Steve Herschbach

I understand where you are coming from Jason, I do, and around a campfire you might be surprised by things I might say. However, I did my 30 years of political activism in issues regarding mining at various levels while in Alaska, contributing a great number of hours and dollars being involved in issues like this. I promise you that if you want to get involved, and really try and institute change, you will have to fight everyone on all sides. Small miners in particular, who hate change of any sort, and are as united as a herd of wild cats. And all the while that you do the small miner vs large miner thing the environmental lobby will solve your problem for you by eliminating both. I did my time and paid my dues and for that reason - I am signing off!

But do feel free to continue folks, just remember - civility and respect.

Wow, toss the GPZ! You got more gold in a day that I got my last week of detecting this season. I went out with a whimper. Good work.

I have only minimal time on the Gold+ but it seemed a bit more refined as a gold machine than the original. Nothing dramatic because the original was already very good, but an improvement nonetheless.

Well I am not defending the majors Jason. I guess I do not worry about them much because they are not going to approach me with crazy hair, wild eyes, and a shotgun, and threaten to kill me for being on their ground. I take great care to stay off ground under claim by small miners but if I wander across a corner of Newmont ground I seriously doubt the folks at corporate will get their shorts in a bunch over it.

Actually there are good reasons why large companies need large acreages. They are making huge expenditures to find deposits that need to last decades in some cases, and depending on gold prices lower grade deposits surrounding core deposits may be found and exploited at much later dates. And frankly, they also do it to help protect themselves from people looking to take advantage of them by staking ground nearby and then holding it for ransom. Chris Ralph can better explain the details but they do not hold ground and pay huge holding fees just to frustrate you and I.

Pick the spot that gave you your best coins. Just like finding a nugget, I start with one decent coin find, and work outwards from there. But I never pressure any one area too much at one time, I spread the work around to give the area time to recover. No strip mining!

If you get a high success rate cherry picking silver no reason to do anything different.

Remember that my main goal is the recovery of non-ferrous targets. I have my own tactics for trashy parks, and that is to just take them apart over a period of years. It is a secondary leisure activity in my off time from prospecting. And my comment was just something in passing about my own personal use and style of detecting - I AM NOT trying to talk anyone out of using the CTX for their uses in their soils.

The soil here in Reno is very high magnetite content. Very high. I am not talking about deep turf, I am talking about the sand and gravel base. Many of the park areas here have minimal turf depth. Kinda thread bare, if you know what I mean. Fe3O4 readings on machines like the F75, Gold Bug Pro, Racer, etc. all come up one segment short of maxed, gb numbers around 88 - 90.

The thing is I am not specifically coin detecting. I use small coils and recover all non-ferrous targets. I always hear people say that's impossible in their trashy parks, that my parks must not be as trashy, etc. No, it is because I eat elephants. And the way to eat elephants is a bite at a time. It is the same approach I use nugget hunting - methodical years long game plans. I can work parks considered worked out for years.

Right now my favorites are the F75 with 5" round DD, and the FORS and Racers with the little oblong 5" DD people are calling the OOR coil. The small coils allow for high gain levels in bad ground and actually punch deeper than the larger coils. Target id in bad ground is always dicey no matter the machine so I just recover all non-ferrous using two tones. The small DD coils automatically take care of most masking, my removal of all non-ferrous takes care of most of the rest. I even give the ATX a go now and then but there I hunt strictly by ear.

I just get pretty weird I guess. I don't much care what I find. Sometimes I just dig aluminum. I find all kinds of crazy little non-ferrous stuff. Lots of trash. But along the way I have no problem finding wheat backs and silver coins and a Buffalo nickel now and then, oddball jewelry finds, like ear rings, you name it. I have cans full of stuff, coins, trash, and jewelry I just toss all together and lots I have not bothered to sort out yet. I do not much care about the finds, I just love finding stuff and doing it well, and not leaving a mark.

I will sort some piles out and take some photos of the "good stuff" and the trash sometime soon. I am in winter house cleaning mode, one reason a few detectors and stuff will get sold, and past time to sort out the "not prospecting" piles of stuff sitting around. Should be an interesting post.

