Leaderboard

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.

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

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

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.

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

Burma Thai Railroad... Pows died here building this railroad, very solemn sorrowful place... Good to know History and never forget these heros who gave their all...

Obviously an LRL circuit!

Some like a lot of hard work but fun for all involved.

What’s fake about it? The Chinese text? The Equinox comes with a multi language set of screen protectors / menu labels. Nice thing about that is you have extras if the English one wears out. You can cut the other menu language section off before applying. This person did not bother... or speaks Chinese! EQUINOX Multi-Language Screen Protector Pack Low-reflection screen protector pack. Keeps the original screen free from scratches. Available languages: English, Russian, German, Dutch, Polish, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Mongolian, Turkish, Arabic. Part No. 3011-0379

Sounds like you have a little piece of heaven there Peg - good for you!

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.

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.

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).

This is a great point Simon. Whether I’m using a multi-frequency or a single-frequency detector my finds all look the same.

The unit your seeing is a mini sluice to strip the cons down... Back to the other table, under the funnel are to small holes to spray water , just to the right of the funnel is a open port, and follow that around is the spray bar but the holes only cover half the belt, so Im thinking the missing part cover the rest of the belt...but Im not sure on that because of the hole under the funnel...

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 overall cost of a detector does not necessarily imply that it is the best detector for yourself nor for the areas/sites that you will detect. I would put more weight on the person who learns their given detector inside out vs someone who simply goes out and purchases the most expensive detector available expecting to make immediate good finds. Also a lot has to do with the types of detecting sites available to you, and the likelihood of making good finds on them. For some people buying the most feature packed/expensive detector available can be a recipe for being overwhelmed with the number of settings available, or to find that they never require all those settings to be successful in the first place. Sometimes keeping it simple will allow you more time to detect and less time fiddling around with endless program options and settings. If you do not have overly mineralised soil and do not beach detect, then there may be no advantage to extending yourself to purchase a CTX, the Anfibio is pretty much top of the range from the Nokta/Makro stables and should serve you well. In my area quite a few detectorists have actually moved on from the CTX to lighter detectors including the XP Deus and Minelab Equinox, as not only are they more enjoyable to swing for longer periods, they also perform just as good if not better on the older sites with abundant junk and iron. Personally I think you need a few good months on a detector to see whether you gel with it or not, if you don't then it may be time to move onto something different. The tones on offer is a real killer for me, if they don't suit my ears or offer descriptive audio then I won't expect to get much further on that particular detector, and once again that is something you only learn over time.

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

Your recovery speed affects depth also. I think Park 1 defaults to 3 (fastest) on the 600. Dropping that down to 2 or 1 might get you another 1/4-1/2 in depth, but you lose some separation speed.

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. 😥

Awesome find! Nothing like finding gold....especially 18k and heavy!

Good catch GB. It is an honor to be compared to Lunk. The amount of hours he has on gold detectors has to be in the highest % in US. Actually, he pulls me 3 out of 5 times. But then I've beat him by a nugget or two 2 days straight. Then he'll hand me a 3 day whoop ass lesson. It's all good in the end as we both respect each other, our capabilities....and most importantly the friendship and commoraudery. But thanks for noticing.

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

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.......😳

Two points, first I would love to have found that amount of gold in a month. Second, good way to explain the difference between models of hunting. I slow only if I find two in an area. Otherwise it is patch hunting speed. I do need to try this 1/2 coil overlap.

No right or wrong, it purely depends on the situation. Are you trying to find a new patch, or trying to extract gold from a known patch? Are you hunting a natural gold patch, or highly disturbed ground like tailing piles? If I am hunting a known patch I am like Lunk, crazy methodical slow. My normal mode is to hunt a week at a time, on one location, basically not moving at all. I find most people can't stand this and want to run all over the place or hop in the car and go someplace else after a day. Not me, just leave me in one place for a week, as long as I know there is gold there. The old saying is "never leave gold to find gold" and as a rule I find it to be good advice. But put me in Alaska hunting tailing piles looking for lost over-sized gold and it is all about ground coverage. The nuggets are few and far between, not in a limited area like a natural patch. And miles of ground usually. Low and slow is not the way to go. If you are hunting for a new patch in a desert, better have a large coil and cover ground like no tomorrow looking for an indicator nugget. Low and slow is no good in 100 square miles of desert. Patch hunting versus known patches, real world result. I spent exactly a month of hunting days in Australia, with JP putting me on a known patch every day. Dawn to dusk. I was in Australia to find an Australia sized nugget, you know, the fist sized type. I figured the pounded patches were not a good bet for that, and so I devoted dawn to lunch each day on a long loop swinging an 18" coil on my GPX 5000. I don't take breaks, I swing for the 4-5 hours I have. I covered about 5 miles per half day on each of those loops. Then after lunch it was hit the patch low and slow. At the end of the month I had 2.33 ounces of Aussie gold. If I recall correctly, like one or at most two of those were found on my exploration trips. I would have bet, did bet, that I would have found some tiny patch or stringer of gold somewhere off the main patch locations. Instead I essentially wasted half my trip for basically no result. I can't say I regret that - go big or go home - and I do have to learn some things for myself. But in retrospect I could have easily have doubled my gold take just by staying on the patches. And frankly maybe got a whisper that proved to be the big nugget I was after. If I go back to Australia again, unless it is specifically a trip to find new ground, I would stay on the patches 100% of the time and give it my all. If I have done that last trip I would probably have found 5 ounces instead of 2.33 ounces. 2.33 ounces of Australian gold I do quite a bit of wandering in Nevada, and have found quite a few isolated nuggets, which apparently are far more common in Nevada than Australia, or at least where we were in Australia. Just one nugget, then hunt there for two more hours and nothing else. And I did find a little virgin mini patch once that gave me about an ounce of gold. But more normal was one week I spent in a gold bearing region but not on a known patch, just hunting dawn to dusk trying to find that fabled virgin patch I know is out there someplace still. A solid week, one nugget of a couple grams. Man I was excited when I found it, but once again it was a one off. It is very hard to patch hunt like that knowing you can drive a few miles and be on gold. But if you want to be that person who really, and I mean really scores, you have to give it a go every once in a while. But realistically, getting on known producing ground with the absolute best machine possible and hunting as slowly and methodically as is humanly possible is what puts gold in the poke these days. Unless you are in tailing piles in Alaska!

Hey Tony, congrats on a great find! Love hearing those stories on the deep finds with the TDI's, and Beach Hunter versions. 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

I wanted a second opinion from White's so I went straight to the top! This was his reply: "Dear Walt Evens White’s TDI SL is designed to operate on 12 volts. All Pulse Induction models show some increased performance with added voltage. However, the price is lowered longevity of the electronic circuit, and voltages over 14.8 Volts can immediately damage the electronics. White’s doesn’t recommend overpowering the TDI SL electronics. Sincerely Steve Howard White’s USA" Thanks! Walt

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

I think tan is more for their prospecting machines. I definitely prefer tan for desert use. Black not only shows the dirt more but turns the inside of the detector into an oven. As detectors go I think the 24K is an attractive machine. For what it’s worth I ended up selling my Gold Monster and kept the 24K. I can’t swear one is better than the other at finding gold, but I have always preferred detectors with more control options. The 24K has those options, and in my opinion is ergonomically superior to the Gold Monster, with a much better feel on my arm. And it doesn’t fall over!

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!

Looks to be based off the Fisher F4, very similar.