Steve Herschbach

Cover for the scale that doubles as a weighing tray. Normally clips over top of the scale. It is an older version of the US Magnum 500

They apparently are made just to be used as promotional items like Minelab did. A couple outfits offer to sell singles as "samples" though. http://www.motivators.com/Promotional-Custom-UrbanPeakHybridHydropack-90166.html? I like mine enough I may just try and get another for when I wear this one out. Lots of other pack options out there however.

Hi Ivan, The number one difference for me from my days in Alaska is how close I can get to most stuff with my 4-Runner. In Nevada I am often parked 5 minutes away!! But I do like to go on walkabouts and the program there is to go that way for a couple hours before looping back to my vehicle so I often get a couple hours detecting distance from the rig. But that is swinging the detector. Actual distance would almost never be more than a couple miles from my truck.

Hi Tom, Yes, that is the Garrett AT Pro Pointer. No advantage in being waterproof in the desert per se but being environmentally protected can't hurt. So far it is my all time favorite pinpointer.

I am not saying my way is the best or anything like that, but I figure for newcomers at least some idea of what a person might need detecting would be helpful. Click images for larger versions. Steve in the field This is what I look like out detecting. In Alaska I would probably be in a rain jacket and mosquito headnet but things are a bit nicer down south! Main thing to note here is I am using a small camelback style rucksack which serves three purposes. It is my detector support harness, it contains some essential items, and it gives me a quick sip of water when I need it. The GPZ 7000 bungee clips to my right shoulder next to the water tube. The speaker module goes on the left shoulder under my good ear. I pretty much always use the module unless wind forces me to go to headphones. The bungee wanted to pull off my shoulder but I found a simple solution by routing it under the cross strap that connects the shoulder straps. I use the standard GPZ 7000 velcro/clip on the detector itself to attach the bungee. I really like how easy it is to disconnect from the detector while digging, etc. which is also facilitated by the remote speaker. Closeup of bungee routing The rucksack is a freebie I got at the Minelab convention a couple years ago (thanks Minelab). It is an Urban Peak Hybrid Hydropack with 2 liter water capacity and for a item I got quite by chance it turns out to be about perfect for me and my use. My rucksack/bungee harness I use the GPS system built into the GPZ 7000 pretty religiously these days but still am also using my Garmin GPS which is clipped to my left shoulder strap for easy access. You can see in the right hand belt pocket the GPZ 7000 ferrite ring ready to use if I ever need it. Here are the contents of the rucksack: Items in the rucksack The waterproof container in upper left has basic first aid supplies, bandaids, pain killers, moleskin, lighter, emergency blanket/tarp, etc. Next is a plastic baggie with emergency toilet paper. Then a cheap plastic disposable poncho in case I get caught by a sudden downpour. A plastic spoon and a Swiss Army knife. Next row some waterproof first aid tape good for lots of things. Some parachute cord. A Delorme InReach emergency satellite communications device. A digital scale with cover and 10X loupe/magnifier with cover. A Garrett AT Propointer and finally, my camera. Often a spare GPZ battery or food or other items join this stuff but these are the items always with me. I have long been a fan of the White's belt pouch (P/N 601-0066 $14.95). It has three main compartments and two little side compartments with velcro closures. The largest main compartment gets all the trash I find. A smaller compartment has my gold bottle and maybe my camera or a water bottle. The third compartment is a holster for my digging scoop. One of the two side compartments has more emergency toilet paper (can't have too much) and maybe spare AA batteries if I am using a VLF. The belt is nothing special just a nylon utility belt. It has a nylon pick holder mounted to hold my pick when I am not actually using it. Trash and goodie pouch with side compartments Finally, the pick. In Alaska I hunted tailing piles a lot and so favored picks with big hoe digging implements. Now with the GPZ I want the metal at a minimum and I find I do not need a digging hoe so much in the desert and such down south. So this is a Hodan 24" digging pick which does all I need. It has a super magnet stuck on the head, with a small hose clamp placed ahead of it that keeps the magnet from sliding off when I dig aggressively. Digging pick Oh yeah, the gloves. I always wear gloves to protect my hands when digging and just in general. I have had people comment that some of my photos must be staged because my hands are always clean! Anyway, that's about it. I am going to put my camera in a pouch on my left shoulder right under the speaker module so it is always handy. I saw a bunch of antelope recently and the camera was in the rucksack. No good as sometimes you only get seconds for a good photo. Other than that I am pretty happy with my setup. Like I said, it is not what everyone needs and lacks some things some people might need, but it at least offers an idea and suggestion for things to consider. Urban Peak Hybrid Hydropack

I bought several cheap watches at Walmart (big display, waterproof) and all my detectors now wear one.

The post was fun but the reality is I have a different solution. I do not wear a watch personally, but all my detectors wear one.

