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The X-coil Has Landed


mn90403

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2 hours ago, Gold Catcher said:

 

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Dang, Gold Catcher ... i love the action shot.  Thing is, i usually get too excited to stop and slow down when digging.  My luck i will spend 5 minutes just to get a nice frame of an old dry washer nail or piece of tin, caught in time.

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6 hours ago, Andyy said:

Dang, Gold Catcher ... i love the action shot.  Thing is, i usually get too excited to stop and slow down when digging.  My luck i will spend 5 minutes just to get a nice frame of an old dry washer nail or piece of tin, caught in time.

The tragedy with this one was that when I was back home I looked at the video recording  that I made from digging the nugget out and  I noticed on the video that there was a another nugget close by that I somehow missed. It must have jumped out as I was digging out the first one. Take a look at the upper right screenshot of my video. What an unforgivable mistake....Have to hike back there.

Missed.JPG

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8 hours ago, mn90403 said:

I'll go to Barstow and try to stay out of the wind.  It will be near freezing at sun up.  We found some gold up high but it is flat near Coolgardie.  

Yup, been there several times on the GPAA claims. I mostly found tiny stuff there though, if any. I hear that you have to dig a few feet until you hit the caliche and then look there. Check out the area south of the I-15 (Mount Ord)

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7 hours ago, Gold Catcher said:

What an unforgivable mistake....Have to hike back there.

Missed.JPG

I will guarantee we all leave gold behind.  We'd  rather just not know.  I once left a screaming signal that i knew was trash.  Then a week later  i drove back 2hrs and hiked in again to check it .. because it just bothered me not knowing.  It ended up being a well preserved pepsi can that time.  I hope your piece is gold and not mother nature playing color tricks on you.

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35 minutes ago, Andyy said:

because it just bothered me not knowing. 

The not knowing is what bugs me too. And the thought that this might now be a sun baker waiting to be picked up is not resting well with me ;). Hard to tell from the video that it is really gold, but this area is gold rich and I was right on the bedrock. And I have found a lot there before. One of the largest nuggets ever found in CA came from this general area (Mojave nugget, 156 troy ounces). Was found by a guy who mounted a military grade mine detector in front of his jeep and drove around in the washes. Was in the 70's (the story goes it was the legendary Jim Straight). Every time I go there I hope I will find a similar one (don't we all!). Oh well, perhaps I will indeed persuade myself to get one of those praised Xcoils one day to make my dream come true...

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Yeah I know all that and usually always do. Don't know why I just did not do it that day. Perhaps because I got up at 3 am, drove 5 hours to the site and then hiked for 3 hours to get there......

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Much appreciated, thanks JW. It is the adventure that matters and all the excitement that comes with it. My job is very different from my hobby and many times when I sit in boring meetings my mind wanders to all the places where I have been, and where I still plan to go.  I have closer spots here too in the Motherlode, so it's not always a 5h drive  🙂  But I just love the desert and there is just not much of here in Northern CA. Planning a trip to Au and NZ soon.

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3 hours ago, Gold Catcher said:

Yeah I know all that and usually always do. Don't know why I just did not do it that day. Perhaps because I got up at 3 am, drove 5 hours to the site and then hiked for 3 hours to get there......

I got up at 3 this morning and I went to a spot where I found 2 nuggets with the Equinox.  I think they were the first two nuggets found in the United States by a customer.  When I got home I didn't have the nuggets.  😛  I wasn't going back the next day so Swifty went by where I was parked and sure enough the wind had blown my purple plastic bottle away from my pouch before I could get them home.  Simon had said at the time 'no picture, no nuggets!'  I got the vial a couple of days later and posted the picture.

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As you can see I'm back after an 8 hour day of detecting from 7 AM until 3 PM.  I hit several spots where I have found nuggets before, I even have them marked on my Z screen but today didn't get any gold with the new X-Coil.  I knew we had hammered the place and I was the only one around today but there were grid marks (kinda like chaining) that showed someone had been around.  I think this is the first time I've been there since September or maybe before that.

I don't normally find this many bullets.  Today was a combination of going exactly over my swings from the past and stretching the area and finding the tiny wires, a couple of shot and the bigger bullets.  The larger 50 cal are said to have been used for WWII practice.  None of it was particularly deep.  This is the same sort of trash we found a few years back when we first opened up these patches to the Zed.  I told us that the GPX guys before us hadn't actually swung over much of the area.  I haven't totaled up my finds from the past but it would be over 200 nuggets with the largest at 3 g.

Now to the X-Coil.  One of the reasons I have more trash and the marked coins is that I can stick the coil into places where I couldn't stick the ML 14.  I could also wave the coil over some dry, dead plants and see the targets through it like the coins.  Someone had planted them in the middle of dead bushes.  No wonder they were still there.

I was able to use the default settings all the way up the Chet's setting without much problem.  I would say at 20 it was not a smooth threshold but if I ran over a target I could hear it anyway.   I brought it down to 15 much of the time.  The coil ignored many of the hot rocks but we have some that it can't ignore.  That is ok.  We dig them and sometimes gold can be near.  I was certainly hoping to get gold first trip out with the X-Coil but it didn't happen.  I don't have much reason to go back to Barstow now.

Next trip (whenever that might be) will be to the Gold Catcher area in the El Pasos.

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