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Been back from wintering in Florida for over a month, and the weather finally got nice so headed to northern Nevada to meet up with some friends and nugget hunt. I got there a day before the others, so took off on the quad to look for new spots. Love the freedom the atv gives me out there, and the scenery is great! I explored some higher ravines and washes, and actually got a nice little .68g nugget a couple inches down at the edge of a wash. Unfortunately, after quite a few hours hitting the area pretty hard, that was the lone piece. We looked for new patches about 60-70% of the next week, and hit a couple old ones the rest of the time. Lots of skunked days. I did get 3 more pieces at a pounded patch, and another while detecting an alluvial fan off the mountains for the first time....Chet got one there too, but the gold was so scattered and random...no patches to be found. While wandering around I noticed this little guy....he wasn’t shy at all, jumped from rock to bush, and waited patiently for me to turn my phone on to get his pic. Here’s my take for the trip....much smaller than usual for my Nevada outings. Very tough hunting, but a great time anyway. Enjoyed some delicious meals with the guys(Tom is an incredible camp chef!), Chet had repaired and souped up my dry washer over the winter so it’s ready for action up at the cabin, and George found some amazing crystals and gave me a couple cool ones. Brian even made a cameo appearance, and as usual found some nice gold in a short time! So the sun sets on another detecting adventure....can’t wait for the next one!

Hi, we have one of the first 18" X coils and also smaller 10×9" coil. This is what we have found so far with the 18". The first time we used it was at a test patch that nenad met us at to test against 14" and 19" at euchunga, near adelaide in south australia. First thing we did was to use factory settings. Then we ground balanced using ferite. The 18" did have trouble balancing out ferite. We then went over various targets with all coils to see various results. Moving on, since then we have used this coil on various areas in the adelaide hills region and sometimes we ground balanced with ferite, other times just normal without it. While detecting in all these spots we found that ground balance was as if had 14" minelab coil on machine. I could tell no decernable difference. Re hot rocks it reacted no different to the 14" minelab as always had others with who had 7000's. We constantly ran the machines over same area to see if the xcoil was picking up signals that minelab coil didnt and visa versa. In one area in particular there was a lot of iron stone which seemed heavier than lead and was as magnetic as steel. Naturally both machines were the same response. We purchased the 18" coil for depth and that has found gold and targets deeper than any other machine on a particular area that had been methodically hammered by various good detector operators with various machines including nenad. (PhaseTech) We wanted to go to WA to detect a spot where we know there is deeper gold as we found gold every foot to meter in this spot. Lots more there but to deep for current setups and the xcoil was the next step. Due to cancer and on chemo daily that is out of the question. We however are hoping to be in Tibooburra in the next week and will try both coils there to see there performance. After the ferite came out we used for a while but then never used until the x coil came and really thought there was no decernable difference. I know JP has explained why we should use it, i will use it now to try and balance as best as machine will let it, but saying that, we are really happy with purchase and in our opinion is a great step forward in detecting technology. WAif we got to the one particular spot we would have liked to get back to would have shown plus or negatives for the xcoil as was in very highly mineralised ground, almost all iron stone. TG

I was having a relatively slow morning detecting at La Jolla Shores Beach in San Diego today, about $1 in clad and a euro coin when a young woman came up asking for help finding a ring. She was frantic and her husband was second guessing, saying it must be at home and asking when was the last time she saw it? She kept insisting it was here right here, next to the seawall. With just a couple swipes of my Equinox 800/15" coil I had it in the scoop. She was ecstatic and gave me a big hug. I've always dreamt of finding a big expensive engagement ring whilst detecting. I've gotten a few gold bands but nothing like this! I obviously didn't get to keep it, but it seemed to bring some good karma to the day and I found two large silver rings shortly afterward. She insisted on getting my info and address so I might be getting a reward or thank you letter later. Here's a couple pics of the expensive ring, the happy owner and the two silvers I got afterward.

Two X coils I have, are as smooth as the ML 19 , handle normal in my ground where I nearly always run the ML14 in difficult. As I have stated from the beginning of the X noise debate, the ferrite had totally no effect on my ground, served no purpose. I have humorously renamed this X noise the Y noise. Y a detector dealer is publically telling very experienced operators they are deliberately ignoring an issue that can be simply shown as the formula X - Y + Z = GOLD Jasong, that is the way to go, you will reap the rewards, I look forward to your review. You too will be an early bird like JW has shown he is in this thread.

Hi all, just wanna show u this find ,was in a breccia pipe, its not gold but its beautiful too ,cuprite crystal with native copper thanks to the gold monster, regards ?

I'll be staying with my custom 3 tones set up. And to each his own RE: pitch. I like 1,12 and 25. I just posted this 2 tone post as an item of interest based on those videos and how various targets span the spectrum of VDI.

