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Got another piece of gold today with the Impulse AQ. The clasp and the chain part both test 10K. I ran it through the ultrasonic cleaner about 6 times and it still has green clinging to it. Oh well, it gives it character. LOL I worked a 4 to 6 foot cut in AM and pulled out 17 quarters, 17 dimes, 7 nickels, 12 cents, one .925 earring, one junk earring, three tent pegs, a bobby pin and just a few other pieces of trash. I knew that I was digging all of the coins except for the nickels and one of the cents. Tent pegs and bobby pins are still sounding good though. It was a good hunt after being sidelined for two weeks with tendonitis in my right foot. I think that I would rather have a broken bone than the tendonitis. 😞 Thanks for looking.

Hello All, A forum member sent me this question after I posted one of my videos. To answer his question, years ago I started to make a video series, but only ended up getting like one video up about "What to Look for in the Field." This video might help some to ID handstacking, which is very common in areas that have been placered mined. You might need to turn the volume up a tiny bit. Rob: Nice job with the latest video. As a beginner I am always interested in learning more about identifying favorable terrain. Do you have any video or still shots of what the general area looked like so that I might learn how to identify favorable terrain and what indicators you used to spot a potential area? Thanks for any help you provide.

Since we are all bottled up inside staying out of the cold maybe this will warm up our insides for the winter. thanks Doug

I got out to give my new Evo a run and it was a great couple days! Here's a video I live streamed to my friends, but I've shortened it in a more watchable and engaging way (hopefully)! Enjoy!!!

Edit - oops, not silver, but it is tiny. I have a tiny silver I will post tomorrow. If we are including cuts I have slivers but I'm not going there! I apparently found the smallest intact coin found by the entire Colchester club in all these years of hunts. Victoria 'Model Eight farthing' 1848 0.29 g, 8.4 mm show about a fifth of the way down on the page here. More info https://aboutfarthings.co.uk/Model Farthings.html

It all started about 40 years ago i got bit by the gold bug in Colorado then we moved to Alaska in 92 bought a little 2 1/2 inch dredge found gold in reserection creek so bought a new 4 inch from Steve Herschbach at mining and diving . Attended a couple of outings down at crow creek with Steve Herschbach doing detector classes wife and i were hooked . Was able to buy 5 mining claims on silvertip creek dredged there for several years bought a 6 inch dredge from mining and diving we did ok there but i always wanted to try dredging up north Fairbanks area i saw a claim on eBay up near central but it was pulled of eBay after i bid the owner emailed me asking if i would be interested in the four claims above i said yes his family was just trying to get rid of them due to hard times. Well the dredging was terrible because the creek was froze after a couple of feet. So i bought a small excavator built a small trommel got a plan of operation started digging dirt the trommel maybe would run 5 yards an hour but i was in good gold so we built a larger trommel out of a huge propane tank also built a feed hopper with a conveyor this plant will run about 35 yards an hour at but at this time we still had day jobs i worked for the Alaska railroad but 2 years ago i retired from the rr after 27 years. well last year with the virus we went up early mid may spent 3 months up there we are 100 miles north east of fairbanks no cellphone no internet gods country so i mined wife made quilts ,hunted Cariboo ,met some locals but the gold was good first photo june 28 2017 still ice in creek bottom second photo boss searching for heart shaped rocks third photo and forth is stripped for this coming season what is truly amazing about this valley the gold is just on the left side of the valley thanks doug

Well it has been a dry spell, but finally connected! Besides the gold stamp there is gcic4 stamped in the ring. Does this refer to the diamond? TIA

There’s a likely looking spot, ping a nugget.🥴 Over and over again!!🤭 I like my nuggets like my girls, being a bit of a challenge and playing hard to get. 😜🤣

