By
Steve Herschbach
I explained on another thread that I was interested in giving the MDT 8000 a spin looking for gold nuggets in trashy locations. All mining camps are places where supplies were hauled in, and none of it left the site, but is scattered everywhere. Miners were not into wasting time, and if possible built their shack, or cabin, or small town, right in the middle of where they were mining. It is not uncommon therefore that there is good gold right in and around some of the trashiest locations in old mining camps. Time has passed and often the wood is gone, rotted away, or left behind when the structures burned to the ground. Old nails and remnants of rusted cans are the most common items, but every manner of metal item that might be needed to survive and mine in the wilderness might be found.
There are detectors that might do better on the tiniest gold nuggets than the Tarsacci MDT 18000, but the MDT has a hot 18 kHz mode that is more than sufficient for common VLF nugget hunting tasks. I knew without even trying it that the MDT 8000 would have the sensitivity I was looking for. My main question was whether it offered anything I could not live without for finding gold nuggets in locations littered with ferrous trash. It is also very common in mining areas that the ground is quite mineralized, though that is not something that is universal.
I gave the MDT a go at a location where there used to be a shack built on some gold bearing ground out in the Nevada desert. The shack is gone, but there are plenty of cans, remnants of cans, nails, door hinges, bed springs, stove parts, etc. All the metal stuff that was ever brought there, but was not valuable enough to be scavenged as the years passed.
The bottom line is the MDT 8000 did not disappoint, and I did manage to find a gold nugget in the limited amount of time I had. The nugget is interesting to me in that after cleaning it weighs exactly 1 gram, as weighed on my very accurate digital powder scales. I find a lot of nuggets that weigh about a gram, but I don't really recall ever finding one that was 100% spot on before. It's probably happened and I did not take notice of it, but this time I did.
Gold nugget fresh out of the ground
Exactly 1.00 gram!
The good news is I did not find anything particularly difficult about using the MDT 8000 on this short test run. I bounced back and forth between mixed mode and disc mode a bit, and far preferred mixed mode. I am big on audio information, usually running detectors in full tones and preferring modulated audio. I also prefer having visual target id information available, I'll take all the tools I can get, but in general I hunt by ear and prefer complex audio. Many people would find the way I run my detectors to be too noisy or busy but with nearly 50 years of detecting under my belt my detectors talk to me and I want to hear everything they have to say.
So mostly mixed mode, black sand and salinity off, sensitivity to max, and ground balance manual 668 on this ground.
This is admittedly a very preliminary report based on limited use. However, It does not take me long to come to general conclusions about metal detectors. The Tarsacci MDT 8000 is more than capable for the task of VLF nugget detecting, with gold sensitivity as good or better than popular prospecting models running in the 18 - 20 kHz range. While the machine is very capable, there are a couple things that left me shrugging my shoulders a little bit. First, the audio. The tones chosen for revealing non-ferrous targets are extremely high, with the high tone being almost out of my discernible frequency range. Imagine a "tink" sound like tapping a glass bottle with a knife handle. I have some definite high frequency hearing loss, and while the MDT is usable for me, I'd be lying if I said I loved the audio. There are no tone adjustments I am aware of on the MDT, so it falls into the realm of something I just have to live with. There is some ability to modify the response by perhaps trying different headphones looking for those that deliver the tones as they are in the best fashion possible, but that's about it.
The other thing is that many discriminating detectors have a common enemy, the flat remnants of steel cans. Think steel cans, thin wall wood stoves, thin steel roofing... bits and pieces of flat steel anything. Coin and jewelry hunters are quite familiar with the challenges presented by bottle caps. If anything the problem is worse in old mining camps due to the volume and variety of this type of trash item. And unfortunately the MDT 8000 is as prone to calling these ferrous targets non-ferrous as are multitudes of other detectors. That's not a knock on the MDT, but it's a bit of magic that if present would make it or any machine stand out in these types of situations.
Some problem items, and a small brass item
One of the first non-ferrous targets I found with the MDT 8000 is some kind of very small brass.... something. A little pin-like object. I was impressed by this find before I found the gold nugget, and it alone told me the MDT had the hots needed for the job. I can only speculate how the MDT would do with a small coil... no doubt extremely well on very small targets. For now however the coil that comes with the MDT 8000 is the only one available, and since this machine is aimed at the beach market, all the push from other people seems to be for a larger coil. I'd be surprised therefore if a smaller coil is ever made for the machine. The existing coil is very good, though for nugget detecting it would benefit from a solid bottom scuff cover/skid plate, to make it less prone to hanging up on sticks or sharp edged rocks.
What about the target id on the gold nugget? I have to admit I was paying no attention to target id at all so do not know. I was just listening for any medium and high non-ferrous tones and digging those.
To sum up, I am not here to promote the Tarsacci MDT 8000 as a gold nugget detector and am not saying anyone should go out and get one just for that purpose. I would say however that if anyone has this detector, it is as capable, if not more so, of performing the task as many detectors made specifically for gold nugget prospecting. I plan on giving the detector another and more lengthy workout at another location in the future, though it may be a few weeks before I report back. In the meantime, for anyone with an interest, I recommend watching this video below by Keith Southern. Pay particular attention to the sounds the detectors makes to get an idea of what I mentioned above as regards the tones. And let's close with one more look at that first gold nugget with the Tarsacci MDT 8000.
One gram gold nugget found by Steve at trashy site using Tarsacci MDT 8000
By Joe D.
By Keith Southern
By Steve Herschbach
By Aaron
By TreasureHunter5
By Bash
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