I am putting the Gold Racer into the park mix as weather allows. It has interesting operating characteristics due to its high operating frequency. The fact is I just like messing around with different metal detectors. Me getting one or getting rid of one is nothing new and people should not read much into it. I really am just a detector nerd.

Hi Trev,

I am probably better with a CTX than most people out there so that it not a concern of mine. I don't need many hours to know a CTX can't get a whisper on targets easily found with other detectors in my ground conditions. Masking is not my problem with the CTX, it is lack of depth on a clear target in the open. Single frequency just packs more punch in my ground, and all the hours in the world won't change that. I can only use one detector at a time and I do rotate the VLF detectors out of the stable for various reasons. Sometimes I reacquire the same model at a later date. I can acquire and dispose of detectors at nearly no cost to myself and technology, unlike grapes, does not age well on the vine. The bottom line is that I know for a fact I will not be using the CTX much if at all for the foreseeable future. If the day ever came I thought I had made a mistake, I would just get another one. But I really do appreciate what you are saying and thank you for taking the time to say so! Hope to see you around here more often.

Perhaps because the people of Nevada in general are happy to have the jobs and tax base provided by the big mining companies?

Well, I got a kinda sorta got the go ahead from Dilek on Friday but sent back an email double-checking with her on whether there are any limitations on my ability to blab away in my normal fashion. That, and I got busy testing detectors this weekend, including just getting back from a park detecting go with the Gold Racer. I am hoping to hear back by morning and get one thing posted tomorrow. Like the detector itself, I hope to make it worth the wait.

I still do not want rechargeable coils but the new DEUS high frequency coil may be enough to cause me to overlook what is admittedly a personal bias. If, and I say if, XP releases a version where I can buy the machine with the high frequency coil as stock as opposed to being an expensive second coil option, then XP just might have a new customer, paid for with funds from a used CTX.

Come to think of it, I bought the DEUS rod assembly by itself on a whim (was considering a Gold Bug 2 conversion) and all I would need to do is buy the coil and control box as separate items to have a complete unit. Hmmmm....

Light, fast GPZ? Even Minelab themselves joke about Minelab being synonymous with "heavy and slow"!

I had no intention of it getting that long!

If I am not digging everything I am usually just looking for good ferrous/non-ferrous discrimination. For park hunting I like the little 5" DD coils which on my F75 and FORS CoRe punch ridiculously deep in ground with high magnetite levels. I very much would like my F75 to win out over the FORS as I prefer its feel on my arm and various options but the fact is I keep seeing the Nokta do better on certain borderline targets. It is very disconcerting to see the F75 call a plainly visible piece of aluminum foil ferrous. My CTX I may be selling soon as it is overkill for what I normally do.

I agree I would hunt deep ground for large nuggets differently. Sadly, I usually frequent ground where smaller and shallower is the norm. Many Nevada areas just do not have any depth at all. Even in deep ground the nuggets can just be in the upper "active" layer where wind and water depletion is concentrating gold near surface over time. Or just lots of relatively shallow bedrock ground. Half grammers are the bread and butter and I have to hunt for them and just figure big nuggets will take care of themselves if I get over them. All the really massive nugget finds in the U.S. as of late have been ridiculously shallow, just missed by everyone to this day.

Thanks for posting JP.

They do mention Al Capone's Vault at the end of the article and a similar result would not surprise. Maybe the Discovery Channel can get Geraldo on board!

When I got into metal detecting in 1972 it was pretty simple. No discrimination, everything went beep, just dig it all up and see what you find. Advances came rapidly however, and manufacturers focused on making detectors that could eliminate trash to the highest degree possible while find coins. Coin detecting was the big market by far, as silver coins were still relatively common in parks and other locations. So the goal was to find a silver coin while ignoring everything else.

Anything smaller than a dime was generally considered a trash target, so sensitivity to small items was actually not a good thing. Low frequency detectors that handled the ground well and ignored tiny trash items ruled the day. Most detectors ran around 6 - 8 khz. Then we got multi frequency, the first and most popular being the Fisher CZ detectors running at 5 khz and 15 khz. The desire there is not what most people think. Single frequency machines do not handle a combination of conductive and magnetic properties well at the same time, the classic place being a salt water beach with a little black sand in the beach sand. Two frequencies can be used to compare signals and reduce both the salt signal and the magnetic signal simultaneously more efficiently than single frequency machines. Multi frequency machines, in particular the Minelab BBS and FBS models, excel at accurate target identification. Again, sensitivity to tiny objects has not been the goal but instead accurate discrimination and ground elimination.

