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Video About Gold Detecting In Africa


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I found this quite interesting and well done. This video report features interviews with Minelab and a number of customers from Burkina Faso. It was filmed in Burkina Faso and Dubai. It also tells the stories of a number of customers and how their success has changed their lives. One prospector, Solomon, struck it rich affording him the opportunity to purchase three plots of land, 3 motorbikes and 3 more detectors. Most importantly he can now afford to send all ten of his children to school.

 

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Thanks for the link Steve,...

 

 

make's you wonder how many of those people will become well off then persue detecting as a hobby maybe even looking for relics and such..

 

you know how it is once you get a detector in your hands it can beocme a way of life for a lot of people...

 

Keith

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Fred,

I know nothing about West Africa, but in East Africa where the other recent gold rush is, there is no metallic rubbish. First of all, the gold bearing formations in Sudan are in the back of beyond, secondly, every scrap of stray metal in countries that poor is plucked up immediately for re-use or sale.

When I lived in Abu Dhabi, for example, there were poor East Asians cycling around the city picking up cardboard to recycle for a few pennies so that they could afford to eat that day.

Under those circumstances, discrimination is unnecessary. I'm not even sure that depth is a big deal, nor do I know if mineralization is a factor limiting VLF use.

The gold rush in Sudan which pushed the price of ML 4500’s to absurd heights did so in an atmosphere of ignorance as to the correct match between requirements and tools. It may well be that for those poor artisanal miners in their flip-flops, a Tesoro Compadre might have been a more rational tool considering cost/performance.

Now we have Garrett and ML each leveraging their "Armadillo" mine detector package into a gold detector. I have to believe that the 3rd world with its possibility for sudden explosions of detector sales is the real market.

The pity is that if the actual requirements could be studied, then a battery thrifty detector like the Tesoro Diablo μMax might hit the sweet spot!

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In West Africa the ground in the regions were I was were flat to low rolling hills and the high density of population there means the people are everywhere farming and trying to eek out a living. We found iron trash everywhere some may have been as old as 200 years from looking at the workmanship. In the harsh desert regions of Sudan, etc. that are void of people, yes there is little trash, but in places where the population is spread all over the place, there is plenty of trash.

 

However I did see the recycling of everything - even empty water bottles we were finished with were highly desirable to many folks. but aluminum foil, rusty old iron scraps, etc - stuff that had no real use were dropped wherever and littered the ground.

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The Teknetics T2 is extremely popular in Africa, and while even it may still be overkill it is a better match for the type of detecting over there than a PI in most cases. Certainly more affordable for those people. Good machine the T2, I found a lot of gold with the Fisher version, the F75.

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Yes, Rick the poor people of the world use and reuse everything, good for them!

But, what the minelab guy said is not accurate...he should have said the detector will find any metallic metal but will ignore minerals. It is that inaccuracy that lets shadey dealers mislead the ignorant. I am not accusing Minelab of wrongdoing...but they have an obligation to be correct in their statements...in my never humble opinion!

 

fred

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Well yeah, the stuff is all staged for the cameras. Been there, done that! It is not a Minelab thing, it is a camera crew thing. "Ok, you stand over here and look this way. You guys, you wander around back here with metal detectors. Look like you are trying to find gold. Don't look at the camera!" Film crews cost bucks so they do not just stand around waiting for fate to provide good footage.

Still interesting though - I was more interested in the factoids than the footage though seeing the diggings was interesting.

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