Gold Metal Detectors

What makes gold hard to find is rarely the gold itself, it's the ground it sits in. Most nuggets are small, and the soil that holds them is usually mineralized enough to swamp a detector built for coins, so the machine spends the day reacting to the dirt instead of to what is buried in it. There are two ways around that. A high-frequency VLF such as the Minelab Gold Monster 1000 or the Garrett Goldmaster 24K stays sensitive to sub-gram pieces while still giving you some discrimination, which is enough for mild to moderate ground. When the ground turns genuinely hot you need a machine that transmits differently, and that means pulse induction in the GPX 6000 and the Garrett Axiom, or Minelab's ZVT in the GPZ 7000, all of which keep hearing targets long after a VLF has gone quiet. So the first question is not what you want to spend. It is what your ground is doing.