The culmination came with notch discrimination and the ability to pick and choose specific target ranges to accept or reject.

Always, when designing the detectors, when it came to borderline targets, the engineers focused on the idea that people hate digging trash. There is an ability on borderline targets to bias the detector response. You can find more good items if you let the machine do so but in return there will be more false positives and more trash dug. or you can really try and suppress trash signals, but some good targets get rejected with them. What I am talking about is the classic "iffy" targets. Ones that are extra deep, or next to a trash item, on edge, or which for various other reasons give mixed or broken signals.

The machines got real efficient at cherry picking out the easy targets, and those started to disappear. All the online discussions and books started to focus on the need to dig those iffy targets to get results in places considered "hunted out".

A detector running in all metal mode reports everything going on under the coil. Detectors running in discrimination modes do not but instead eliminate signals based on various criteria. The detector "sees" what it thinks is a trash target, and instead of a signal could be set to give no signal at all. The trash items just become invisible.

A problem exists when a good item is directly under or next to a trash item that has been rejected. The detector, if set to ignore the trash item, also ignores the good item directly under the trash item. This is called target masking. But it gets a lot worse than that. The detector must ignore the trash target, then the circuit must reset, and then report the next item that comes along under the coil. This actually takes time, and that time frame is called the recovery time or recovery speed. The simple test for this is to put a nail next to a dime, and sweep the coil first over the nail and then the dime. If the dime is too close to the nail, it gets ignored along with the nail. If the detector has a very slow recovery speed, the nail and the dime can be inches apart and the dime is still eliminated! The faster the recovery time, the closer the dime can be to the nail and still have the dime signal.

Many things can be learned doing this. First, sweep speed matters. Going slower gives the detector time to reset so if you sweep too fast, you miss the dime. Go slower, it can sound off. Second, direction matters. Dime next to nail, if coil is swept 90 degree across the nail, the dime gets missed. Turn and sweep along the length of the nail, and now the dime appears. This is why classic coin detecting skills recommends hunting a location from multiple directions. Coil size and type matters tremendously. Big coils have more chance of both the nail and dime being under the coil at once, and both being ignored. Small coils have a better chance of separating the targets. DD coils do better yet by narrowing the detection pattern.

Tuning matters. If you set the detector to aggressively ignore all nails it is more likely to ignore the dime. If you set the discrimination to just barely reject the nail, even so far as letting it produce a pip or broken response, and now the dime may very well sound off also. In general you should only set to reject medium to small ferrous trash. Tuning out bolts will really mask about everything.

Then people realized setting the nail to be silent and the coin to beep caused more masking than using two tones. A low tone for nails, and a high tone for dimes. Totally suppressing the nail is more likely to kill the signal from the dime. Letting tones flow from low to high keeps the audio circuit open and more likely to report the nail.

All these tricks get combined, and so running with multiple tones, small coils, going slow, etc. all add up to more good finds being made.

Now, certain machines have always excelled at this, in particular the Tesoro detectors and some older White's models. These were/are detectors with analog style single knob discrimination controls that could set a very fine point on where the discrimination point was between ferrous and non-ferrous. But as the new digital machines came online, we actually lost some of this capability because digital signals get broken down into small pieces for processing. Think old LP record versus early digital file recordings of music like MP3. An analog signal is continuous whereas a digital signal is a zillion little bits glued end to end, and just fast enough to sound continuous. It is like the frame rate on a movie file. It looks continuous to our eye but is actually distinct separate frames strung together.

This digital type audio has been described as "gated audio", like a gate opening and closing, letting signals through. Analog type signals are described as "blended audio" or "bleedy signals" because the audio flows, blends, and bleeds together. With digital style audio the detector looks at a signal, decides if it is good or bad, assigns a tone (or no sound), then opens the gate and lets you hear it. Then it stops and looks at the next chunk, decides again, and opens the gate again before slamming it shut.

