 real dogs from top detector maufacturers out there. You can find gold with them , but are extremely irritating and difficult to use. One is the Gold srike and the other is the Garret scorpion. Garret continues to try to sell the Scorpion after 15 years of negative reviews and no attempt to improve it or fix it. Fisher at least is pulling their dog out of the race after only about 3 years before they lose all credibility.----Bob

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THE one plus of using this detector?Well in areas outside of of Lovelock,Nevada there were "Dealer Wars" going on between 2 dealers in one favored area......one would "salt" the area(area's?)with BB's in order to run out the other guy,hoping he/they would get so disgusted with all the BB's/trash and move on OUT of the first guys area.So EVENTUALLY here we have 2 "professional" dealers throwing a bunch of BB's around on top of each others patches.......I do believe this is another form of "prospecting" by Finding BB PATCHES in order to find GOLD underneath them.The GoldStrike was/is good for setting the visual I.D. on BB's then discriminating(with that setting)to find THE BETTER TARGETS.

BIGFOOT

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