I take partial exception to comments on the NOX. In all fairness you are correct in calling it "All Purpose", but I want to make a point so many people don't know, so you are not alone. The NOX is more Gold Detector than any VLF unit on the market of the popular brands at this time. There is not 1 VLF gold detector out there that can find a variety of gold as well as the Equinox 800 in a varying conditions for $900 or no matter if you spent $3000. I'm not saying the NOX is best at every task and for every size gold. Yes the GB-2 in non mineralized soil on a 1/4 of a poppy seed can beat the NOX for that 1 task. But gold is usually found in mineralized soils and the NOX can handle varying grounds better. If you are after anything from poppy seed size (from a poppy seed muffin) and larger, I'll grab my EQ-800 every time. Plus all the other benefits it has, 100% WP, Blue Tooth Wireless, Software Downloadable, and great detector for a variety of other hunts. The #1 selling VLF gold detector on the market right now is the Gold Monster 1000 at $900. The EQ-800 can outperform it in so many ways it's a no brainer and at the same cost $900. Minelab is lucky I'm not in charge of the detector pricing as I'd be selling and marketing the NOX at a higher price and would still make great sales. I feel it's the most underpriced and underappreciated top performing detector on the market right now. When the EQ-1000 comes out, maybe they'll price it right, but for now, the 800 is a steal.

Geof: The late Kevin Hillier may have somehow successfully transcended that find, but I have always considered myself fortunate to have never found anything remotely resembling the size of the "Hand of Faith" That would probably ruin detecting forever for me. How the hell do you top that? Ok! All right then! - I'll risk being ruined - - - :)

If they were all the same price it might hurt, though even then the SDC is more compact folded up and waterproof. Add the price difference that appears to be brewing.... I'm not worried about the SDC. They just upgraded it and why do that if you are just going to can it?

It's not silver but it's small. It's my Celtic gold quarter stater from my last trip to England. It measures 10mm. This is a picture of it sitting on my pinky fingernail.

Does this count? It's actually a small bit of a seated quarter. I figured it's from an 1853 with arrows and rays. Found it with the Equinox at a military camp in Utah.

Great topic!!!!! I had to have a little fun here so, sorry for including a copper item which is actually from an earring so it isn't really a coin. Out here in Colorado there aren't too many old coins so finding an 1857 half dime was pretty exiting. Finding the miniature Lincoln penny was pretty fun too. All were found with the Equinox in moderate to high mineralization and all were deeper than 6".

Model coin included for scale (top right copper coin 10mm diameter). These tiny little silver coins are difficult comprehend when clean, let alone when still mixed with mud. The smallest (the rosette one) is a half penny of James 1st about 1620, others are a bit earlier.

another trime...i love how many folks have found these.

Don't cut the Minelab charger cord Eric. Since your car ciggie socket is stuffed, your best bet would be to connect a separate cigarette plug socket to your 12v solar charged car/freestanding battery via alligator clips. These are usually available at most auto accessory shops Your Minelab car charger will then simply plug into this - make sure the polarity is right though! Edit: Another way is to replace your stuffed ciggie socket with a flash new one - maybe complete with USB's

Hi JP water warn flakes like that are the bread and butter for me in my area of the New England with the sdc. If I am digging that size with an sdc what advantage could you see from upgrading to a 6000. Is there any reason hypothetically that you could not find that flake with an sdc due to ground conditions?

I would set up a solar system to the Car/4WD battery and use the cigarette plug to charge you detector battery with the regulated ML charger. This will not work if you are going on foot for a few days, a second battery or two is require and if a light weight ones are used they can be used for half day trips.

The SDC is still king of simple, both from a controls POV but also the way it behaves over the ground and what it imparts to the operator.

Little update. Took the digger out for a test run, hit local woods and though I didn't find anything the digger worked incredibly well. The blade tracks straight and does not side kick on ya when hitting small roots making it very easy to control. Hight for me is just about perfect. Foot peg is comfortable but will adjust. Takes 3 easy steps to make a nice plug. Handle I chose the grip tends to slip a little so will glue it though others are asking for different handle types. The fiberglass rod does flex a little but doesn't seem to be an issue. Granted I was digging in semi frozen ground. Blade is super sturdy. last thing is I will adjust the foot peg/bracket so it is slightly wider and meets the depth of the back of the blade. Possibly weld on some cleats. My foot didn't slip at all but couple cleats will give ya bit of grip. One my local detecting buddies will put it through it's paces when he heads out but of course were getting hit with snow :(