Still with me? This is the biggie. It is this gated audio response and recovery times determined by processor speed that combine to mask targets.

It gets worse. A dime right under a nail can be masked. The fun part is the deeper the dime is under the nail, the larger the area of masking is that occurs. If I sit where I am right now and hold my thumb up in front of my coffee cup, I can see the cup with my thumb in front of it. Now if I pull my thumb towards my eye and away from the cup, I can completely hide my coffee cup from view behind my thumb. Detectors actually have a similar "field of vision" effect going on, and recent surface trash can block out a lot or nearly all coins buried deeper down.

Get the picture? You have a park where the surface inch or two is full of trash dropped the last thirty years. Under that are all those old silver coins you are looking for. But you have your detector set to reject all that surface trash and the coins get eliminated right along with it. There is far more silver lurking to be found than people realize.

Still, all the way up to now, Fisher, Garrett, Minelab, and White's in particular have been cranking out detectors with the old "I do not want to dig trash" mindset at work, and the machines all have suffered from relatively slow recovery times and a bias against calling borderline targets good but instead calling them bad. And as a rule that has worked well enough for the U.S. market, especially because there were no alternatives and more importantly, people really had no idea what they were missing.

VLF nugget detectors early on dealt with this, and the Gold Bug 2 and GMT both have ferrous id systems. However, their extreme sensitivity to tiny items and edge sensitivity to certain ferrous trash items like flat steel sections of rotted and disintegrated cans makes them impractical for most detecting outside of serious nugget hunting or perhaps micro jewelry detecting. Newer nugget machines like the Gold Bug Pro with a small coil up to now have been about as good as it gets for pulling non-ferrous targets out of ferrous trash and they are pretty darn good at it. That is why Gold Bug Pro variants like the Teknetics G2 and now the F19 and G2+ have been popular with and marketed to coin and relic hunters. The Garrett AT Gold is more popular with coin and relic hunters than nugget hunters for the same reasons.

However, a detector renaissance of sorts has been taking place in Europe. They have thousands of years of ferrous trash in the ground and non-ferrous targets of all sorts scattered around in it. The very first thing that became obvious to them was that U.S. style discrimination schemes were pretty useless. The target types are too varied, so job one in Europe is to just dig all non-ferrous targets. The vast amount of trash in the ground also means recovery time is a large factor. The fields are huge and the hours long so light weight detectors are also favored. When I went to the UK for my hunt years ago I took a Fisher F75. At the time is was about the fastest swinging, fast recovery rate hot on small non-ferrous targets machine you could get in the U.S. The F75 and Tek T2 made a lot of their reputation in their ability to pull non-ferrous items out of ferrous trash. The reality is however that they still had some recovery time issues and a definite bias on borderline targets that cause non-ferrous items to be mis-identified as ferrous.

The Europeans wanted something better. Some companies though simply ignored the market or figured what they had was good enough. Minelab in particular comes to mind. Where is their light weight, fast swinging, fast recovery detector? The X-Terra 705? Sorry, no. Tesoro has some good detectors but people really do want to see new detectors now and then, and they are content to just crank out twenty year old models. An opening was created, a vacuum that companies we never heard of decided to fill.

Now, it just so happens all of this, everything I have described above, applies to looking for gold nuggets in trashy camp and other mining locations littered with ferrous targets. I have always kept an eye on what goes on in the relic hunting and European worlds because the needs and desires almost perfectly overlap with what nugget hunters need in trashy locations. And so a funny thing happened. Machines that work very well for nugget detecting started to appear in Europe. Names like the XP DEUS and Vista Gold entered my radar zone. One company, Nokta, suddenly appeared and targeted U.S. nugget hunters directly along with their sister company Makro. XP decided to get in on the game and added a Gold program to the DEUS. Most of this was actually driven more by the Africa market more than the U.S. market, as these days Africa is where the big bucks have been in nugget detector sales.

