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Giant Coils Looking For Gold From The Sky


phrunt

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I had the TV on and nothing weird, they did go directly over my roof at one point, they seem to have to cover ground just as you would with a normal detector coil, they did a lot of laps to cover the ground properly.   They seem to try keep an even height off the ground, big trees mess them up a bit.

I have no idea what they're looking for.  My metal roof shielded my gold stash so I'm all good 🙂

It was pretty cool to watch though.   

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Chances are they are looking for magnetite ore bodies. With the magnetite will be the other metals gold, silver, copper etc.. A helicopter flew over our claims this summer for 4 days doing this from many directions over thousands of acres looking for magnetite. The geologist and mining company CEO came looking for me to talk to me about my book. I asked about the devise under the helicopter. He stated they find the gold by finding the magnetite. 

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They probably aren't prospecting at all. You can use AEM's (aeroelectromagnetic surveys) to determine soil/gravel composition in rivers for groundwater management and whatnot.

It's a bit like a geophysical survey that measures sound refraction of various soil intervals in concept, though different entirely in reality. Basically the conductivity of various things like silt/clay differ greatly from pebbles, boulders. And as we as detectorists know - soil conductivity variations can definitely be detected with a coil, we just tend to call it ground noise. But one person's noise is another person's data.

These things have ridiculous "theoretic" depth when you are just looking at larger scale characteristics - like hundreds or more feet deep. So, anyone who thinks metal detectors are stuck at 3ft max, you are wrong. It just depends what you are looking for and what data you find important, if you ignore coil-on-a-stick models (and little gold nuggets).

It's also why I have a lot of hope for the future of automated, remote UAV based prospecting. Not for like dinking around all day for 1 grammers, but for larger scale occurences and geologic patterns favorable to bringing finer resolution instruments in later. This concept already exists, it's a whole field called remote sensing and includes things like this, all the way up to satellites investigating planetary geology from orbit.

BTW - proton precession magnetometers are much easier to build and fly, if one just wants to look for magnetite concentrations or other magnetic anomalies. You can build one on a bench and mount one on a standard DJI type drone.

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Geophysical surveys are an overarching term that encompasses different techniques like mag, gravity, resistivity, conductivity, acoustics and others.

Mag surveys are used extensively in prospecting, as others noted, looking for changes in magnetism.  Intrusions, dikes, sills, flows, etc, can have a positive or negative signature against the surrounding rock.  The signature is from their formation depending on the composition, oxidation state and or magnetic pole reversal.  Other types of contacts and alluvial systems can show up as well.

I have experience applying different types of surveys to guide geologic mapping and interpretation.

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Looks like a VLF setup to me.

We use them to map conductive structures prior to drilling.

They work particularly well in places like NZ or Canada where oxidation is low compared to Australia where oxidisation can be a problem.

The oxide here can cause quite a bit of noise.

We have had the most success with gradient array and high resolution magnetometer surveys.

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Here is one aquifer mapping project with these helos/coils happening in Southern NZ right now. No clue where you are, but I'd say the chances are almost certain something similar to this is what you are seeing, and not prospecting.

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Wow that's it Jason, so they can use it to look for water, nifty. It can shoot 300m into the ground, makes my GPZ look pretty poor.

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After the discussion about geophysical machines started, I got the idea to suggest a method that can help you in your search for natural gold.

I personally don't deal with physical gold because I know it doesn't exist where I live but I would love to

it existed because I really enjoy this kind of research and envy many of you who do it

so let's get to my point...

I have read that in soils that contain a magnet like black sand, the chances of native gold are increased, so perhaps using a proton magnetometer would be useful in the soils being surveyed to see what magnetically excites the soil and focus the prospector's research metals in this area ...below I'll put a scan containing magnetic from my main magnetometer so you can see what I'm saying..

IMG_20221209_190358.jpg

IMG_20221209_183903.jpg

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