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Time flew by up at the cabin and on my little claim this season. I continued to clear, detect, and drywash the decomposed granite bench areas. Here’s a nice clean out from one drywash session: I also reworked the sides of some oldtimer Diggings, filling in their ditch as I go....lots of work here for little return lol! Found some nice nuggies when I uncovered some crevices in a different bedrock...biggest piece was almost .6gram, decent size for up here: A highlight of the summer was having my nephew’s boys visit. They learned drywashing, running the concentrates through the recirculating sluice, then how to pan. Each ended up with a couple grams(hmmm....maybe a little “salt” in those concentrates lol): AND the season ended on a positive note! Found a nice handful in this small scraping from a new spot....definitely will setup the drywasher here next year! Ended up with just shy of 12 grams total up here for the season....not much gold, but tons of fun and memories! 🙂

Nice today so I headed out but the sun never did come over the mountain so I cut it short as my feeties got cold....lol Dredge piles gave up this cute little .800 gram noogie!!!!!! I managed 1 more bit and this specimen outta the same area yesterday and got skunked today......

My brother knows I'm trying to build my own machine and sent me this diagram. Thought it was pretty funny 🙂

Or maybe they compared the AQ to a 14.8v TDIBH..........and collectively cursed in English and French 😳😳😳😳😳 Tony

Every year my Alaska Gold Mining Claims For Sale page skyrockets into number one position for the website as TV viewers around the world dream of getting a gold claim in Alaska and striking it rich. Because everything you see on TV is real!

From Wikipedia: "A long-range locator is a class of fraudulent devices purported to be a type of metal detector, supposedly able to detect a variety of substances, including gold, drugs and explosives; most are said to operate on a principle of resonance with the material being detected." There is more at the link, but "a class of fraudulent devices" says it all as far as I am concerned. I just wanted to post this so people can find it in the search results in case they are looking. For me these devices have always failed the most basic test... the experience of hundreds of thousands of prospectors and treasure hunters around the world. Treasure hunters and gold prospectors will give anything a try that might work, no matter how crazy it seems. If it works, the use soon spreads to other prospectors. You can Google genuine successful results for regular metal detectors all day long. The internet is full of successful people using normal metal detectors to make great finds. Except for a few obvious promotionals, the success stories of people using LRL devices are glaringly absent. All excuses for why this is so flies in the face of the simple common sense answer - they don't work. In almost 50 years of metal detecting and prospecting I have met a lot of successful people, and none of them got that way by relying on a long range locator. Part two of the common sense test is if they did work, there would be at least a few users of these devices that would be fabulously rich. The few I have met are anything but... just the opposite. Again, excuses made about why these rich LRL users are invisible fly in the face of common sense. Like wanting their privacy, as if we are not a country that brags about every tiny thing we can think of! The only people getting rich are the people selling these devices. I personally refuse to purchase anything from a company selling long range locators. It says something about the management of the company that makes me prefer to do business elsewhere. If you want the absolute best information on these device anywhere visit the website below. More at Geotech

How good is that. And good on you keeping the kids interested. A little bit of salt never hurt anybody 🙂

Child abuse -plain and simple.

That's great Idaho Peg, i would be very happy with 12 grams and the good memories. Thanks for sharing 😀 ht

Phrunt, try a master reset to see if it makes any difference to the sensitivity.

I bet Parker used one of those radar thing-a-ma-jigs!

The stories George could tell if we could just pry them out of him! I was with him when he found his last Celtic gold back in 2010.