Clearly, with the huge amount of interest that is being shown in the after market coils for 7000, it`s obvious that there is a market out there for coils other than 14'' and 19". I don`t take the 19" out much because I have had very little success with it and with my bad wrists it`s just too damn heavy, but Minelab did tell us in the early days of marketing the 7000 that they would be releasing a 11" coil down the track, and now there is another company that nobody has ever heard of making a huge range of coils that are lighter and have so far been very well received by the public. What`s going on Minelab?

Sorry for not being on DP much and giving love to you posters, but my travels have been many. Early last week I tried a new park and was able to get the usually handful of common clad coins. Also was a fair amount of cheaper jewelry (I need to test the diamond ear ring) recovered. With the amount of coins and jewelry I have a feeling there has to be a couple pieces of gold in the park. It will take time, but I know I'll succeed at getting the Au. Photos of the cheap stuff...which means I am getting closer to the good. BTW, this was a 2 1/2 hr hunt.

The after market coils are also built better. I don't have the 7000, but on my GPX I have switched to Detech coils because the Minelab DD coils just don't last. Plus the variety of sizes is nice too. Maybe there is just not enough money in it for Minelab to get serious about coil manufacturing.... They may be too busy coming out with new machines that will squish back the competition a bit

FWIW.... I haven't seen a coin like this posted in any MD forum....at least not yet. It was a zinc signal 20-21 about 4-5" deep.

Thanks, Chase. The Wilcox with the long handle might be the item I need.

Two tone works well, but im not a fan of the 25 setting..... at least not for my ears. Some where around 13 seems to catch me...... and for some odd reason on say a quarter or a can...... it doesnt quit size the target properly being that high. Another consideration is ...... if you are looking for gold.....id go with a disc pattern. A whole lot less targets to check in two tones. Once that box is under....... you are looking for a target first and for most. Patterns can be a great time saver if you know what you want to find. Choosing two tones you have to realize ..... any falsing will come in both those tones. Thats why i like AM and multi tones..... it has a tenancy to move iron back to the iron range. As far as why not single tone........ if you go that way you best be using disc because i can tell you there is a lot of iron out there even when nothing else is........ got to love bobbie pins and bottle caps.

Great way to start the season, nice gold and great pictures!

Nice Pic of Collared Lizard, and some nice gold. Its Beautiful in Northern Nevada.... Hope next time that patch will come to you.. Dave

Peg, Yep, a lot of slow trips when hunting new ground for patches! Glad you found a few and seen some nice Country! LuckyLundy

Peg great pictures and great gold. Well done ?

This is what i would like to know too.

Finally had some time to get out. I hit a local football field for two days, about 2 hours each day. I was using the stock coil on the Equinox 800. It was in Park 1, 7 recovery, 50 tone, and ground balanced. The chain, found on day 2, rang up a solid 17, much like many of the aluminum bits on the field. The clasp is iron, but the rest is .925. At first I thought it was junk because of some rusty looking areas on the chain, but when it was cleaned off at home, a smile came to my face. The first day I dug a hole with a solid 11. Out popped a junk earring. There was something else in the hole according to the pinpointer, so I kept at it. The second target was another earring with what appeared to be silver and maybe diamonds. I tested it at home, and my tester said they were diamonds. However, my local jeweler gave me the bad news that they were not. It was a silver earring though.

A couple of months ago I put out a call for the parts list for the WM12 because my original WM12 was taking forever to charge. At the same time I bought the replacement battery, I also bought some heavier charging cables because I have about half a dozen devices that all use the same cable. I bought cables that were listed as suitable for external hard drives and they were about 6 bucks each. Because I kept changing cables on different devices I don`t even know now what cables came with the WM12. Anyway, with the heavier charging cables my original WM12 now charges QUICKER than the newer WM12, so I don`t need to fit the battery. Maybe, if your WM12 is getting sluggish charging, it may not be the battery, it may be the cable breaking down. Just a thought. Dave

Yeah been playing today and its getting better. I think a lot of my chatter problem may actually be targets. I started digging some today and there is LOTS of aluminium in my yard. Looks like my house had aluminium siding at one point, cause there are pieces of it all over. If you go over 5 to a dozen pieces of aluminium with every swing it sounds pretty unstable, but I'm pretty sure it's just actual targets.

Phrunt "you`ve hit the nail squarely on the head" GPZ sales will surely go up, once it has a range of coils available, especially that smaller coil.

