BMesenko

Great topic! For me any place that is well known and hammered it has to be a crawl. Learned that the hard way about 7 years ago when I made my first 3 trips to the fabled Rye Patch where there was supposedly gold laying around everywhere. Each trip I spent 3 or 4 full days and found zero nuggets and would have sworn the place was fished out. Trip 4 I decided to go back to an area where I had noticed dig holes on an early trip and slowly and methodically cover every inch of the ground around them. Within an hour I found my first Rye Patch nugget and a few more before the day was over. Since that day I still try to make 3-4 trips there per year and have had very few skunk days. When I look back on it almost every time I hit a long dry spell I realize that I had lost focus and was moving too fast. I don’t have the latest and greatest machine or the best technique and definitely do not have anywhere near the knowledge that many on this forum have. I also don’t think I am particularly lucky or intuitive, but I do have a not so secret weapon that not everybody has – I am naturally blessed with Patience & Persistence. All else being equal he who has his coil moving the longest will find the most nuggets and even without all being equal they will still find their fair share.

Steve, Agree no great surprise. It does illustrate that there are definitely different horses for courses. It’s interesting the niche the stock SDC fills in a place like Rye Patch which has been hit hard for decades with every generation of VLF and PI machine but it seems that even with all of the improvements in technology there are still a significant number of smaller nuggets that all other machines seem to miss.

I have the Coiltek 11" round coil for the SDC and after hunting with it for about 36 hours at Rye Patch last week I agree with Strick in that I would only recommend it if you are looking for more depth on bigger gold. In my opinion the larger coil turns a detector that is special in it's ability to hit on small gold into a more ordinary machine that will find larger pieces deeper than the stock coil but is not as deep as the 5000 or 7000 on pieces over .5 grams. I had hoped that it would be close to as sensitive as stock on the .5 gram and smaller and better on the larger pieces plus having the benefit of significantly more coverage but I don't believe that is the case. What I found is that I did find my typical number of .5g -1g pieces that I would have found with the stock coil plus some deeper .75g - 1g pieces that I am fairly certain I would not have found without the Coiltek. The downside is that I only found a couple of pieces that were under .5g when I normally find 3-5 in that range on a typical day. I base my observations on average daily results of having spent somewhere between 300 hrs & 400 hrs detecting at Rye Patch since getting the SDC in Sept of 2014. Other observations on using the Coiltek: It has a much more subtle signal on the small nuggets at similar depths than the stock coil so you could easily miss a target that would be a screamer on the stock coil. It is quite a bit less stable in the threshold and more prone to hot rocks making it tougher to stay focused enough to hear the fainter signals. I do like the Coiltek for hunting tailings in Idaho where I live. The better coverage and significantly better depth on larger specimens are worth the trade off in sensitivity on small stuff. The added weight is enough that if you don't normally use some kind of assisted support (bungee , Hip Stick etc.) you will definitely want to get something.

I went out today for the first time with the 11" round. My area still had too much snow to do much detecting but I was able to do some tests against the stock coil, the new 11" coil and my Gold Bug with the 10" elliptical . I tested nuggets of .25g, .5g, 1g. 1.5g and some assorted larger specimens with between 4g and 35g of gold content. The 11" will pick up the .25 at nearly the same depth as the stock 8" but the signal is much more subtle. On the .5g they the 11" has a bit more depth, maybe about an inch but again the signal is much more subtle. On the 1g and 1.5g the 11" gets easily 1"-2" more depth. With the larger specimens the 11" gets dramatically more depth. On the 35g sample I was able to get a solid repeatable signal at at least 6"-8" deeper than the stock coil. The only piece where the 11" performed worse was on a specimen with about 7 grams of gold in quartz with a total weight of around 40 grams. There is a lot of gold but it is very fine. The Gold bug hits hard on it up to about 8"-10". The stock sdc will get it at 6"-8" but very faint. The 11" doesn't get a solid signal over 3"-4". A couple of final observations is that the large pieces when at depth give a solid signal on the 11" but it is reversed . As you get closer it changes to a normal signal. Lastly overall all it seems like signals on the 11" are less obvious than the stock coil even at shallow depth. With the stock coil a .5g at 4"-5" screams. The 11" on the same nugget gives a clear signal but nowhere near as obvious.