Great topic! For me any place that is well known and hammered it has to be a crawl. Learned that the hard way about 7 years ago when I made my first 3 trips to the fabled Rye Patch where there was supposedly gold laying around everywhere. Each trip I spent 3 or 4 full days and found zero nuggets and would have sworn the place was fished out. Trip 4 I decided to go back to an area where I had noticed dig holes on an early trip and slowly and methodically cover every inch of the ground around them. Within an hour I found my first Rye Patch nugget and a few more before the day was over. Since that day I still try to make 3-4 trips there per year and have had very few skunk days. When I look back on it almost every time I hit a long dry spell I realize that I had lost focus and was moving too fast. I don’t have the latest and greatest machine or the best technique and definitely do not have anywhere near the knowledge that many on this forum have. I also don’t think I am particularly lucky or intuitive, but I do have a not so secret weapon that not everybody has – I am naturally blessed with Patience & Persistence. All else being equal he who has his coil moving the longest will find the most nuggets and even without all being equal they will still find their fair share.

I reached out to Jimmy through his website for Discovery Tours. http://discoverytours.us/ Here was his response: Hi Walter, We are still doing our Discovery Tours to England. In fact this was our 29th consecutive Year .I have personally missed participating in the tours for the past 4 years for "health issues" ....I turned 89 years old this year, but I hope to make at least one more trip if I can get a better handle on health. Meanwhile, I do all the paperwork from here. Get the participants, collect the funds, keep all informed of details and handle the return of the finds to the participants when I get them back from David and Trish in UK. So the only difference is that I don't get to participate in England. I hope to make one more trip at some point when health improves....but age is not on my side, sorry to say. Our website is still active and David and Trish keep it up to date with pics and finds and info, as always. If you are interested in a future trip.........let me know and I will keep you on my mailing list. Best regards, Jimmy Thanks! Walt

My son printed this up for me. Hopefully it will last longer then factory ones.

Fred made a comment on one of my posts to Mitchel and I feel it needs more input from a variety of hunters and their styles. This is results from my last day at Rye Patch (last Saturday). My 5 days of hunting had me doing the hoping and looking for an indicator nugget...and I also snail crawled. Here are my results. The 2 days I want Prospecting and covering a lot of ground produced 1 nugget. The 3 days I snail crawled with 7000 produced 25 nuggets. In fact, my last day was spent in a very small area of approx. 20' x 30' and I found 12 pieces of gold. 10 of those were signals most others have missed and including myself a few times missing them, as I have detected that exact same piece of ground twice. I'm much more fortunate than most folks who hunt Rye Patch, NV as I've been doing it for 20+ years and I know the history of the old patches. Sometimes I go back to those old patches, pick a small section of ground and work the crap out of it. I especially like sites where I was pulling deep nuggets in years past, as I know those deepest pieces of heavy metal might only make a peep within a small 1 to 3" width. Don't ask me how or why, but overlapping at least 1/2 and sometimes 1/4 of coil size, per sweep with the 14" coil on the GPZ can produce. Lunk and I spent the last day crawling with our 7's and here is a photo of the results. Both of us and some other well known hunters have been in the wash before. The old saying it true "You can never get them all". I just want to make sure I get my share. How do you other Prospectors do it and what is your results when covering ground and snail crawling with a detector? I look forward to hearing everyone's comments. Nuggets on top of dime are Lunk's and the ones on bottom were found my myself on the last day.

I’ve recently had a few emails regarding my TDIBH so I thought I’d hammer out a response. I’m going to try and summarise with some dot points; I have close to 500 hours on this machine and run the 14.8v (nominal voltage) Lithium battery pack. Details in my earlier posts. The detector has found me quite a lot of big and deep gold. I don’t use it much in the water as conditions down here are generally quite rough. The 12” coil is physically too big in waves and white water. Also, digging 18” targets when you are being swept around by waves and swell is almost impossible even with 30 pounds of lead. The detector is now mainly used on the lower beach and low tide areas. I have had no issues running the 14.8v pack. I charge overnight and let the voltage settle down before using the next day as this avoids the off the charger voltage of 16.8v. My run time is about 6 hours before I swap out for a fresh pack. I have had no condensation issues within the detector. I do have a large silica gel pack in the battery compartment. The detector is quieter than other PI’s with the low delays when used in the shallow water and saturated hard pan. The SAT is very good in keeping things quiet even at low delay settings. Maybe it is the new Flux Capacitor that White’s now use 😉 I have several layers of yellow Plasti Dip on my coil to keep it well protected on the coarse shells and exposed reef areas. My ultimate power setting is minimum Delay and maximum Gain, threshold a fraction below audible with volume up high. Frequency is usually at the 12 o’clock position. I have only ever needed to change this once. My deepest ever finds have come from this machine. GB is always OFF unless I hit a rare patch of black sands. You need a BIG and STURDY scoop..............Tony

Found this about 10" down with my Vaquero. Thinking drive chain link of some kind.

