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Okay, yeah, I took, as a first outing, a GB2 to a public park and a tot-lot for about 1.5 hours to practice with the 10x5" coil (all I own.)

 

First target out ... a hot rock.  Uh oh.

Second target out...darnit ... I can't nail it down... what the heck ... turns out it was 8" of 16ga steel wire.  Grr...

Third target ... oh yeah, I have discrimination!  Target!  Discriminate ... solid clean spike.  Discriminate means no iron, pull it up ... rusty nail.  *boggle*

Fourth target ... okay, signal...discrimination ... multiple-spike flutter ... due to last #3 target that must mean it's NOT iron since #3 was .... rusty wire.  *boggle*

 

Things I learned which you all probably already knew: 

 

1)   I have no idea what I'm doing.

2)   Manual GB is a lot of work. Doable, but still a bit of work to do it over and over and over.

3)   The park I was in had hot-rocks.  Granite-looking nodules of evil.  Everywhere and at all layers.  This is just obnoxious.

4)   Iron discrimination either doesn't work, or more likely, I'm going about it all wrong so I need to work on this.

5)   This GB2 is insanely sensitive.  I chased a signal in the sand for almost 10 minutes only to find out it was, literally, the platinum puck off a spark plug getting kicked around.

6)   At 12 cents clad per outing I'm never going to pay this thing off. =P  (I bought it for the gold fields so this is very tongue-in-cheek.)

7)   The mosquitoes are active now.  They're huge and hungry.

8)   Digging everything stinks when you're not allowed to actually dig.  See #1 and #4.

9)   Having a pointer (TRX) is nice.  In trashy areas it's annoying to get it out, put it away, get it out, put it away, get it ou...

10) All pinpointers should have headphone jacks.  Talk about drawing attention...
11) Foil + lawnmower = no fun
12) It's was a pretty darn good time.  Well, except for the mosquitoes.

 

I cannot find any YouTube videos or anyone on "how to interpret the Gold Bug 2 tones."  Even over lots of trash and some test targets it's not quite making sense.   Anyone have any good resources on learning those tones?  Especially the discrimination tones?

 

On the plus side - I cleaned out a bunch of rusty trash, beer bottle caps, wires and such so the park it 0.00000001% cleaner..

 

Rock on.

 

 

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I see some humor in your frustration but I do believe most if us have been in the same place too, myself included. I just spent a few days with a new BG Pro in an area full of rusty cans, many hot rocks and highly mineralized ground. Was nothing more than confusion and frustration, especially when I was in a virgin patch and watched my buddies popping nuggets with Minelabs all around me! I was determined to learn this new detector!

I have a practice patch in my yard, that is where I should have started......learning curves suck big wind

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I am a big fan of practicing but starting out you need to find a place with WAY LESS TRASH. And I would stay away from the turf. Best spot would be a sand lot or fresh water beach. A volleyball court is perfect or something similar. You want easy digging and most places like that get detected so should not be tons of targets.

You have a detector designed for finding gold nuggets and so the basic idea is dig everything. Iron discrimination is prone to calling gold nuggets iron and so missing them. Therefore the iron discrimination on the Gold Bug 2 is designed to work on small targets and to be conservative. Big iron and steel will often read good. The basic theory is a gold nugget will give a good, clean, solid response. Ferrous items will either be eliminated entirely or more often will break up. It helps to hit the target from various angles and at different speeds.

But frankly you are not using a Gold Bug 2 to find big stuff. You need a place with less of that and you need to be looking for tiny stuff, like small aluminum. The target that most closely mimics small gold responses is small aluminum or small lead. Pretend these are small nuggets - everything else is junk.

The only tone response on the Gold Bug 2 in all metal is the pitch increases with the target strength, so big targets squeal, small targets have a softer tone. Some people ignore targets that squeal as big junk and that works until you get over a big nugget. In iron disc it is all about the target being clear and distinct, or breaking up.

