Shotgun Pellets And The Manticore While Prospecting - The Benefits Of Target ID

[phrunt]

I've been experimenting with my Manticore as a nugget hunter, kinda difficult with only an 11" coil as I can often have more than one pellet under the coil at once so I'm desperately waiting for a smaller coil but with the Nox 800 in highly contaminated gold areas with shot gun pellets I used to try take advantage of the Target IDs, the pellets almost always gave a 1 - 2 Target ID as most are on or near the surface and consistent targets, if ever I was getting numbers above that or even below it like a 2 - 3 - 4 -6  or something more bouncy it was far less likely to be a pellet that tended to just bounce solidly in the 1 -2 range and was more often than not gold, I always get excited when the numbers moved off the very solid 1 - 2 it was giving on pellets. 

The Manticore and I'm sure Nox 900 are doing the same thing with pellets but giving a broader range of targets off that pellet range thereby separating possibly more gold from pellets.  Of course this only works if the area has all similar sized pellets of the smaller varieties which fortunately my areas mostly do.

Very early days on this yet and no matter what you will miss gold by doing it, probably a lot of gold but if you just have so many pellets around that you spend all day recovering them it does give you an option whereby you can pull some gold from the pellets and waste far less time recovering pellets.  The old pick or boot scrape method is fine when using something like the GPX 6000 that misses something like 60% of the very small lead pellets like the #9, but when switching to a VLF and it finds every single pellet known to man life gets more difficult in these crazy pellet areas.

My previous method for dealing with this was using a less sensitive detector to the very small pellets like the GPX 4500 and gliding over most tiny pellets with no response but like the small pellets it missed some of the the small gold too so I prefer the Nox/Manticore method.

The Nox 800 lumped a lot of small gold in the 1-2 range, the Manticore has spread those same nuggets out further making them easier to identify away from pellets.

I also believe I can take advantage of this more than many because in more difficult soils the numbers are far more wild, in my milder gold area soils the target ID's remain good, think a coin hunter in mild soils vs a coin hunter in bad soils, the mild soil coin hunter is using and relying on target ID a lot where as the bad soil coin hunter can not rely on target ID's much at all.

 

[TampaBayBrad]

Good to know for the nugget hunters. A wider range of target ID's is helpful in this situation for sure.

I don't have shotgun pellets but I do have little tiny bits of can slaw on my beach that I'm trying to learn to discern.

They bang loud since they are shallow or surface. After reading your report, I may start watching and memorizing target ID's a little more when I find the little critters.

[GB_Amateur]

It seems the reason this works is because of the uniformity of lead pellets, both in size and shape.

[phrunt]

4 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

It seems the reason this works is because of the uniformity of lead pellets, both in size and shape.

that's correct, and gold is always different so on the Manticore at least it's moving away from the uniform pellet consistency.  The Nox 800 with a much smaller ID range was more likely to lump gold in the 1-2 range where as the Manticore is moving it away from the pellets, not 100% reliable but certainly an improvement over the Nox 800 in this regard as it did the same, but not on near as many nuggets as the Manticore does with a majority of smaller nuggets coming in the pellet range on the 800.

[strick]

So then your saying that the M-Core is still reading pellets the same in the 1-2 range and gold more likely away from this ID range? What sized pellets do you mostly encounter 6-7-8 shot? Just curious because I have wondered how it would do looking for small gold and where the pellets would appear on the screen...I'm waiting for the small coil before I try it. 

strick 

[phrunt]

We mostly have lead pellets around here, if you get the magnetic steel ones I guess it's a different story.

The #9 Pellet comes in at 1 -2, and 7 1/2, 6 and 4 comes up between 1 and 4 with the numbers creeper higher the bigger the pellet, so I'm dodging 1-4 essentially.

For example, this tiny little guy is coming up a 5-6

So at 0.05 of a gram or higher its moving away from the common shotgun pellet target ID's around here and that's a very beneficial thing for cherry picking gold in the worst case scenario of a place with too many pellets.  Of course it's a high risk game and I'd not recommend anyone do it all the time but in some situations this is a very beneficial side to having the bigger target ID range.   I wonder how the 900 goes with this as it's ID's are different again to the Manticore.