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I have found no difference in settings running the 10 inch coil

You go, Simon!! Now you are going to need a new pair of boots... probably a new water pack as well. And with all that digging you're going to be doing you may need a new pick. Oh wait, you're broke now because you just got your first GPZ, yet alone the golden Xcoils. LOL. Maybe JW will let you borrow his bike.

Yep. And that gives you confidence that you can find more …. zilch days.. ha ha. But yeah, nothing beats "your" patch, your secret. Keeping one nugget location a secret is easy, but a patch …. you just want to tell the world how awesome you were to find that patch that at least 50+ prospectors (minimum) walked by.

Nope. My donor coil was garbage. My two key pieces of advise if you are doing this yourself is, ohm it out often and be sure to get that strain relief clamp on there good.

Good video with valid example to the question at hand. I am always interested in other people's techniques. I myself, will never pass a dry washer pile or other small tailing piles. The larger ones I have passed on many occasions in part due to my lack of knowledge of how it was put there and whether I am actually detecting an ore pile or a garbage pile. But then I guess you rarely know for sure.

I do something similar when in really trashy areas. Instead of flags, I use the orange caps from Gatorade bottles to mark what I find with the GPZ and follow up with the GM1000. They are plastic and you can see them fairly well. If you are night hunting I will use glow sticks from the dollar store. In the really trashy areas you will swear you are walking on a hill with glow worms.

Lot's of the books record the areas of high productivity and low productivity finds. The low productivity finds were often forgotten or are not as widely explored anymore by the general public. Also, just because there is a known gold area, it does not mean that everybody and their grandmother has covered every square inch. Many many of my finds are in known gold areas, just not in the heart of the main work. Many time there are no "signs of life" anywhere near where I am finding gold. Maybe they are not noticeable or they just weren't worth the old timer's efforts. But staying on the claims can be really tough. I really don't know if you will get skunked more by going off the claims or not, but I can tell you that your chances of the big finds tend to increase 10 fold when you go off on your own and explore. And when you find a couple gullies that nobody else found (because they were afraid to explore) you will more than pay off all of those skunks. Well, hopefully :)

And if the smaller gravel piles have a lot of iron in them, use a rake with strong magnets on the teeth. This will help you spend less time digging trash.

I would be happy if NF makes a small coil, too. This would likely bring down the cost of the Russion 10". If not, then I have to agree with others, it is likely not worth the smaller coil option. I have loved having the small 10"coil, but still have not found enough tiny bits to pay for it. (especially since the 14" coil will get down to a grain and sometimes smaller if making contact with the coil) The only way I would probably buy yet another small coil is if I had a Sadie 8x6 size coil. To me, that is the perfect size, but likely not manufacturable for the GPZ.

Agreed, Rob. On my GPZ, I have to fight the tendency to ignore screaming Low/Hi signals that are typically iron..... until they are not. Similarly so with those signals you think have to just be ground noise, until you keep kicking away the dirt, only to find that the noise eventually gets louder and turns out to be gold.

Sorry Lunk, only emails I get lately are those from Russian women who want my body. Darn gold diggers.

Nah, you've just grown smarter, Norvic. I carry a small 9mm (that doesn't bother the GPZ) in case I run across people who shoot first. But if someone asked me to leave, I would avoid the trouble, as well (keeping my gun hidden) There are still plenty of other places to search.

I usually don't get harassed until I get home.. On those rough days when you're prospecting new areas and come up with nothing to show for the long hours and wasted gas. I'll unload the truck, putting everything neatly into my messy gold equipment corner, and go to the refrigerator for a cold one. "So did you find anything?", comes an echo from our living room couch. "Not today, but it was gorgeous out", I say trying to sound positive. "Sounds like you're a LOOOOSER, today." My wife and daughter bust out laughing, and of course I bust out too because you just have to laugh about what we go through for gold. Anyways …. probably not the point of the thread, but I thought I would lighten it up. 🙂

Great topic. If I am in an area where gold has been found before (within 1/4 mile) and there are my typical indicators, I will go as Lunk describes. I will pretend my shoe laces are tied together and pretend I am a master painter covering 90% of that wash. The more indicators I see and the more my intuition sets in, the slower I go. But this is only for washes. If I am scanning hillsides (not knowing if there is a gold in the washes below) I will go much faster. I will not walk along the hillsides, however, without my coil to the ground. I have stumbled on great gold with this small rule ...hillsides you would swear on your relatives grave there could not be gold there. But there was. 😬 I started learning gold hunting on claims and for that, I did the slow hunting everywhere. And that taught me the style of gold hunting that gets the bits others miss in their rush. I believe this is really important to learn starting out. But as I began hunting with others, there was a distinct advantage to really covering ground and covering only half of a prospective gold wash. So many more gold areas can be found this way. But I think you need to be able to go back and clean out those washes the slow way, once they are identified. Some people can flip that switch and in my opinion, they are the most successful. So I see it as you need to be good at both methods and even better at deciding when to apply these methods.

I know a person who bought both of those detectors. He favors the GPX for gold hunting and found the ATX to be a little too bump sensitive. But that is all second hand info. I wish I could give you better.

I have no idea. LOL But I usually have about 6 large images kept on my GPS, before I start recycling them. For me, the only thing I notice it affecting is my device startup time. It takes about 20 seconds for all my maps to load.

I will not go out without my Garmin Montana. It is higher priced but has paid for itself time and again. I wanted a large screen and the ability to overlay maps and geology. I manually would overlay google earth areas for about a year before I tried Birdseye. It was so worth the money as overlays get you close but are rarely perfect and it's very tedious. The only other type I wished I had were the Rhino? so I could find out where my partner is so I can locate him when I find a good gold wash.

Interesting concept. I do like it better, so long as you are not balancing out that connector, making it less sensitive to gold. I like metal as far away from the coil as possible.

Nice haul, Chet! I have to agree that the 10" round cannot be justified financially, but it sure is good for putting the tiny ones in your pocket when you're a little low on the gold. I found both of my 10" coils to be very sensitive. My latest one is REAL bump sensitive and gives the same noise like when lightning strikes, whenever I bump a rock. This was found on the same ground that I ran my first 10" coil on. My first coil was smooth and silent without any bump sensitivity. But that is just how it rolls with coils sometimes. Frustrating but you deal with. The manufacturer already corrected the stretched coil issue and I will just be content with that and ensuring I do not bump rocks. As long as I can find gold with it, I will use it. Either way, I am happy for another coil choice.

yes. I still love the 10" coil. It is sort of my skunk buster. Before, after a few skunks, I would go back and remove some dirt and then run the GM1000 to clean up bits. But I found that unless it is on bedrock, the 10" Xcoil gets me more tiny gold without having to remove as much overburden. Actually, I call it my SDC coil as it is the closest thing I have to it.

If they didn't take your books, they must not be prospectors. It sounds like now you're making good use of your gold investigation and applying it to criminal investigation. More power to you! I really hope you find them. Sorry to hear you had to go through this. Glad they didn't get your GPZ stuff, at least.

Alright, Condor! I'm glad to hear you got your machine back. Let's get us some more Xcoils in Arizona.. LOL. Unfortunately, I won't be getting a 17" until I get enough to pay off my 10" xcoil. :p

Nice work. Some of my biggest gold could have been found with a detector from Radio Shack. Location is everything.

Those are the days that make all of the others really worth it. Very nice work. I am happy for you. Hard work definitely does pay off.

Yes, this is a very handy website. But as you have found, you still need to go through google earth and review different time frames. And even then, you never know how much the bushes or roads have changed from the past satellite pics.