Wow, you got some major backing and promotion. I just got an email from Kellyco promoting the event... 3rd Annual Rye Patch Nugget Shoot Come out for a day of fun! You will have the chance to participate in a planned detecting hunt and see demonstrations of gold mining while learning about important contributions of the mining industry, in the state of Nevada. There will not be an entry fee into the park or to camp overnight! The metal detecting class for $5 per person will help you learn to hunt better and get a chance to see the Nokta FORS Gold and Minelab GO-FIND 60 in action. Classes and demonstrations start at 9 am with the hunt lasting from 10 am to 3 pm. Be sure to get there early so you can grab one of 500 giveaway bags that Kellyco (that's us!) are providing! You could also be a lucky winner of one of the many prizes (total value of over $20,000) that will be given away during the day as well. Last year's event was a huge success and promises to be just as fun this year. What: 3rd Annual Rye Patch Nugget Shoot When: Saturday September 19th Where: 2505 Rye Patch Reservoir Rd. in Lovelock, Nevada 89419

I have briefly demonstrated a TM 808 to find a water main. It is not normally used gold prospecting. More for finding fuel tanks, water mains, etc. and by "treasure hunters". Anyway, my advice is check out the Minelab GPX 5000 and its large coil options. Good luck!

The Pro runs fine at full gain. Yes , it warbles. The warbles are not target signals. The warble is the threshold. Listen for non-warble noises - those are targets.

What s classic spectacularly awesome story. Thanks for taking the time tell tell it strick, and congratulations!

Hello OroSeeker, As far as fonts go, do nothing and the forum defaults to Arial. You do not have to chose a font, just type away. Sorry if I came off harsh but I am just being honest. You predicated this idea on your mom being of failing health and your finances non-sustainable. I am looking at this from that perspective, the perspective of needing money in serious circumstances. From where I sit I have prospected for gold my entire life and am doing this literally as this thread develops. I was swinging a detector prospecting all day yesterday and will be doing so again in an hour for the entire day. And the next, and the next. I know intimately what we are talking about here. I am in good gold country swinging the most powerful prospecting detector currently available, a Minelab GPZ 7000. The country I am in has vastly more chances of my wandering over a shallow overlooked gold vein than Minnesota, where your chances are so close to zero as to be exactly that. Most of us are looking for gold nuggets because that is the best way to find gold with a metal detector, but the ground all of us swing over could also reveal shallow rich gold veins or pockets. They do get found from time to time, but they usually are the sort that give up a few ounces of gold as best. They are not some magic bonanza. I can recall one example in Austrlalia off hand where a vein found in Australia with a metal detector actually produced enough gold to make a difference in life. This is extreme long odds stuff. I do spend time, and in fact spent half the day yesterday on a walkabout looking for a new patch or a shallow gold vein. I do it all the time. I detect gold shed off of veins all the time. A gold vein in place is usually just a bunch of quartz with no gold to be seen, but if enough of the quartz decomposes over millennia a stray piece of gold is liberated now and then to create little residual deposits that can be worked with a detector. If you were with me right now I could drive you to and show you many in place gold veins. They are not the gold filled things I think you are imagining. They have gold measured in fractions of an ounce per ton. Rich gold veins the likes you seek exist mostly in the imagination. Again, your issue is not detectors of detecting methods, it is learning more about the nature and reality of gold veins and gold deposits in general. If you were just a casual person with some money to blow I would indeed say go for it. But the situation you have presented is different. You portray yourself as somebody with some serious issues that require some income. I would be doing you an extreme disservice in suggesting that chasing gold with a metal detector is a wise way to approach that issue. That is all I have to say on that subject. If you do just want to get into prospecting and metal detecting that is great, and we are here to help.

He was referring to the type face(font) in the original post, which was very hard to read. I have converted it to standard. I hate to dash dreams but I have done it a lot over the years. If you are looking to make some money, this is not the way to do it. At best, you are going to spend a lot of money getting an education. I can give you the same education for free. This is not something that thousands of people have not already tried. If dragging big coils around found gold veins than big mining companies would have crews out doing just that. Without getting into details the issue is simple. Detectors see the number of square inches or square feet of target as seen looking straight down. Here are the depths attainable with metal detectors on large items, whether a PI or specialized VLF. These are depths under perfect conditions in non-mineralized ground. Your problem is not the equipment, it is the nature and reality of how gold occurs in gold veins. It is normally near invisible to the naked eye. You would need masses of gold as large as the items in the chart to get similar depths. The sad reality is you are not going to be finding gold as large as one gallon cans and larger. Therefore, the depths that can be obtained on these large objects will not be attainable while looking for naturally occurring gold. Large drag coils are employed to look for single large gold nuggets and meteorites and could be employed in very specific area to possibly look for extremely rich gold veins at shallow depths. But it would have to be in the middle of world class gold country, like Australia or now Africa. And even then the odds of success are very slim. The TM 808 above is a VLF and as such cannot deal with high mineralization. The depths are likely to be half or less of those published in bad ground. Similar results can be had with a Minelab or other PI and very large coils in more mineralized ground. But the target size rule remains. Beware, you will find people willing to tell you otherwise if it involves parting you from your hard earned cash.

Sorry to hear no gold. The GPZ runs hot and that is all there is to it. In some places that works against it. The SDC on the other hand is running a version of the GPX Smooth class of timings and will ignore rocks the GPZ hits on. The GPX will handle almost anything. I sold my GPX but my Garrett ATX serves the same purpose for me. It will tune out basalt that even a GPX cannot handle.