Now that is clever, and funny, thanks for posting it. And there's definitely aspects of LRL innards in this diagram. Not just the hot melt glue - there's the non-functional 'decoy' component; the impenetrable jumble-of-wires; the 'Holy Water' and the magic smoke container; the switch that's glued in the 'open' state so it never functions. An obvious omission is a frog's leg, possibly the first electronic component. And a jar of 'Gypsy tears'. I like the inclusion of the electric eel, an under-rated component, for definite. A few in-jokes appear too: you can use a sandal in place of the 'flip-flop' circuit.

Sounds like you had a great season and can look forward to starting off next year in a productive spot. Thank you for sharing.

That's gold that was found on a lease in Corindhap. The first week they were in Vic and filmed in Creswick (only found a few tiny bits), Corindhap (on a lease) and then filmed some stuff in the Ballarat Gold Museum. They then went down some old mines with the Victorian Historical Mine Shaft Chasers group before heading up to Qld where they are filming now. Tyler from Aussie Gold Hunters has joined Parker as well as a new guy named Fred who you will see around Episode 13 of this seasons Gold Rush.

I went back to the place where I found a silver rosie, merc, and quarter. Today I found a 1964 Rosie. Was down 7.5 inches and the ORX hit it. This is the first silver the ORX has gotten for me. Audio was faint and registered on the ID as 96. I also found 2 1990's nickels, an unreadable clad dime, a penny, decaying rifle cartridge, a button of some sort, and lots of aluminum pieces not shown in photo. While detecting I noticed the mineralization scale on the ORX was going up sometimes 6 bars, and varied a lot. Tough site with iron too. It's amazing to me how silver coins for the most part clean up really nice. I simply used some baking soda on this one with a drop or two of water and rubbed it between my fingers. Happy Hunting

Obviously an LRL circuit!

Looks like you had a good mining season, great gold and great memories. Thanks for sharing!

Toecutter, The 2 items that I have circled I am sure that the red one is for a outlet that looks missing. That would be to help regulate the water pressure at the top of the table to keep the gold where you want it to go. The yellow circle is for a cup area for when the gold is cleaned out of the funnel tray at the top. All else that I see is there and I hope that it works for you. They can take a bit of time to get used to how it works, but they are really great units. That unit is great for when you are panning and then dump the remaining in to it to remove what you don't want to keep.

Never heard of a White's High Sierra. Are we talking about the Sierra Gold Trac SGT? That is the stripped down GMT model.

Lots of it in the fields when I hunted England. GaryC/Oregon Coast

Go to mouser.com and search either SL-404MX of SL-404FX. One is male the other is female. Can’t remember which way the delta coils are wired.

From my article referenced above by phrunt are my suggested starting point for gold nugget hunting without using Gold Mode. This gets away from VCO audio for those that do not like it, adds tone capability, and very importantly low frequency options. There are places where these settings can be more effective than Gold Mode. You can also use Field 2 as long as the settings are the same - beware the preset notching of target id 1 and 2. Notching those two numbers will be fatal to your nugget detecting, which is why I suggest starting with Park 2. As far as I have been able to determine there is no difference between Park 2 and Field 2 other than the presets - performance appears to be identical with identical settings. Both the Equinox 800 and Equinox 600 have identical performance when using the same mode and settings. For Park Mode 2: Frequency: Multi Ground Balance: Auto (Ground pump method with manual tweaking) Sensitivity: 16 – 25 Recovery Speed 800: 4 - 6 (default is 6) Recovery Speed 600: 2 - 3 (default is 3) Iron Bias: 0 Accept/Reject: Everything accepted, rely on tones (alternative reject -9, -8, and -7 if too much ground feedback) The settings are a starting point to be adjusted as needed. More sensitivity obviously adds more sensitivity but can add instability. Lower recovery speeds will add sensitivity but also add to any coil knock issues being experienced. Increased iron bias may help in trashy areas and with some hot rocks but could filter out the weakest non-ferrous signals. Judicious notching can help with certain hot rocks. Ground tracking and/or lower frequencies can help deal with the worst ground. Every adjustment is a trade-off and comes with a cost - learn your detector! See the article for details. The 6" coil is both more sensitive to the smallest targets and less bump sensitive.

