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Equinox 800 Gold Nugget Detecting Tips


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What a great read. Thank you as always for taking the time to share and educate. It does not go unnoticed or underappreciated.

I fully agree with your strong suggestion to learn how to use this detector. Gold prospecting with a detector is a constant learning process. Combined with learning the Equinox, it is doubly important to heed your words.

 

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Good starting points for a GoldiNoxs trip Steve.

I left mine in auto tracking ( letting the unit do the work).

I also bump my response up to 7 and 8. I found it makes target id better. The .5 grain I found was hiding in hot ground.

Just my two cents.

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It is 'funny' that the nuggets on the screen above are on Field 1 for the picture!

I gave a presentation at our gold club/beach club meeting about a month ago.  It was just after I found the specimen with 2-5g of gold in it.  In my presentation I showed people in a women's club with lighting how the 800 would hear gold on a hot rock or while holding nails or other trash.  I waved a nugget and trash under the coil with sensitivity around 15.  We had a microphone near the speaker so we even had more EMI in the room.  Some of the hot rocks/nails over gold nuggets I have tested in the field and know the 800 'could' find a nugget of reasonably small size in mining trash and deteriorating buildings.  To me this might be the greatest potential of the 800.

I've found two other nuggets the first time I used it in the desert.  I've been to the same area 3-4 times since and not found anything.  This is an area where we have hit pretty hard and most of the trash was removed to get at the hundreds of nuggets in that 2-3 square mile area.  We got most of the gold with our 7000s before the 800 was out.

I say all of this so that I feel somewhat confident now that when I swing over gold the 800 'sees' it.  I think it will easily see bigger gold in trash and that is the area I want to find.

I'm not trying to ignore the settings as I used the default mostly with accepting -1 and 0 as Steve suggested.

Mitchel

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8 hours ago, mn90403 said:

It is 'funny' that the nuggets on the screen above are on Field 1 for the picture!

The photo is from JPs linked article and are his nuggets and detector. He really does not cover settings in his article so I have no idea if he was using Field 1 to actually find the nuggets or not. Field 1 is a “milder” mode than Field 2 and maybe his soil called for it. You have to use what works, and as I noted I tested in Nevada and California. JP may be doing something entirely different in Australia. 

I liked the photo but I suppose I should replace it with one of my own.

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My comment about the photo was that it is probably 'shot after' he found all the nuggets of course and probably after turning it off and on a few times and it just happened to be in Field 1.  The idea that he was using that to find them really didn't occur to me.

That would be a great addition to the gold finding ability if he did.

I'd leave JP's picture and add some of yours that you have.

 

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Programs Park 1, Pole1 with frequencies of 20 khz and 40khz are more sensitive - they see tiny gold as in multi-frequency - it's also a detail but it's good to know it ...

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  • 11 months later...
7 hours ago, phrunt said:

Investigate all bouncy target ID's in the low iron range.  (emphasis mine)

Does this mean that a steady, repeating TID in the iron range can be safely ignored (i.e. not gold)?

 

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It just depends on the trash levels. Rule number one of nugget detecting - dig absolutely all targets. But if you can’t realistically do that, you start skipping the ones with the worst signals. But it is always a gamble with small signals in highly mineralized ground. The more ground iron mineralization, the more chance a weak non-ferrous signal will read ferrous.

Here is how that works. Get a very faint signal, consistently ferrous on every sweep. Obviously ferrous, no question. Now remove a little soil. At some point the target reads both ferrous and non-ferrous, erratic. Remove a little more soil. Now it’s a fairly consistent non-ferrous signal.

The detector sees both the gold signal, and the ferrous ground mineral signal. It tells you which signal dominates, and that may very well be the ferrous component. Consistency only tells you that the machine is consistently accurate, or consistently inaccurate in its reporting.

It’s like a spectrum, with a pure ferrous reading on one end, pure non-ferrous reading on the other, and every possible inconsistent reading in between. It just depends on how much and how intense the interference from the mineralized soil. 

The IS NOT an Equinox issue, this applies to all detectors, especially single frequency detectors. Equinox has enough controls plus Multi-IQ to do better than most.

More Details Here

Like I said, rule number one is dig everything. This is how you learn that a ferrous reading can be a non-ferrous item. If you can’t dig everything, dig anything that gives any non-ferrous reading at all, even just once out of several swings. If that’s too much digging, then ramp it up to dig only solid non-ferrous readings. It’s like a sliding variable scale, determined by how much time you have, and how strong your back is.

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My explanation was not aimed at anyone, just generic stuff. Your case is special Simon in that you are using the disc to eliminate certain pesky non-ferrous items. This can be helpful. I have been places where people have fired off thousands of rounds of .22 bullets, and being able to knock out the shell casings can be a neat trick. Yes, a large nugget that reads the same as a .22 shell casing will be missed, but the odds of that are low, whereas the odds of digging the one thousand shell casings is 100%. The same for you and certain pellets, or any constantly reoccurring trash or hot rock item. Rejecting anything always has risks, but it is all we have for working really trashy locations.

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