Both are excellent choices for the Anchorage area. The Gold Bug 2 has a minuscule edge on the tiny gold but the GMT punches deeper on big stuff so a bit of a trade there. If you are staying close to Anchorage I might lean Gold Bug 2 but for nugget detecton all over Alaska I think the GMT is the better choice. Can't really go wrong with either. Unfortunately no training I am aware of in Alaska but good news is none really needed. Just get out and dig everything that beeps.good luck!

The Makro Racer has proven to be a sleeper of sorts with more and more people appreciating its ability to pull non-ferrous targets out of piles of ferrous stuff with a minimum of settings and at an affordable price. Keith Southern http://www.dankowskidetectors.com/discussions/read.php?2,91212 Monte Link deleted since Findmall Forum update broke all old links Gave up the DEUS and CTX for the Racer Link deleted since Findmall Forum update broke all old links Now the countdown begins until we see the Gold Racer announced. Only four months left in the year so no matter what it will not be much longer. And I am sure it will have been worth the wait.

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for the thanks! You are welcome. The Nokta FORS Gold and FORS CoRe along with the sister company Makro Racer are gaining a fan base of some pretty hard core users who are finding the machines work some magic at extracting non-ferrous targets from the middle of trash piles. Mainly they just get the job done with a minimum of settings at very attractive prices. I am proud I had a bit to do with helping this new (to people in the U.S.) company gain some recognition. They are not perfect but the company really is aggressively listening and responding to the users of their detectors. I think they are just getting started and so look forward to what they will bring to market in the new few years. I like their out-of-box thinking and outstanding price/performance ratio.

From http://www.trademarkia.com/xventure-86677796.html "On Monday, June 29, 2015, a U.S. federal trademark registration was filed for XVENTURE by White's Electronics, Inc., Sweet Home, OR 97386. The USPTO has given the XVENTURE trademark serial number of 86677796." A Russian site at http://md-arena.com/wiki/whites-xventure/ has very speculative information hinting at multi frequency, 11" DD coil, and 4 AA batteries. The fuzzed out picture is probably not the machine - I am guessing they just wanted a teaser so used a Teknetics G2 photo and blurred it. The whole specs thing could just be wild guesses so do not put much store in any if this except the trademark application, which usually means a new machine in the year following the application. Or no machine at all - not all trademarks get used.

The whole ICMJ website has been down all morning.

A quarter ounce in ten hours is nothing to sneeze at, I would be happy with that any time. My last thirty hours has netted me about 6 grams so I am still catching up to you

That is a link to the Lost Treasure website. What page did you find the original link on? I don't know why people keep moving pages around. It breaks links and is bad for Google ratings. Anyway, maybe this is it?

The pictures will disappear along with the ad so here are the photos.....

I totally agree Dave! Plus I want an audio alarm to go off at a preset time. I get so into my detecting I need the detector to tell me it is time to quit. Even if I wore a watch, which I do not, I have to remember to look at the time and by then it is too late.

The Minelab CTX 3030 has a clock on screen, and so I have puzzled over why it was removed from the GPZ 7000. I finally noticed the other day that the GPZ 7000 does have a built in clock but it is hidden. To get the time the GPS must be turned on, and it is off by default. Go to the Settings screen and activate the GPS. You also need to set the proper time zone in the Preferences/Time Zone screen. This does not adjust for daylight savings time so set accordingly. The easiest thing is just take your best guess then double check the time once you get this running and adjust if need be. OK, once you have a satellite fix you are good to go. I am always tracking myself anyway so my GPS is always on. Once set for on it stays on by default when you power the detector up unless you go back and shut it down. Now, push the red Store Button on the lower right control panel. This will bring up the Create Geostore page, and the Create Findpoint menu item will be highlighted by default. Select the Create Findpoint menu item and you will see this screen, and there is your current time! Normally at this point you would create a Findpoint by pushing the selection button again and adding the target (nugget) depth and weight. Instead, once you see the time, just push the Back Button on the lower left control panel, and get back to detecting. A Findpoint will not be created. In practice you push the Store button, then push the Enter (Checkmark) button, see the time, and then push the Back button. Done!

I am in full agreement Hard Prospector. There was a time when each leap in technology really did make a difference, but all along the resource has been depleting. For various reasons adding a couple more inches just is not going to do it anymore. As you note, the SDC and GPZ are specifically designed to go after gold missed by the previous Minelab models but basically all it is are leftovers. The constantly increasing gold price also masked depleting returns by making it possible to get as much cash for lower weight returns. But now with less gold and lower prices it is starting to catch up. The guys to get hit first will be those who truly are in it to make a buck. I like to say I do it because I love it but I could also be looking for quartz crystals or other fun to find stuff. Fun is fun but the fact that gold does have value does make a difference. Even those not really finding anything like to think maybe, just maybe one big nugget could really make a serious payday happen. As chances for a monetary return become low to nothing there will be fewer and fewer people sticking with the detecting for gold gig.