I doubt it's 100% scripted, but I also doubt even more that it's 100% WYSIWYG. A couple hints: 1) he's not smiling; 2) (apparently) he doesn't say he found these. Anyone who is trusted to hold that much gold can pose for a camera. Are the show's promoters going to play it up? Sure. Is it ethical? Maybe in their world. 'Reality TV' is full of people who rationalize their tactics. There are worse places and people who do a lot more than that. I'd like to say I wouldn't do it if I were in their shoes, but I'm not (and thankful for that).

Welcome to the forum! I’ve been detecting for coming up on 50 years now. One thing I can promise you is the detector you are using is not nearly the biggest factor in success. That’s the marketers at work. I can use any, and I mean any of the top tier coin, jewelry and relic machines made by any of the manufactures and basically do just as well with any of them. The tech is mature and it’s splitting hairs with all the over $700 models these days, and what you get for the price is dropping by the day. Nugget detecting gets more technical but for the vast majority which detector model you use is largely a popularity contest. I choose detectors based on basic factors like feature set, weight, waterproof or not, audio, etc. not whether one is magically better than all the rest at finding stuff. There are people out there doing better with a Garrett Ace 250 than some other with a much more expensive CTX 3030. How is that possible? Easy. Learn your basic skills which translate to any detector. Coil control and target recovery. Then put yourself in good locations, put in lots of hours, and dig lots of targets. That’s it, just good locations and hours. It’s not rocket science. So my advice is keep and use what you have. If you are dissatisfied with your results, it’s not the detector. Work on your detecting skills and finding better locations. Or get another detector if you want... but don’t expect that simply doing that will really make any difference. Best wishes and good luck! Edit: I hate it when people don't simply answer the question asked. So for what it is worth I sold my CTX 3030 as soon as I got my hands on an Equinox 800.

I can take a few more pics tonight to give you better idea...

Two letters only to cover this.....BS. If you believe this, then I have a second hand bridge I can sell you in Sydney.

The best Australian nugget Parker had was that hottie he used to hang out with. She probably bailed on him...

Dang Steve you make me want one.... as always, a complete and excellent review! I am late to the party, but still good reading thanks

I lobbied for a solid elliptical early on to no result unfortunately. It seemed like a no-brainer to me since the housing already existed and it is a shame it’s never happened. ThIs coil feels great on the arm, and the solid design slides smoothly over stubble that hangs up the other coils. It would be great both for gold prospectors and U.K. style hunting of fields in stubble. 😥

Finished my battery pack mod today and got to test it along side the Whites stock NiMH rechargeable pack. This test was done with targets in the ground. 1 foot long 2" diameter PVC pipe buried vertically with a 1 foot long 1 1/2" PVC insert. Inside the 1 1/2" insert is a removable styrofoam tube with slots at 1" increments cut into it that can hold coin sized targets. Ground around it is 4 to 5 bar Fe3O4 (F19 reading) dirt that reads -2 to +3 ground balance on my Equinox. TDI SL with ground balance on 7, gain 8, pulse delay 10, frequency 12 o'clock, conductivity low Clear 2 way tone (not just threshold waver) Nugget Finder Sadie 8X6" 11.8V stock NiMH battery 14.8V four Panasonic 18650B 3.7V Li Ion rechargeable batteries .25 gram flat lead 2" 3" .5 gram flat lead 3" 4" .75 gram flat lead 4" 5" Nickel 4.8 grams 9" 10" Miner John folded mono 12X8" with the same settings Nugget Finder Advantage 17X11" 11.8V NiMH 14.8V Li Ion 14.8V Li Ion .25 gram lead 1" 2" 2" .5 gram lead 2" 3" 3.5" .75 gram lead 3" 4" 5" Nickel 4.8 grams 9" 12" 13.5" Jeff

The fact your son made that for you makes it doubly awesome!

