Andyy

Well, I'm not sure if I'm going to make it or not.  Probably only there for a day, if I do.  Hope to see you there.  We'll have to see if ML says anything different.

Just thought... it would be interesting if the technology ever came about where you could run one detector as either a VLF or a PI (orZVT).  What machines would you combine?

I would go GPZ and Equinox

Cool.  I like seeing how others do it.  I usually make small vials with the lid drilled out to accept a knotted string.  If not going deep, then I can pull it up to different string lengths.  But this gets really hard after 6 inches.  That's why I have gone in your direction, at times, by using a vertical pvc pipe that I can raise the gold vial out on a string.  But yes, a 30/60/90 or a 3/4/5 triangle would let you make a simple chart for this and you would have more ground above the gold (to improve accuracy). 

Andyy

They lied to us the first time ML showed up to the outing.  I'd be surprised if it were any different this year.

By the way, are you making it up for the outing?

At my workplace, one of our shipping women mistakenly got her thumb into HF.  It only looks like water.  She had to have her nail pulled off and get a shot into the bone to preserve it.  Let's  just say it wasn't her most pleasant work day... but she survived.

Be careful ! !

14 hours ago, phrunt said:

If you read the story on it they get the detectors on a loan type plan that they pay off over time 😞 poor buggers

The corporation will supply the detectors to the youth with affordable service payments to create employment.

https://www.ena.et/en/?p=9037

Imagine being an Ethiopian youth paying off a $12,000 USD loan for their GPZ detector in gold finds.

 

Hey Phrunt, maybe you can get on this plan so you can get yourself a ZED.  But for them, I still think they'd be better off using the machine to club an animal.  Anything they find is going to need to be spent on essentials, not on paying of a loan. 

And that comment on a meter deeper, just did not make sense to me.  Personally, there is nothing worse than digging down 2 feet, and then busting up another 1 foot of caliche, just to get to a can that was buried by a bulldozer, long ago.  And don't get me started an freak'n nails!

Well then again, who am I kidding.  I'd probably strap a small VW to my back if I thought it would get me on more gold.  Scratch that last paragraph. 

7 hours ago, jasong said:

So, clearly there are differences between the two rings. Thought people might like to know even if you are just using the stock coil, as I'm not sure how this affects the ground balance, but someone could be running suboptimally using this ring.

Jason - I was just curious if the Xcoil did ok balancing on the new ML ferrite ring you just got?  Mine has worked in probably 3 out of 4 locations. 

oops - I just saw Simon beat me to the question.

6 hours ago, phrunt said:

Out of interest can you bang up a photo at some point Andy?

 

Sorry, I've been out curing world hunger, helping little old ladies cross the street, and night hunting for some gold.  I think my season is on hold now for a while as the monsoons have really brought in the mosquitos.  It's just too miserable to keep your head clear and listen for feint signals. 

Below are a couple shots of the new coil.  I'm not sure it could be seen in Jason's so I wanted to focus in on the coil clamp.  You will also notice my patch cord is a bit bent, which happens when the old coil comes unraveled and doesn't allow you to collapse the unit very far.  Thankfully, my patch cord uses Unobtanium (small upgrade), so it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Just to close this out, I did get the replacement 10" coil, as well.  Improvements have been made so that it fits very nicely into the shaft and includes clamps on the end (like Minelab) that prevent the unraveling.  I think this new version will do quite nicely.

The GM1000 is pretty awesome on the small stuff, as you have seen.  I put a telescopic rod on mine and threw away the 3 pole design.  Now I run the GPZ with the GM1000 folded up on my back.  The GM is my cleanup after the GPZ finds an area. 

Most of the gold you found is 10x bigger than what I find with the GM.  Its primary limitation is depth.  But otherwise it is a bedrock beast.

I have been out ini light rain and not had any problem.  I don't know of any coils out there that are not water resistant to rain.  Plus the Xcoils are taped around the sides.  It all comes down to sealing on the top connection points.  If you are concerned, clean it off and bead silicone around these areas.