not enough

I took my son down to a beach between rain showers today. When we got there I saw the beach was favorable for a hunt so when I took him home I turned around and went back. Well, not exactly. I went back and I forgot my scoop and rain coat so I had to go back again! There weren't a lot of targets but I did get a couple of quarters and some indicators but I couldn't really find a pattern/line. I knew I didn't have much time and I was a bit impatient with my 800/15 so I stepped up the pace and said I only want 'good' targets on my way to a beach area that has given me good success in the past. Before I could get there I heard this scratchy 8-9 but it was not solid like a good ring. After a couple of scoops I could see color in the side of the hole. That is not a normal thing for me. I wish I had taken a picture but I just scooped it and looked in the bottom. It was a great color, not as heavy as I would have liked and it reminded me of a cheap ring style. But that color had me hopeful for something real. The rain was coming so I had to turn back. I had gotten in 1.5 hours. When I got to the car I could see 18 C. When I got home I looked up 18 C and it said it could be the same as 18K or 18 ct if the ring was made in a country where English was not the spoken language. It cleaned up pretty nice with my ultra sonic cleaner. It weighs 4.6 grams and is only missing 1 of the stone inclusions. They are faceted but many are very cracked and chipped up so I don't know what they are made of but the ring itself catches light well and sparkles. This was the rainbow on the way home! This was the way it looked before I cleaned it up.

First proto, I will be testing. 4 1/4" x 10" blade, 40" overall. 2.15 lbs. Integrated foot peg so it doesn't hang up, couple root cutters to reduce side kick. Thoughts?

I found this Mexican 1925 10 centavos a little over a year ago. Dug it at an old SP stop that was very good to me. It sounded like an IHP. Solid 19 on the 800. As small as it is I am surprised that more have not shown up. Show some small silver.

I’ve been pretty busy this month and I’m not sure if I’ll be out there the rest of the month so I thought I’d post this. It’s a 5 gram 10k nugget ring I hit yesterday down about 6” I’d guess in waist deep water. That’s on my little finger so it’s not a big size. Beautiful day for hunting.... two hunter on the dry but just me getting wet. Real quiet in the water this year. Hit an area I knew this summer had pushed up some of our thick gray sand. I could hear a bit of chatter that smoothed to nothing as I ran into processed deep sand. Not much out deeper but this year we don’t have much of a trough... she’s pretty smooth and on the reneourished beaches there’s a lot of deep worthless sand. So it’s kind of blind squirrel hunting even if you know the beach.

Interesting out of focus somethingorother in the b.g. too...

If the holes weren’t filled than that wasn’t me. All the black sand made it hard to get deep targets. I got lucky with the eyeball find it or else I would had gone home without jewelry. Good luck out there. The actual cross is magnetic and the magnet I’m using is a normal one available at any store. I’m sure the pins holding Christ to the cross should be made of the same metal as the cross. Finding 3 or more gold rings in a hunt is quite rare since there’s so much competition. HH

Thanks. I am looking into carbon shafts, might have to hit up Steve G for those as he has one for the sand scoops. Bit of flex isn't bad so long as it isn't flexing at the connection where the steel could crack the fiberglass. I thought of making plugs but that just pushes the possible fracture point up further. Another way create a slit ferrule on the metal then wrap over but again the shaft if it flexes may just be further up but would be gradule. I am really happy with the stout spade point, worked well scooping out the hole without getting down on the ground. So blade is a keeper, foot peg/brace needs some tweaking, need to settle on shaft which will determine handle styles available. I hear ya on using it to get up. My knees are junk and hip not so good. Sucks getting old eh?

Hello my friends, I tried to find out, what super-successful gold prospectors do differently and I started a video series about what I found out. Have a good week!

As JR said. Here is a link to plug. ....LINK....

Kevin found that 1980. The million dollar nugget. I think most prospector dream of. I was sitting around the camp fire with a few full timer in Leonora 25 years later. Kevin turn-up and joined us. He got his $1,000,000 house on millionaire hill in Perth but here he was roughing it out in the desert with his wife just to go detecting for enjoyment. At this stage he was using a ML detector.

Erik, the solar panel output is pulsed and has too high of voltage swings, like when it has a shadow on it or is angled to the sun, so you cant use it directly. The battery charge controller charging output sends measured pulses to the battery depending on the battery charge level, it cant be used directly either and is only good for charging batteries. The light bulb circuit on the controller may be constant 12v dc, but the output amperage is probably too low and will not be constant enough (due to the solar panel power) to use directly with a regular car adapter charger. An intermediate 12v deep cycle battery ( even like a 12v 34amp mobility wheelchair battery) will be the best bet.