(NOTICE: No gold found on this outing. Read on only if you enjoy hearing about the adventure.) Deep Canyon Ghost CampWe’d heard rumours, but we’d never followed up on the information . . .We were told to head down the logging road until we saw a large area off to the left side that had a designated winter pull-out for vehicle parking. After we’d found the spot, we were supposed to check the forest behind the pull-out for an old trail, and by following the trail, it would lead us down the mountain into a steep canyon where the Old Timers had taken out lots of chunky gold, and all of their work was done by hand as the gold was shallow to bedrock; shallow diggings, the Old Timer’s bread, butter, and cream. Furthermore, there was supposed to be an old cabin where a highly successful miner had been found dead. His body was discovered during the deep winter snows, and only located weeks after he’d died, but his cache had never been found. So, it seemed like a good spot to investigate.We grabbed a couple of detectors, some bear spray, a flare gun with bear bangers, some sniping tools, a couple of pans, and off we went.Not far into the trees we found an old cabin, but it wasn’t quite old enough for the stories we’d been told, but it did have some cool items in it; however, there were no other structures, and we’d been told there were “cabins”.We carried on, picking up the thread of the trail, but we got crossed by some deadfall. Working our way through, we were soon on our way downslope. In short order, the steep trail dropped in pitch even more, and the surrounding forest was extremely quiet, which was unexpected.We were in an area of dense growth, but no buildings were visible anywhere. As we rounded a bend in the trail, we saw a collapsed roof, and under the roof, the drooping remains of a log structure. Off to the right at about a 45-degree angle, there was a building that had obviously been a workshop at one time, as lots of cast off materials and machinery parts surrounded it.In front of us, right off the trail to our left, was an old root cellar, and someone had been digging behind it, throwing out all of the old cans and bottles. To our immediate right was a building and part of the roof was beginning to collapse. What was interesting is that under an intact portion, there were still many cords of cut firewood.As the steepness of the descent increased, we came upon a large, long log building, one that had been re-roofed in more modern times. To elaborate a bit, the cuts of the logs where they were fitted at the ends had been beautifully done by some master builder in the past. Those logs were securely locked; it was built to weather any kind of severe force. To the left of the long building, there was a house, the roof over the porch collapsing, and when we went inside for a peek, someone had done a lot of work to cover the rooms in every ceiling with tin, and that was curious.After poking around the surrounding buildings for a while, and after snapping some pictures, we worked our way along the edge of the cliffs to get down to the creek.One of the first things we noticed was a hand-stacked rock wall on the opposite side, one expertly crafted on the bedrock of the creek to rise up to then intersect the cliff face. Someone went to a lot of work to stabilize that spot.Visible above the rock wall and the cliff were countless hand-stacks of cobbles, evidence of the gold rush where the miners were working the shallow diggings to get to the easy placer. (Later on, we met a modern-day miner, and he told us there were lots of nuggets recovered in the two to three-ounce range!) As the canyon was so steep, and due to the shallow deposits, it had never been worked by mechanized mining.My son fired up his detector and set off to see what he could find.While he was hunting for targets, I set up to provide over-watch: we were after all in the land of the grizzly and the black, as well as the territory of the cougar.As luck would have it, there were no encounters with apex predators, and it was a beautiful afternoon with the forest lit by golden shafts of soft sunlight that filtered down from high overhead. However, the normal symphony of mountain songbirds was absent, as were any signs of hummingbirds or butterflies, all my normal companions while chasing placer. In addition, no mountain flowers were present, reflecting the scanty soil conditions of the canyon.As I kept watch, I moved around and noticed that every place there was any kind of a gut or a draw the miners had tossed out the cobbles to reach the bedrock bottom. In fact, I couldn’t find one place where they hadn’t excavated any likely-looking spot. Furthermore, as I looped above the area where my son was working, I came across numerous trash pits with all kinds of interesting old cans and containers, rusted evidence of either former food or fuel needs.My son called me down to the creek where he’d isolated a target underwater, but it turned out to be a small part of an old square nail, which for whatever reason always sounds off like a good find on the pulse machine. He kept digging the rest of the afternoon and recovered countless trash targets: square nail tips and sections; intact square nails of various sizes; bits of can-slaw; a chunk of punch-plate; various pieces of wire of differing compositions; as well as chunks of lead, etc.What he didn’t find was any gold, but that’s the way it goes in the nugget hunting game; buckets of trash get dug before the gold gets found. In retrospect, I don’t even know how many buckets of trash I dug before I found my first nugget, and I think that’s what kills most beginning nugget shooters. They give up after the first palm-full of trash or sooner. Nugget hunting requires serious dedication and patience, but when that first sassy nugget is finally in the palm, there’s nothing like it, nothing.We gathered up our gear, took a few more pictures of the cabins and buildings on our way out, and then hit the switchbacks as we slogged our way up out of that silent canyon.We will go back, but with a different focus this time. We’ll move some hand-stacks from some likely looking spots to give the underlying, undetected bedrock a sniff. I mean, two to three-ounce nuggets? Something had to have been missed in a crack somewhere . . .All the best,Lanny

Half the info being quoted, frequencies, certain Q related terms, model numbers, etc. are all coming from a suspect Russian source. Don't be quoting it as fact because they are click bait, pure and simple. If it is not coming directly from Minelab it is a rumor. Period. I have to repeat this every time a new Minelab comes out.

