Minelab SDC 2300 Metal Detector - Child's Play Part 2

The SDC 2300 is an amazing little metal detector, I can confidently say this because my son Timothy has achieved amazing results with his SDC in minimal time thanks to the simple switch on and go design.

Here in Australia it’s the summer holidays and as with all school holidays at some stage parents and children find themselves running out of ideas of what to do next to occupy their time.  I suggested to Tim he might be able to supplement his pocket money by joining me in detecting a little spot I’ve been frequenting since the GP 3000 days, I also said he should not get his hopes up too high as I’d not found much there in recent times using the GPX 5000.

How wrong I was, Timothy turned on his SDC and was rewarded straight away with a rough little nugget right in amongst my old dig holes, so much for teaching the boy about patience and perseverance! Still being at the vehicle rigging up didn’t help my own mental position, as I had not even got to switch my detector on yet let alone get my coil over a target.

Once the initial excitement abated we got into a rhythm of working in and around the trees and fallen branches. It was great to see Tim was focusing on his coil technique by keeping the coil swing low and slow focusing on minimal lifting at the ends of each sweep, text book stuff that left me feeling very proud of his efforts.

It’s pretty neat working nearby with someone in situations like this, keeping out of interference (cross talk) range I was able to keep tabs on Tim’s progress and make suggestions on places to try based on where I’d found gold in the past. Using a blend of voice and hand gestures I managed to steer Tim down the side of a slope where I‘d picked up a solitary rough nugget earlier in the year. Even though I’d spent considerable time in and around the location I still felt it was worth a shot because the gold I’d found suggested there was a little decomposed quartz stringer nearby. I made this assumption because I’d found a couple of these types of deposits in the local area over the years so felt the chances were there of it happening again.

The SDC 2300 has amazing sensitivity especially on gold that has not travelled too far from the source, in either specimen or rough nugget form. I’ve on a number of occasions now, found numerous pieces of gold that the GPX 5000 would not respond to or if so very faintly, in some cases its felt almost surreal.

Keeping the above in mind it was worth a shot especially after Timothy’s amazing success so soon after switch on, so I encouraged him to keep at it and to dig everything. This meant after a while he had a nice little pile of shot gun pellets added to his trash collection before yelling out to me to tell me about a large signal he had under the coil.  What happened next was nothing short of amazing, signal after signal starting coming out of the ground, prickly nuggets and quartz specimens popping out of the ground one after the other.

I quickly grabbed my camera and started filming what turned out to be an amazing experience, clearly demonstrating that using the SDC 2300 really can be “Childs Play”