Gerry, You've gotten lots of really good comments. I wish I could react to many of the commets one at a time but have to 'put something together' that tells what I do and a little bit of what I think. Steve covers most of my bases with his style and comments. I feel like I've been 'called out' so to speak. (As a help to me and others too!) I seem to be the poster boy for skipping around. I have to admit you could call me the beach hunter of the desert or just call me impatient. I don't know where to find gold in Rye Patch (and other places). It's everywhere and it's nowhere. I don't know where the 'known' patches are. I just look for the random nuggets and if I find one I try to find another. My last two trips to Rye Patch are my current pattern. The first trip I drove all night and went out to an area where I had found one nugget before (3 years ago) and I stayed there for 2 hours. Enough. (I've been to this area at least 3 times since I found that nugget but didn't find any more.) I go to another area where I had found a nugget and repeat the pattern not knowing if there is a patch there or not. I camped out near the burn barrel. I got up in the morning and my first target was a nice nugget. I stayed there all day and didn't find any more. I had done some research and joined a new club and I wanted to see Placeritos so I drove there and spent the night. No nuggets but an interesting place to see. I have no idea how to work this place so I leave, try to find a couple of meteorites on the dry lake and spend the night in Winnemucca. The next day I drive to north of Elko on an exploration and drive back to the Eugenes and spend the night. I hunt the area where I parked for half the day and go back to Rye Patch and find a little nugget on my first target but no more for that half day. At the end of the day I drive back to Santa Monica. I had a good trip. My next Rye Patch trip about a month later I come to the patch later in the afternoon and meet up with Chet after 2 PM and we go near where I ended the last trip. I get out and start walking and my first target is a nugget. A few minutes later I get another one and before dark at 6 PM I have another tiny nugget. The next day Chet takes over that 100x100 spot to see if the Xcoil could find more. He finds two nuggets there all day and I find one other nugget within 1/4 mile. Next day we hit two spots (Fred saw us at one where I had found a nugget before but not this trip) and then we went back close to where we had been at the previous day and I found one more nugget. I went back to near that area for half of the next day and that was my trip. I detect sections 17 and 19 only when in Rye Patch. I have it marked on my phone. I'm on another trip now to Gold Basin. I wanted to find a nugget with the 800 so yesterday I went to 4 places where I have found nuggets before. There were no tiny nuggets for the 800. I take shorter trips but I go back to where I've found nuggets. I'm mostly a solo/skunk hunter. I don't have a quad and I don't have a trailer to camp for a week. My Australia trip was a map trip. I looked on a map and got to an area and detected. I tried to understand the workings and get started as Steve has said but day after day it just didn't happen. There was no one to tell me how to change that pattern. After the first week I worked myself into an area where I had been given an exact pointy finger for a found nugget or two and I went to those places with the help of my phone GPS. It resulted in nuggets but I found very little for my 20 days ... don't remind me. If I'm not finding gold in an area that I know nothing about ... why should I stay? I think I have a better chance of getting lucky than concentrating on an area that doesn't have any gold. Experience is not my friend when it comes to gold hunting. I started in 2011 after many of you hunted out some of the best spots. (I must add that Adam and Mop took me to their patches and we didn't find anything either so the trip was not entirely solo.) I've had a couple of areas over the years where I hunted that I would call a patch. I could go out and find missed nuggets and new areas at the same time. It is a foreign language to me to suggest that I go back and look for the deep nuggets on a patch I detected over 10 years ago. Many clues and lots of nuggets are gone before I ever get to these patches. Bottom line for me is I think I take short, intense trips to places I've been before expecting better results. I might continue to find 'once in a lifetime nuggets' as Fred calls them if I did go to new places more often. Mitchel PS: I thought all day about an important individual in Australia I did not mention in this post. Thank you Reg Wilson for making a map for me near where you live and also putting me up for the first few days. I was jet lagged and getting over a head cold and I didn't learn as much as I could have. I did go back towards the end of my trip to the places you showed me when I stayed in Maryborough and followed that ridge you showed me. Adam now has your map. Thanks to your wife also. Your home is something I'll always remember as picture perfect.