My concern would be more with saturation ground signals near the surface.  But then again, I didn't run into this in my areas even with a light rain in one area.

My guess is you will be fine.

9 hours ago, Jin said:

I often see others using a high sensitivity setting of 16 - 20 on the 7000. Is there really much of an advantage doing this? I used to think maxing out my 4500 gave me some kind of advantage over the poor suckers who ran factory presets or slightly higher, now im not so convinced.  

Jin - this is definitely a personal preference, but I will tell you two stories that line up with yours.

When I first got my GPZ I was hearing about the high sensitivity settings.  Fortunately, I had just found a new area where the gold had collected  in the washes.  The area was found with the GPX5K and I could only run it in Fine because of the ground noise.  So I ran the GPZ down my two best washes with high sensitivity to see what I missed.  I found nothing.  Then I lowered the sensitivity to 3 or 4 (to make it quiet).  This was done because I had heard from other detectorists (Bill Southern) and (Rob Allison) that you can hear more at low sensitivities.  Bill rarely ever ran even at 5.   I went back up those same two washes.  One of them had nothing.  The other had four more pieces (all over a gram).  One hole was a two-fer.  The hole with the two, was 14" deep.  They were nice clear but soft signals.  Mind you that when I already know there is gold in washes, I go very slow and overlap extra.   So this opened my eyes to the lower sensitivities.

I go out hunting with multiple people because I think it is good to share what you know and you learn many techniques of others as well.  So my one hunting buddy ran high settings in the range 15 to 19 on sensitivity.  We were at a hillside patch he had cleaned out most of the big ones and were having fun picking up dinks (.1 to .2g).  He asked my settings and told him my beliefs on sensitivity.  He ended up switching to my low sensitivity settings, permanently, when he found areas hit before were turning into new patches.

Personally, I believe that with really mineralized ground, high sensitivity will raise the ground noise so that you will miss deep 1 gram nuggets.  But, I have also found that raising the Volume and going high sensitivity, can raise the dink signals in quiet ground so they really pop (similar to Lunk's settings).

In the end, you just have to do what you are comfortable with.  Best thing to do when you find a good patch area is to play with your settings before you dig.  This is really the gold in patch finding,   It's not like you can really do this when you are digging trash after trash.   But it is SO HARD not to just dig all the gold up right away.  Experiment with those settings and you will find even more gold!

My .02

Andyy

1 hour ago, jasong said:

Andy, do you mean the ground itself wouldn't balance on the X Coil, or just the ferrite wouldn't balance on that ground?

My limited experience is that if the ferrite is way out then your GB will stay out. (as in saturated ground)  But if you set the ferrite with the 14 coil first, GB is not a problem.

That said, even with the 14 coil, I am not always able to silence it on the ferrite.  This was the case when I wanted to compare to average sdc depths recently.  The ferrite was a little extra noisy for both coils but both still GB no problem.

When I had gone to my second test location, I am pretty sure I heard the issue before I even hit the QT button.  The ground was walking distance away but changed drastically in saturation noise, apparently.  It was really strange that it did not clear just running normal GB.  But when I switched back to the 14 coil and did a QT, everything was quiet.  Put back on the 10" coil, and it was still quiet.  

So far I have only seen the ferrite issue in one area.  If I run into other areas, I will just set the ferrite with the 14" and then switch over.  I don't see it happening that often.  I was just lucky enough to run across it my first day of testing.  It is good that I did because it brought up that there is still work to be done, but also that there is a workaround for those who do not want to wait.

I don't really see hiking far out into the field with the 10" coil (patch hunting).  I typically start with bigger coils to cover more area, anyways.  Only when I know there is a good area, the 10" coil could be used as my cleanup coil or in those rocky stream beds.  Before, I would do cleanups with my GM1000, which I will sometimes throw onto my pack.   It is reeeally good for getting the small pieces of told that the 14" coil misses.  My guess is that the 10" coil will keep me from losing as many of these small pieces.

