G'day
Some people did very well in the goldfields in the early vlf detector days and most of the reason was that a lot of the gold was very close to the surface, a vlf detector will still get gold if you are persistent enough and will still find a virgin patch with shallow or surface gold, but you will definitely walk over more gold than you will find as they simply don't have the depth range of the pi machines, I have found dozens of virgin patches that contained good gold but almost all were out of the depth range of any vlf detector.
Also since the introduction of the vlf detectors there have been hundreds of makes and models of detector combing the known gold bearing areas, and then they have been pounded by many pi models as well, for the most part all there is left is very deep stuff and very small stuff, as most of the easy to find nuggets are long gone, these days we are pretty much scraping up the dregs in a lot of places.
If you want to get consistent gold then a pi detector is the way to go and probably the best detector I have used for this is the sdc2300, sure its bread crumbs but at the end of the day but it all adds up and its the right colour, having a VLF detector is handy to work junky areas or if you want to chase some coins and relics but in no way would I be travelling the distance I do and work the ground with less than the most capable machines, as most people will attest to its definitely getting harder to get any gold at all now from most places so it quite easily can become an issue of the cost of the hobby outweighing the benefits, I have seen many long time detectorists giving the hobby away over the last few years for this reason alone.
cheers
stayyerAU