This post falls into the category of things that haunt us, the lost opportunities, the unknowns that make us wish we'd have done something different, that we’d have paid more attention at the time, or that we’d have made a return trip . . . I know of a spot that I have to get back to one day where they were running the material so fast they were pushing nuggets over the end of the sluice boxes, and all of that material ran under a road across jagged bedrock, so those nuggets will still be there.That same outfit had a hopper that had a leak, and it used to ooze out material from one side. These guys were getting so much gold, they knew about the leak, and they knew they were pushing gold over the end of the sluices, but the season up north is short, and the material was incredibly rich, so they were running flat out to get as much as quickly as they could. Furthermore, because they were getting so much gold, they wound up not caring about what they’d lost.From my own experience, I know the gold was left at the site after they pulled their equipment out as I panned a few spots, and talk about pickers! That country is known for coarse gold. I gathered up a couple of five-gallon buckets for my son to pan, and what a party he had running those buckets through a little river sluice. There was lots of dirt left at the site of that hopper too. But, once again, a person would have to know exactly where to look, and to the casual observer, they'd never have a clue as to what had taken place there in the past.However, I’ll add a few more details about that abandoned area, and the wash-plant, as well as a bit about the crew and the deposition of gold in their mining cut.After removing about forty feet of overburden (boulder clay: thick glacial clay salted with boulders), the ancient channel was finally exposed, with lots of orange material (orange is a good sign of the heavy mineralization that runs with the gold in ancient channels) in the bottom six feet of material that was sitting tight on bedrock. Moreover, getting to the bedrock had exposed a large section of tunnel where the old-timers had worked extensively, and as those Sourdoughs did all of that underground, back-breaking work by hand, it was a good sign that we might have a great chance to hit some good gold as well, and we sure did.After the modern miners used the excavator to take the orange material out, and there was only bare bedrock left, I got invited into the pit to have a look at the side-wall of the channel, the area composing the ancient stream material that was still buried under all of the previously mentioned overburden. It was a sight I'll never forget.The excavator operator (who was also the mine owner) walked me in from the north end of the cut, and he said, "I've never seen this before. Come take a look."He walked me over to where the cleaned bedrock met the wall, and then he started pointing out nuggets in the wall! You just can't make this stuff up!!About a foot off of the bedrock, and all along the length of the cut, we walked along flicking out multi-gram nuggets from the side wall into a pan!! I'd certainly never seen anything like it before, and I haven't seen anything remotely close to that amazing sight since.The owner had to go to town for machinery parts, and the second-in-command wanted to yard as much through the wash-plant as quickly as possible, but not having been in the game as long as the owner, he overfed the plant, because when they shut it down, the twin sluices were yellow from top to bottom with nuggets!! That's another sight I haven't seen since, and one you should never see if you're running the plant properly. Furthermore, that's why the nuggets went over the end of the sluice with the discharge water, getting trapped on the broken bedrock as the water rushed under the road to fall into the waiting settling pond, and nobody ever tried to recover them as the whole outfit left at the end of the season and none of them returned (me included).However, as I said earlier, they got so much gold everyone was happy regardless. Now, that’s the kind of gold mining problem I’d love to have in the future, the issue of pushing nuggets over the end of the sluice but not bothering to recover them because the overall take was so rich!All the best,Lanny

The dealer is wrong lol. Now the other guys will be by at some point and they will say the 3030 has a place in the line up. That is true. Now my point of view; Nox is cheaper and just as good, only better in many cases. Try this point of view. I can go from Tahoe lake silver coin shooting, to my local part looking for some V nicks on my way to rye patch to nugget shoot and not change detectors. After all that if I have strength left I can relic hunt the ghost towns on my way to McDonald's. If the dealer told you that the 3030 can do that trip with the same level of ability the Nox can, then I have a bridge in AZ I can sell you. Nox is king of all around detectors and the price point is a grand low. These are my view points only.

Just like Harley Davidson, Minelab are finding it hard to appeal to a younger market, and their latest offering is still targeting the older consumer judging by the video add. Not all that smart considering that the old farts are falling off the perch or losing interest. How to appeal to youth will be a problem as the youngsters of today are not really into such pastimes.

My sources tell me that it is--- ...umph...oh, muffled,,,,grrrrr,,,dang....arf....wth,, glass breaking,,ouch...boom..slap..,gunshots,,..sirens.... dogs barking,,, phone and computer smashed.... billy clubs to the head and shoulders, busted nose....... Update: I'm sorry I cannot divulge any information or knowledge about Minelabs newest detector.... ...owwwww..OKAY!!!-- ."im typing as fast as I can... you have broken my fingers" Anyway--- no new detector and dont get anything started SS----that stands for sh.. stirrer...?