The difference is that the DEUS in particular vastly improved the recovery time and it is now regarded as perhaps the best machine made for pulling non-ferrous targets out of ferrous trash. They did it using gated audio but with very fast and sophisticated audio processing. Nokta and Makro are doing something a bit different because their machines rely more on a circuit that almost perfectly duplicates the blended audio responses of old style analog machines but combined with digital discrimination. They also have the ability to sport much smaller coils than currently exist for the DEUS and so Nokta/Makro also have made inroads. Similar results can be obtained with either but with vastly different stylistic differences. The DEUS is the epitome of high tech wizardry, the Nokta/Makro units so far much more basic machines. DEUS is what White's could have done had they not been asleep at the wheel. All the pieces existed long ago with the XLT. And when I look at the Nokta/Makro detectors I see what could have been with Tesoro if they had not just stopped making new detectors.

It is what it is however, and Euro style detectors are making waves and inroads into the U.S. markets, but almost as an afterthought as these companies target Europe and Africa.

This long post all came about because I was out comparing a truck load of detectors again in the field, and the simple basic fact once again was right there before my very eyes. It all kind of boils down to two very broad classes of machines aimed at two very different end users.

End user type one is common in the United States. The park or turf hunter. Park hunting requires sensitivity to outside factors, number one being that you just can't go crazy and dig holes everywhere. People like machines with high levels of accurate discrimination that deliver few false positives. In other words machines that focus on not digging a hole just to recover a trash item. The Minelab BBS and FBS machines like the Explorers and CTX 3030 are famous in this regard. They really are not the deepest detecting machines around by a long shot, but what they deliver is accurate discrimination results to depths beyond what most if any other machines deliver. I have a White's V3i that never really sees any use outside of parks because I like its incredible visual and audio discrimination customization features.

The Euro machines do get criticism because while they are extremely good at telling ferrous from non-ferrous, they by design do allow for more false positives. A deep borderline coin in bad ground that my F75 will identify as ferrous a Euro machine will call good and have me dig it. What they really do not tell you is that the Euro machines do not tend to separate out different categories of non-ferrous targets very well, and so you find yourself digging all sorts of things like pull tabs because they end up sounding like a coin. And even a nail now and then.

What I am trying to say with all this is that Euro style machines are really, really great for relic hunters and nugget hunters, or anyone who simply wants to recover all possible non-ferrous targets out of the middle of ferrous trash, or are willing to dig all non-ferrous targets in parks and other locations. What they really are not so great at is cherry picking certain types and categories of targets, and in general you will just dig more trash with the Euro machines than what I am calling the U.S. style machines even though that includes Minelab, an Australian company.

Now you will get people who say they can cherry pick with a DEUS or FORS CoRe, and people who will say they can pull goodies out of thick ferrous trash with their Minelab Explorer, and of course that is true. I just think you are fighting the true underlying nature of the machines. This article is for the newer people out there who are confused by it all and looking for a little honest guidance. My advice boils down to this. If you simply want to dig all non-ferrous targets, machines made by Nokta, Makro, Tesoro, and XP excel at this task. If you really hate digging any trash at all and want to focus on certain targets only, like U.S. coins, then machines made by First Texas, Garrett, Minelab, and White's tend to focus more on what I would call "turf hunting" or hunting parks, schoolyards, etc where a high degree of discrimination is paramount to reduce needless digging. There are of course other companies but I have to keep things limited to the larger and more visible ones because things are already too complicated as it is.

No matter which detector you use however, even the best cannot change the basic facts of target masking. There is stuff out there hidden under trash targets, and the only way to find those items is to remove the trash item first. The trashier the site, the more likely there are good items hidden away waiting to be found. There is no such thing as recovery time or target masking in all metal mode. In places where high value items are very likely to exist, nothing can be done but to dig it all if you want to be sure and not miss that once in a lifetime find.

Beneath The Mask by Thomas Dankowski

Looks like you will be able to see it all on cable next, Discovery Channel has got the rights. http://www.ew.com/article/2015/11/13/discovery-nazi-gold-train

Digging may commence this spring.

What I wonder about is how many claims exist in this "shadow inventory"? All the stats posted by Clay Diggings are based on LR2000 but if claims never reach LR2000......

Sorry to hear that, I have missed filing dates and it sucks. As far as the government having the authority to operate outside D.C. just go with it as the way it is.

