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Advice For Dealing With Hot Rocks? They're Everywhere!


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I took my new F19 out for a spin at the creek and it failed me 😢  Didn't even find one nugget.  I guess I'll have to send it back as defective!

All kidding aside, it was a good time detecting and panning the creek bed.  Hot rocks were terrible though.  I consider myself a competent coin shooter, but hunting for little specs of gold in all metal mode with a highly sensitive machine is somewhat new to me.  The hot rocks were horrible.  I kinda started noticing the difference between them and "good" targets.  Still, how do you guys deal with this?  I tried ground balancing over them and that helped a little, but certainly not a solution.  I turned down the sensitivity to about half and that helped, but I really don't like giving up that kind of depth.  I'm thinking a smaller coil may be better?

Any tips are appreciated.  Thanks.

 

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I rank patience right up there in the tips department.
No sarcasm meant in this at all.
There doesn't really seem to be a way to effectively tune out hot rocks
without losing both depth and sensitivity to gold.

I am sure you are getting good at identifying some of the tell-tale sounds that signify hot rocks
and that really helps, but sometimes those sounds are so close to what signifies gold
that I, for one, have to go for it and dig. That's where patience helps a lot. 
Patience with yourself and patience with your machine.

Good luck!

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In all metal you have no options but ground balance and sensitivity. Use a test nugget or small piece of lead and try to make the hot rocks as soft as possible and gold/lead sharp as possible. That’s usually the difference, a smaller, sharper hit.

Or go to disc mode and play with notching out the rocks. In worst case scenarios this can be a life saver. You might miss some gold but better that than quitting in frustration.

But the way most serious prospectors handle the worst hot rocks? Get a PI. 

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What Steve and flak said, there is no getting around the fact hot rocks make life tough ground balance and proper tuning your detector are great steps in the right direction. After a while you will as you mentioned begin to get the feel for the difference between the hot rock and other signals but that is still just a guess, if you are in a good area put fewer hot rocks under the coil by slowing down and cleaning them out allowing you to carefully scan the soil for those faint little goodies hiding there (you hope). It’s hard to get yourself to slow down and really search carefully when not finding a nugget but covering a lot of ground quickly will put a lot the loud/strong targets under your coil and make it easy to walk over the soft signal.

 

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Thanks guys.

Steve - that is a great suggestion.  I am going to experiment a little notching out the hot rocks.  Discrimination ain't so bad, right?  Will see how it goes.  I may use the Infinium next time I'm out that way again.  For whatever reason, I do love using that machine.

 

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The only hot rocks in this area are the little round ones. and the little square ones ant the big round ones and the big square ones and the red, brown, black, green, grey, yellow, orange and multi colored ones and the igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary ones and the.........I'm sure you get my point. A VLF takes more patience than I'll ever have. You might listen for a difference in signal between left to right and right to left. The Minelab 705 worked very well this way in sorting out some of the hot volcanics we have here. 

 Steve failed to clarify that" P.I." is an abbreviation for "pricey investment".

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The higher the operating frequency the less effect the VLF have on Hot Rocks but the depth will drop but if the gold is small you will win in the end. This showed up when Garret went from deepseeker to Gound Hog back in the 1980s a lot of small gold was found in hot ground. 

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4 hours ago, klunker said:

The only hot rocks in this area are the little round ones. and the little square ones ant the big round ones and the big square ones and the red, brown, black, green, grey, yellow, orange and multi colored ones and the igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary ones and the.........

Well I am sure glad you didn't mention the orange rectangle ones, both large and small so I should be OK.

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