The Minelab GPX 5000 lithium battery is 7.4 volts. I may have read this wrong, but if you’re planning on directly charging it from the 12v solar charger controller, you can definitely damage the Minelab battery because the direct output from the solar charger controller is most likely for 12v batteries.There are smart chargers that can use a 12 V input in order to charge different types of lithium batteries, however they’re expensive. Your least expensive and a safe option would be to use a system like the solar charger shown by VL above to charge a separate 12V deep cycle battery. The deep cycle battery will provide a constant 12 V output for the car charger, whereas the solar charger output actually uses a pulsed output to charge a battery,which can damage other electronics that are directly plugged into it. Just connect the Minelab car charger to the 12v battery (same way the Inverter is shown in VL’s diagram above) and use the Minelab charger to charge your Minelab lithium battery- it will do the 12v to 7.4v conversion needed to charge the Minelab battery.

update and improve the Garrett ATX timings and coils, lighter housing and new color and market it as less expensive alternative against the GPX 6000. Garrett has nothing to lose and everything to gain, the ATX is in need of a new rebirth

Hey Noah, The last coil, that i said something like that about, literally broke a day later! I jinxed myself!😱 That was my third coil, and it is now in route to be replaced as of yesterday! And i am Not rough on my coils at all! 👍👍

Exatly what I'll be using it for! And my wife will use it for her everyday detecting, she will apreciate the light weight🤩

more ice june second and third photos are elevated sluices from the early 1930s in the head waters of mastodon creek had to take 4 wheelers to get there thanks doug

Sorry, can’t make any promises! 🤗

The 5000 has some discrimination with the DD coil - we have been verbally told by Minelab US Rep that the DD coil on the 6000 does not and is only intended for high EMI environments. So in a high junk gold field the 5000 may still be the weapon of choice.

in all wyoming , montana , south dakota , oregon , california , nevada ,arizona , idaho and colorado.

Alaska, Arizona, Australia, California, and Nevada so far. Would not mind adding a few more.

Well the title says it all. I was detecting at an old town that is mostly gone. We got the permission from a really nice older couple that gave us plenty of info about the town and it's history. They cut hay off an area that used to have houses on it so off we went. Only found two coins but both were old. The first was the what is that coin and the second a shield nickel. I had dug an old barrel spigot on my first pass and wasn't really finding much at all. Then about the third trip across I hit some really big numbers that sounded good. I was thinking perhaps another spigot or relic of some type. I popped out the plug and could see the side of what I thought could be maybe a silver dollar! I pulled it out of the plug and wiped off some dirt and thought what is that..lol I was pretty sure it was silver and an 1829 Mexican coin but other than that...clueless. My detecting buddy looked at it and told me I had found a Mexican 8 reales. I thought it was cool before being the oldest coin I had found but after realizing what I had found I got reales happy!! 😁 I was told they were used as American currency until 1857 which made it even more special to me. Ya just never know. Oh, Equinox still pk1 ib3 recovery7. HH! Tom

That was a nice video. It’s too bad you never finished your series these are the types of things that I would like to watch and learn more.

4. Got skunked in one or it could have been 5. panning sluicing or dredging then I am up to 8

The guides are simplistic marketing tools and you should not read too much into them. The positioning in the product line up tells you 80% of what you need to know. The rest is details. The charts basically justify the positioning. Minelab is saying up front the GPZ is top dog, but just like all the models the 6000 will no doubt excel in its own little way. I can find gold with an SDC the GPZ misses and it costs a lot less. But should everyone ditch their GPZ for the SDC? You know the answer to that.

An unregulated solar panel can put out up to 20+ volts no matter how many watts it's rated for.. The solar controller regulates that to battery charging level 13-15 volts depending on sun exposure , how well it charges also depends on how many watts the panel (s) puts out. A battery is a good buffer for the voltage swings plus---- !!!! the solar controller needs to see a load or the panels could easily destroy it . IE: release the magic smoke ! A USB outlet is 5 volts. You can get 12 volt powered ciggy lighter sized unit typically with 2 USB outlets and maybe a digital voltage readout that will replace that ciggy plug socket for about $15 US , not sure of where you might source them? but you can find them on amazon. or any of the usual places like that. Look for "fast charge" types. This would save the need for a 12volt inverter plus wiring , and the resulting conversion loss of the extra stages inline. (unless you need mains power for something else ? Use fuses . Hope that gets you going to keep on going.>>>>>>>>>

More like ping.2 ping.2 ping.5 ...... 3kg leader 🤪

HA HA and by that picture Dirty ...HA HA HA HA HA