I may have mentioned this before but ... I haven't much trouble with my cell causing falling on my SDC. However when using my GB Pro if I have my cell phone on in an area where I can get basic cell service but no data connection about every 10 minutes the GB will go crazy for a couple of minutes then go back to normal. I am assuming that this is when the phone is trying to establish a data connection. I use an iPhone with GSM (At&t) service and have noticed that it is particularly bad when roaming off network in the Rye Patch area. If my phone is anywhere within 10ft or so it causes the problem. If I turn off Cellular data and just use phone service it solves the problem.

The stock headphone are decent in calm conditions but are not useable at all if you have much wind. They are lightweight and hollow and when the wind blows across them it creates a lot of noise. Normally if it is windy I would switch to a heavier headphone or a noise canceling set but the with the connector they used it's not possible. I think $95 is a bit steep for an adaptor but I am ordering one anyway. After being out on a couple of very windy days I now see it as absolutely necessary.

Steve, Thanks for the response and insight. I totally agree using discrimination is a crapshoot and I try to avoid it when prospecting. More eye opening to me is the apparent masking of targets by hot rocks or mineralized ground on the GB of what you would think would be easy targets in all metal. I am starting to think this may be fairly common and explain some of the success we are seeing with the SDC in heavily hunted areas. I also found 3 small nuggets with the SDC in a spot I know has been hunted extensively by others and i'm 90% certain I have covered before. None were very deep and all should have been obvious with any good VLF.

I was out hunting some dredge tailings yesterday and did some testing with the SDC 2300 and the Gold Bug Pro on some specimens. I tested a variety of pieces but the one that is most interesting is in the pic below. I previous tested this with the GPX 5000 with standard 11” mono and it registered only very slightly when touching it to the coil. The GB pro with the 6x9 coil in all metal mode will easily pick this up at 8”-9” in an air test. The SDC in an air test was slightly less at 7”-8”. I then put this at the bottom of an 8” hole without covering it up and retested. No change on the SDC but the GB was now barely able to pick it up. After filling the hole the SDC still had no problem but I couldn’t pick it up at all with the GB. Further testing determined that the GB would pick this up at only about 4”-5” when buried. I actually found this specimen about 4” below the bottom of an 8”-10” hole where I dug out a large square nail. Other observations were that on the buried test the GB was only slightly deeper in all metal than in disc. mode but the target response area is far greater in all metal. In all metal I tested with the machine ground balanced neutral and with ground balance at + 10 and – 10 on the GB screen. Also if I put one of the numerous hot rocks from the tailings over the specimen it almost completely masked it. After this test I carefully covered over a 15’x20’ area with both detectors from 2 directions and marked all targets. I got 7 targets with the GB and 9 with the SDC. The 7 with the GB were all seen by the SDC but the GB could not see the other 2 SDC targets. 6 were square nails and one was a small piece of tin. The 2 the SDC saw that the GB did not were a small (about ½”) tip of a rusty square nail at 4” and the item in pic 2 below at a about 6 1/2 inches. Not certain what this item is. Looks like some kind of melted metal possibly solder. It reads on the GB screen about the same as gold or lead but too hard to be lead. This screamed on the SDC and once out of the ground hits very hard on the GB also. I reburied it at about the same depth and the GB hit it fine. It seems that there are certain situations or rocks that mask targets from the GB. Last observations are that the GB seems much more sensitive to iron targets than the SDC. The deeper nails were stronger signals on the GB but on the specimen in the pic and some heavier gold specimens I tested the SDC clearly had significantly more depth in the ground (at least 25% - 30%). Bottom line the SDC will clearly potentially find more specimens than the GB in tailings if you have the patience to dig every target but with the amount of trash in the area I was hunting it would be difficult to have the discipline to dig all targets. I have gone out many times with the intention of digging everything but after 3-4 hours of digging junk ever couple of feet I usually fall back to using the Disc. to try to determine if its trash. Given the random distribution of specimens in the tailings this is most likely gives the best overall odds but that being said I have found a couple of nice pieces that in ground read and sound just like nails on the GB pro (Target id only in the high 20’s in disc. and 3 or more bars on the iron indicator in all metal. Once out of the ground or reburied they read in the normal 48 to high 50’s range in disc and 0-1 bar on the iron scale in all metal.) I am trying to video as many digs as possible to try to catch one of these to post showing the sounds and readings. It would be great to get some of the groups opinions on the reason for this.