One tip (probably common knowledge to some) is before you throw the dirt back into your hole, spread it out flat a little bit so you get good contact with the bottom of the coil.  Recheck this dirt well, not just the hole.  You will be surprised how much gold you catch and release.

2 hours ago, jasong said:

I invented something when I worked in the oilfield but I lacked the money to build it. The company I worked for flew me to Houston HQ where I was able to meet with their team of physicists and engineers in the R&D dept. There was a "Bruce Candy" of this particular company who listened to my idea and took me to lunch. The minute he sat down he told me he didn't hear anything I said, we never talked about the idea, and I should fly back home early and forget about it until I quit the company and pursue it on my own. Otherwise he'd be forced to patent it.

Why? Because he said their job isn't to build things, it's to patent things so the competition can't build it. It's cheaper to do that and force customers to pay top dollar for old tools then to constantly create new ones which still only get the same day rate, and guess which business model the shareholders prefer?

That cracks me up, Jason.  But it is true many times.  For a while I took a job at my company as a mechanical engineer in our legal department.  My sole job was to expand on existing patents and the competition's patents because millions can be lost just on intellectual property.  Now, I don't think every engineer's job is to just patent things.  This was a poorly made statement.  A good engineer does both. 

But moving on, the engineer has very little say on the direction a company goes towards. As others have mentioned, marketing tends to be the ruler in this arena.

Very interesting, Chet.  If anyone would have thought of that, it had to be you.  

Now if you could find a permanent method to keep the coil from unwinding and stretching things would be groovy.

2 hours ago, jasong said:

I'm going to take a random guess and say this problem might be worse for us here. You in 105 degree heat at night. Me in 95 degree heat in the full sun, the machine gets quite hot to the touch, at least 120 degrees. The Aussies are in winter right now right?

Yep, I sweat my butt off last night taking measurements.  It was still 100 degrees or near.

So if I try the heat method, will it stay or just unravel later on?

Well, the good news is I was happy with the results, today.  Bad news is my coil will not assemble anymore.  Stay tuned.  I'll have to see if Jason found a fix for this …

UPDATE: (SDC small gold comparison)

Ok, I didn't want to start yet another Xcoil thread so I am just adding to this one.

Be forewarned, if you are only a big game gold hunter, finding grams and ounces at a time, and then throwing the little guys over your shoulder in disgust, you will not be interested in this report.  This is mainly for those of us who creep in the shadows picking up little bits here and there, to keep down the gold fever.  A little piece of gold Xanax if you will.  We call it crumbing here in the states. It is a highly technical term I prefer not to waste time reviewing.   It is just big enough for us to take a picture with our smart phones and blow it up big enough to look awesome on our screen savers.  (blown up 100x)

So the bad news is I was not able to do a direct comparison with the SDC, but I was able to get some input on average gold depths for small gold.  Then I took those numbers and went to the gold fields for some testing.  Results were interesting and a little surprising.   But let me preface my data table as, this data was taken at my conditions, my settings.  Some will get better depth and some will get worse.  So don't flame me for just sharing data I found.  It is just so people have a very rough idea of where the 10" Xcoil might relate to the SDC 2300.

Settings were what I use for small gold.  Sens=8,Vol=13,Thresh=27, High Smoothing, Manual Ground Balance (after setting to ferrite)  Similar to Lunk's Settings discussed a while back.

As you can see, I picked four very small nuggets.  Since the SDC is known for the .1 gram range, I focused on this and smaller.  The SDC averages are just that, averages.  They are approximations.   But they are from a very experienced operator that I respect, so I do assume they are good for a rough estimate.

I will let you make your own judgements but I will say a couple things.  Firstly, I was a little surprised the 14" coil was decently close to the SDC.  The 14" coil size is definitely all that is holding it back.  Secondly, as I had expected previously, I usually got an extra 1.5" or more on some of my nuggets by using the 10" coil.  This explains why I was able to go back to my first patch (previously discussed) that was gridded and easily pick up more in the .1 gram range.  There does seem to be an advantage in the smaller flakes.  I was also very surprised that the 10" coil could get a piece nearly a half grain at almost 2 inches.  Typically, I would have to be nearly on it.