If you are just getting a few hot rocks no big deal. If they are present on every swing you need to set the mineral switch either for higher levels of mineralization, or use less sensitivity, or both. This with proper ground balancing should lessen the hot rock responses. The goal is to try and get a smooth, stable threshold, even if it means less depth. Running in iron disc will often eliminate hot rocks, but again it will get less depth. Experts learn to hear the difference between many hot rock sounds and zippier nugget sounds.

Bottom line is you picked a really tough spot to learn. Give yourself a break and find a sand lot to start out in or hit the road and go bullet detecting. You may not have gold nearby but you can go detect just about anywhere and find bullets. And since bullets and shell casings sound just like big nuggets they are good test targets going aluminum detecting in town or bullet detecting out of town is just like chasing gold except the targets are usually shallower and stronger than a typical nugget signal, which tends to be more mellow.

Hope this helps. Stay with it, it will make sense in time. It is just like starting with a new musical instrument - everything is foreign at first.

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Oh, just so everyone is aware: that post was meant to be lighthearted and not "down" in any way!  I knew going into it I was in for a lot of digging and learning and confusion.

 

Personally, I prefer the "more trash."  It gives me more chances to hear "what is what" in a smaller timeframe.  It's easier (for me) to then correlate the various sounds in my head and try to make sense of it.  And it keeps me from getting bored or running out of space to detect in.  Also, I now have a good set of "distressed targets" (eg, rusty garbage) in my collection to then resample at home.

 

The mineralized stuff I was seeing was when I was in Low GB, and they (the rocks) would fire it off.  They respond to a magnet, too.  When I moved to Med GB they disappeared.  I searched in all-metal until I hit something, then checked it (or tried) with discrimination.  Whatever ground I was in for this park, I pulled out a clad dime at 3" and it had so much reddish-iron color bound to it that I thought it was a penny at first.  I found what also seems to be a highly-ferrous round target about 1/16" in diameter which looks (to my highly un-trained eye) like a little ball of rusted iron ore.  /shrug

 

Thanks for all of the information about the GB2 tonality.  I'll have to think on that and compare it to what I heard (especially as I go back over the junk.)  I figure there's a ton of nuances to pitch, duration and amplitude that I'm just not hearing because I'm new so it'll just take time to tune my ear.

 

It was still fun!

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It's called VCO (voltage controlled oscillator) audio where the target volume and pitch is directly related to the target voltage. The closer you get to the target, the louder the tone and higher the pitch. The effect maxes out depending on the size of the target and how close it is to the coil.

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The discriminator is not perfectly accurate, and distance from the coil to the target wildly affects discrimination.

Last summer I got a very faint sound at an old gold mine. It discriminated out on my GB2 as hot rock or iron. It could have been a spot of mineralized ground and there were some in that area. I decided that there was a decent chance it was gold because of the exact spot it was in (my intuition based on experience). I dug down about 4 inches and the discrimination broke up a little, but sounded a lot better. I got down about 7 inches and it screamed and discriminated as clearly not ferrous. At 8 inches out popped 2 nuggets, one 2 dwt (a 1/10th of an ounce) and a second at one dwt (1/20th of an ounce).
I was glad I trusted my intuition rather than reject the initial faint target sound that gave zero response on discrimination.

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Cleaned up a bunch more trash last night; I still don't feel that I can "trust" the iron discrimination.  I know it's an inexact-science to being with but I dug up a 4" chunk of an iron bar, ferrous, at 1" because even in iron-disc it still spiked the VCO up nicely (expected due to big target, close, but expected it to be disc'd out.)  I've got a really nice diverse test-set now.  I think it may be close to time to start doing some really solid controlled side-by-side testing.

 

Excepting the discrimination I think I'm about comfortable enough to hit some gold-areas tomorrow.  Hopefully, and with a ton of luck, I'll have a couple more test-subjects for my collection!  >:)

 

Rock on!

 

-mox

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