JP finds a nuggets with the settings at https://www.facebook.com/JonathanPorter.TheOutbackProspector/?ref=hl

The gold nuggets found at the Ruby Mine are the stuff dreams are made of. Thanks for posting Tom.

In a solid 30 days of wandering western Australia prospecting I saw exactly one snake, a poor little python that came into camp one night to get a drink out of the JPs dogs water bowl. JP picked it up with a stick and deposited it outside of camp. I was told horror stories galore before I went, and then when we got there it was a big non-issue.

From BLM website at http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en/info/iac/miningfacts.html

MINING CLAIMS/SITES FILING INSTRUCTIONS FOR 2016

DUE ON OR BEFORE SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

WHAT MUST BE PAID OR FILED?

Pay the 2016 Maintenance Fee of $155 per lode claim, mill site, or tunnel site. For placer claims only , you must pay $155 per every 20 acres or portion thereof *, on or before September 1, 2015.

OR

File a 2016 Maintenance Fee Waiver Certification , Form 3830-2 (commonly referred to as a Small Miner’s Waiver) on or before September 1, 2015. There is no charge for filing a Small Miner’s Waiver.

AND

Because you file the 2016 Small Miner’s Waiver , you must ALSO file the following:

ON OR BEFORE DECEMBER 30, 2015

For placer and lode claims listed on the Small Miner’s Waiver, you must file a 2015 Affidavit of Assessment Work (also known as a Proof of Labor), along with the $10 processing fee per claim.

For mill or tunnel sites listed on the Small Miner’s Waiver, you must file a 2015 Notice of Intent to Hold or, write on the Small Miner’s Waiver that it serves as a Notice of Intent to Hold for the mill or tunnel site listed on the waiver and include the $10 processing fee per site .

IMPORTANT REMINDER: For those who filed a 2015 Small Miner’s Waiver last year (by September 1, 2014), you must file your 2015 Affidavit of Assessment Work on or before December 30, 2015, regardless of whether you pay the $155 Maintenance Fee this year for 2016.

So in your opinion it is perfectly legal to never file with BLM and just hold a federal claim in perpetuity by repapering at the county level? Never file BLM paperwork, never pay BLM filing fees, never do assessment work, never have to even bother with small miners exemptions. For one year? Two years? Three years? I cannot believe that was the intent of the law and that somebody doing so cannot be challenged.

OK, let me try again. I am not talking about a guy that stakes ground, and in 90 days does not file with BLM and walks away. No issue with that at all. I am talking about the guy the files with the recorder and in 90 days does it again and in 90 more days does it again and in 90 days does it again and on and on. They want to hold the ground but they do not want to pay BLM fees so they play this game.

I am taking the position that there is already proof they have not filed with BLM and simply keep refiling at the county recorder level. I am not talking about a guy that is following the rules but those trying to circumvent them. If you truly want the ground and truly want to protect your right, why would you not file with BLM as soon as possible? What valid excuse is there to never file with BLM?

I want every claim filed to get on the books with BLM as soon as possible and on LR2000 as soon as possible. People messing with the system at the recorder level are a pain in the ass.

seems to me that if you file the claims with the county and then go to the blm and file before the 90 days are up you would not become the owner of the claims after the previous claim owners 90 days are up because your claim is invalid because you over filed his, you would still have to beat him to filing the papers after the 90 days are up.

Claim filing establishes an order of precedence on the way to "perfecting" the claim. The first person to properly complete the process gets the claim. We are talking federal claims here. A person who never files with the Feds cannot possibly have completed the process required for having a federal mining claim. People rotating at the county level are knowingly trying to circumvent the process in order to not pay the BLM filing fees.

BLM will not invalidate a claim simply because it is filed over another. They simply monitor the paper trail but disputes are left up to the court. Do you think any federal person adjudicating the issue will back the guy rotating at county level over the person who has properly gone through the process of obtaining a federal mining claim? I think not. The people doing it know what they are doing, we know what they are doing, and any any judge will see what they are doing. There is no way any judge is going to legitimize the concept that you can have a federal mining claim in perpetuity while never ever filing with BLM.

I am however going to actually pay an attorney if need be to get legal backing for what is admittedly just an opinion on my part.