So based on these rough and I stress the words "rough" estimation, the 10" Xcoil may be a good substitute for those not wanting to pay for an SDC and willing to take on a science project.  This was my original reason for getting it, to compare to the SDC.  I will be curious to see what others find when doing direct comparisons.

Also, If I am to extrapolate data, I would predict that the two coils (14" and 10") even out at about the .5gram size for depth and then as the gold gets bigger, the 14x13 will likely rule this camp altogether. 

Again, this is nothing definite, but even if my data is half accurate, it does show that the 10" Xcoil puts us very close to what the SDC can do.  And that is a good thing to know.

36 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

This used to be the conventional wisdom.  The Minelab Equinox  800 (and maybe even the Makro Gold Racer and its offspring) has changed that.

Maybe.  I know Simon (Phrunt) has done well with his.  You might want to ask his opinion.  My thing is that most gold is in areas with high mineralization that is really rough on VLF machines.  (remember, Simon is in the easiest ground possible)  If you are in high mineralization areas, I would suggest pulse induction machines or similar.  Personally, I wish I started with the SDC2300 and worked my way up from there.   Yes it is more expensive, but waiting and studying and saving more money, may be the way to go.  Either way, see if you can buy used.

Everyone has an opinion and really I don't think anybody is wrong.  It is what works for their ground, with their knowledge.  Good luck!

Well I am assuming people know what I mean by tuned, but maybe not.   I mean the electronics are designed and set to detect gold (not relics).  Or maybe a clearer statement would be that if you are looking nuggets, don't get a relic hunting detector and try to use it to do both.  You can and people do, I just don't recommend it.  Just a personal opinion I have.

I don't think Stephen clarified, yet, what he was actually hunting for ... nuggets or rings ...etc.

I would say you need to be more gold specific.  Are you looking for gold jewelry or gold nuggets?  If going for nuggets, while there are detectors that do both, I would stick with a detector that is tuned to JUST look for nuggets.

16 hours ago, Chet said:

The lowering the X-Coil transmit coil approximately 2cm/0.75” creates an exponentially greater target signal return to the receiver coils. 

DOD receiver coils are wired in series (voltage adding) so that with a large target the returned signals are combined effectively into one centered search lobe similar to a Mono coil.

A very small shallow/weak target normally does not return enough signal strength to both receive coils to be formed into a Mono like search lobe. Thus they are predominantly detected in the more sensitive areas near the windings. 

The lowering of the X-Coil transmit coil approximately 2cm/0.75” creates exponentially greater signal strength from a small target.  This can produce enough signal from some small targets into both receive coils to provide a Mono coil like search lobe. This will be most evident with smaller coils that concentrate the transmit energy into a smaller area.

So the lower transmit coil hurts us in some cases where the ground is saturated with surface ground signal but helps us on ground that is not saturated.  Interesting.

21 hours ago, mn90403 said:

So, do you think I should get an Xcoil?

Maybe then I would have found some gold in Australia?

I have to agree with Paul.  You just have to be over the gold.  I think the 10" is good for those real tight creek beds you cannot fit the 14" coil in and for dink patches where you know everything left is 0.2g and less.  The 10" Xcoils make these scream out at you.  So I can go back to these places after I have been skunked a few times and gain back a little confidence with some dinks.  Depending on the gold's orientation, sometimes these are hard to get out of the scoop using the 14" coil.  (sometimes I use the GM1000 as a pinpointer for those)

To me, getting an Xcoil that is bigger than the 14" isn't going to help me much because I already have access to a 19".  And when I am in multinugget washes, I move dirt.  So it really doesn't matter if I had another bigger coil for the area. 

But heck, that is how I rationalize it.

Thanks for clarifying, Jason.  In the future I will have to pay more attention to the sound pattern.  But what you are saying makes sense now. If the signal is wider, you would be able to detect more nuggets up on the edge of the coil deeper.  This could lead to an advantage if this is the case.