Coiltek Goldhawk 10x5 Review

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Yesterday I found enough gold to buy a couple of chicken wings. I have a feeling in my water that tomorrow is the day. Chicken drumsticks here we come.……. I can taste that honey and soy chicken now.

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Well it looks like chicken drumsticks and wings for dinner. A mate and I went out to do a bit of filming comparing the 11” Minelab coil to the Goldhawk 10x5 on real targets. We went into a deep lead area where the old timers holes were up to about 10m deep. I’d found about 5 targets a couple of days ago with the Coiltek coil and just marked each target on the gps so that I could find them today. I had the standard coil fitted and my mate was using his new 10x5. We decided to do a bit of roaming for about an hour or so before we did the filming. My mate scored 4 bits in that time and I found one before we met up for the comparison filming. I will try to get the video up in a couple of days so that you can see what happened. My mate and I enjoy this type of testing and we had a ball running through the process. After filming we decided to work together and just use one detector. One person would move fallen branches etc. and dig targets that the other person detected. We would swap tasks every 20 minutes or so. The gold/ junk ratio for the day was a bit disappointing. It turned out to be about one in thirty two.……………………………………. One bit of junk for 32 small bits of gold. Some of the pieces were just specs. We both thoroughly enjoyed the day.
 
Hi Folks,
I went out for a morning session with the Goldhawk tethered to the 6k. Just worked in the same area where a mate and I did some filming a couple of days ago. Managed to squeeze out a few more micro bits before running the detector over a mound that I’d detected with the standard coil. Picked up two exceptionally faint signals that both turned out to be gold. Now it may have been poor detecting on my part the other day (which is a distinct possibility as I have the detecting skills equivalent to that of a one legged spider) or it may be due to the fact that I can run the 10x5 in auto plus (whereas the standard coil has been sitting comfortably on sensitivity 3 for that area) Or it may have been that the standard coil could not pick up the small target at depth. Doesn’t really matter anyway. The main thing is that I was able to put some shine in the rattle jar. The depth of the two nugs was impressive. Here is the deeper of the two holes. Sat the pick at the point where the gold was pinpointed before the last little scrape. The coil is sitting on the ground to give some perspective of depth.6A0A65BE-2DD3-459E-A002-208661B165DC.jpeg
And the little piece of gold………
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I was pretty impressed with how this little tacker was “sniffed out”with such a small coil.
 
@Lesgold have you had much rain where you are? It's hard to see but that first pic it looks a bit drier than where I have been going in Vic.
Reason I'm asking is that I cannot run any coil here above 4 sensitivity because the ground is so wet. I usually run the Goldhawk at 2-3.
Maybe once it dries up I can go back to a few spots and "clean" up lol
 
SL, it has been dry for about a month now. Its actually quite good out in the bush. The 10x5 has been running quite well flat out and the standard coil on sensitivity 3 or 4. Sometimes you can crank it up but only in the really dry areas and in the mornings before everything heats up.
 
Spoke too soon. Got a bit of rain the night before last. Not enough to make the ground overly wet but it was enough to activate the charcoal in the soil slightly. Over the past couple of weeks the ground has been as quiet as a mouse. Noticed yesterday that some charcoal was making the detector show some interest and there was a little more noise coming out of the mineralised, damp soil.
 
My thoughts exactly! There's no point taking digging targets all day to get several bits that only total say 0.3g. When the fuel costs more than you find - what's the point?
Just about every park in Aus will produce more gold ($1 & $2 coins) with an Equinox in half the time.
Sometimes it just makes sense to move on & find a more productive spot, I think 3 to 500 bits to an ounce belongs in a pan!
But I can take my SDC down to the same park and find $1 and $2, and then go to a place where I can find gold. And if tgere are subframes, then there might be bigger.....
 
Ok, Les,ya talked me into it, I went and got one.
Like you, I find it to be a great little coil. Much more stable than the 11" and easy to poke around in long grass. Good little coil for our wet season up here. Got 3 little speccies in a flogged out patch today, very small amount of gold.
 
Glad you like it Dave but please don’t tell anyone. We want to be selfish and keep all the gold to ourselves. It really does nail that small stuff but it also has the potential to find hidden bits in locations that bigger coils can’t reach.
 
The 10x5 is awesome totally dominates over the standard 11” in every way it’s way more stable and in my opinion punches deeper iv been amazed at the depth of some tiny nuggets in flogged area where my average was 2 little nuggets with the 11” now my average is 9 little nuggets and thats only about 2 to 3 hours of prospecting in the same place that I flogged with the 11” on 6000 and evo on my old 5000 . I haven’t touched the 11” coil since I got the 10x5 goldhawk
 
The 10x5 will give a false call on hot rocks but apart from that I think it’s great it hasn’t left my machine since buying it and I find gold every time I go out . I find swinging it slow and steady it runs pretty smooth
 
Hi Dave,
My replacement 11” coil from Minelab hardly has a scratch on it. The 10x5 doesn’t leave the machine. If I want to look for bigger, deeper gold, the zed comes out. This little coil runs quiet and we are finding that in a few areas we can run flat out in normal. Hot rocks can be the issue but it’s only a matter of dropping in it into difficult to see if the signal diminishes or disappears. In “hot” areas, it can still be normally set a couple of notches higher than the standard coil. I don’t find that it’s bump sensitive but more touch sensitive (if you know what I mean). When you get right in the zone and are focussed on slowly covering a small area, sometimes a small plant or a fine tree root can have you guessing for a minute or so. I never knew so many detectors have missed so much lead shot. This also means that they have left behind a lot of the small gold.
 
Mine was sounding off pushing through grass, and bumping the stick or rock. The damp ground could have been giving me false targets, but not much in the way of hot rocks, more hot pockets of ground.
 
Really wet grass and saturated ground make the coil sound off. I’ve had that happen before when going out after rain. The coil settles down when things dry up. You would probably need a snorkel or learn how to hold your breath if you were out detecting at the moment.
 
The ground is not saturated, it has been just an average wet season, and there are no puddles etc around. The grass is long, but not wet. The zed 17 x13 was quiet.
 

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