Thanks Jim.........probably my most satisfying find ever. Nearly walked away from it too.......😳

My buddy, Dave, and I are headed to the Winnemucca area Friday. First chance to use the modified SL for gold. Also taking the GM24K, and Dave will be using his Equinox 800. I've done a lot of research on the area since our June trip, and hopefully it will pay off with more gold. We may stay a couple of weeks, depending on the weather. Jim

I'm over 70. I'd rather have a shorter-lived detector, with greater ability, than a longer-lived unit with less ability. I'm going on 4 years with my 16v battery pack. Jim

A little place we found. I'm excited to search the area

RobNC I’ve sold silver two times over the years when the price was up . I don’t have a lot of silver anymore but I have the memory of finding it. I may been detecting longer than you are old . That being over fifty years. I guess you could say I cheated being I didn’t wait on you. The year I started detecting was the first year they stopped the silver coins. The Indian Head penny I like and I’ve found a fair amount but here is some. The Flying cent I’ve yet to find.

I use the 7.5'' DF coil on my TDI Pro,probably about 50% of the time,mainly use it on a roman trading villa site which is possibly one of the hardest mineral content sites that i have ever detected its basically like black sand but inland.Very few VLF machines apart from multi freq can get any depth on this site,so its ideal for the TDI and the small DF coil......this same site over say the last 12 years has produced i guess nearly or possibly more than 10,000 roman coins as it was a trading site for 400 years. So yes i really like the 7.5'' DF coil,cannot recall the last time i used the 12'' DF as my main coil is the 14x9 Coiltek mono

That’s nice to hear. Jimmy and I were allies a few times battling White’s on stuff. Thanks for posting that.

Something I will have to play with I guess. I have never found an actual practical use for the Ground Scan Mode or the "Trace the Black Sands" mode on the GMT so off the top of my head I don't have any idea for what the audio does when using this mode. My gut tells me you have to eyeball the screen. From the User Guide: "Ground Scan is enabled by holding the LOCK button. The display will change to display the ground strength on the top bar, increasing from right to left. Full bars equates to very strong mineralization, and one flashing bar alerts you that no ground information is present. The two-digit numbers displayed are the ground phase. Solid ferrite will read around 81, alkali will read between 50 and 30, but you may encounter any range of phase numbers depending on the area you are in. In Ground Scan you can also set a ground offset by using the UP and DOWN arrows. This selection will affect the ground offset in normal search mode whether using XGB or locked settings. Ground Scan is very useful in prospecting dry washes or creek beds for black sand deposits. One trick you can use is to carry some landscaping flags with you, placing one down where the mineralization is the strongest about every 10 ft. That is where you would want to process material through a sluice or dry washer. To return back to the regular search mode, tap the LOCK or CROSS HAIRS." White's Goldmaster 24K XGB Ground Tracking Explained

Looks like that turned out to just be a rumor. I thought I would bring this review to the top since people are finally figuring out the 24K is a great little detector. This was my last detector review so I put a little more effort into it than most. I think it holds up well now a year later. White’s Goldmaster 24K Specifications & Data

I was curious. I don't think I want to own one. That beautiful GMT that I got from you will suffice!

In general with all detectors and pinpointers, start the pinpointer and sit close by. They do a frequency scan with detector. That should do the trick in most cases.