Frozen_daze

So.. after a few months of learning/practicing the gold monster, thousands of targets, a pack of wolves, a beast of a grizzly bear, a broken pan and close to selling all my prospecting equipment and just being happy I'd had the chance to ever find a flake of gold...

 Dig everything!

(pardon the black and white I'm saving a few photos for another article about how the monster paid itself off, and made the dream of owning the GPZ7000 a reality!)

Thank you all so much for the precious info this site has provided.

Thanks guys! 

So far I'm up to a pound of lead in sinkers, bullets and birdshot, a few lures/flys and found a decent size rock that the gm1000 screamed non-ferrous on, so I brought it home, busted it open and found a shiny silver layer in it. first thought was pyrite, but had read in here that its unlikely to detect. Then off to get X-Rays and turned out being 98% iron?

 I'm guessing its a common type of hot rock here, but the area I found it is normally under about 10ft of water so I won't have to worry about it until next spring since the water was only down for a few days.

I did however finally take a quick drive to see how the snow looks out in the northern goldfields. It's melting way too fast but is still a few feet. I found my way to a spot I panned a few times but was really hit or miss and requires hauling pay about 500yds to the creek. In less than 20 minutes I scored my largest flake yet and first with a detector. weighing in at 3.15g and my runner up was .49g. Not another piece to be found after about 3hours of omg I found a nugget and not being patient while swinging.. Looks like the Gold monster has struck GOLD in Alaska! 

 Hi all, 

My name is Joseph and am a lifelong resident here in Fairbanks, Alaska.

After about 8 years of searching for gold with a pan, homemade sluice and 2" suction dredge, I'd decided to take a leap (after reading a few spectacular in-depth reviews here) on purchasing Minelab's Gold Monster 1000 at the beginning of April. I have a older Bounty Hunter tr/bfr detector and a older Fisher 1212x I'd found at a pawn shop although I learned they are both ok for finding decent size metals like keys/coins and hot rocks on the surface and the Bounty Hunter has helped me find black sands a few times, but not so good on the small sub-gram gold I normally find.

The snow is still on the ground here, maybe 1ft in my yard and still around 7 feet in the area I like to spend the summertime prospecting.

 This past week I'd taken a short drive to one of the local fishing lakes to see if I could find some ground to get a little practice in and luck was in my favor. 

 Not being to familiar with detecting non-ferrous metals, I thought it would be a good idea to chase after some of the tin foil and lead sinkers that had been scattered all over the beach from years of people that like to hang out there.

With the large coil on, I'd held the machine off the ground to power on, let it complete the air test and started out in "All Metal Mode" at "auto plus one" sensitivity and was about 30 seconds before I'd heard the first loud beep with the meter slamming to the right, it took a few moments to find out it was the first small split shot lead sinker! So on to the next few targets I'd noticed plenty of beeps with the meter going the other direction (ferrous) I'd dug them anyway to make sure and turned out being single fish hooks. What got really annoying was how overly sensitive the GM1000 is on tiny pieces of foil and I mean tiny! It screamed like it was a large target until I turned the sensitivity to manual to the 6th bar which calmed things down and helped me focus on some actual large targets. 

After about an hour went by I had 14 lead sinkers, 5 hooks and a few pennies, I just had to check out the 5" coil. 

Round 2: I'd returned to full auto plus one sensitivity and found what cherry picking really was by simply lifting the coil up just a little to see if I could make any difference in the sound getting lighter response from the smaller targets and seemed to do the trick of avoiding some (not all) of the tiny foil pieces and continued to score some good size lead, a few dimes, nickels and then my first silver which looked to be a part of a bracelet or?? Didn't matter so much as it made my day!

I was happy to then try out the "gold mode" for a while as I felt really comfortable with the full auto/all metal settings. I did not like the beep..beep sound it made while ignoring the ferrous targets after hearing a more wha-zip sound I had gotten used to and doubt I'll ever use it in that environment again. (maybe in the hills?) Although the meter seemed to be spot on still.

So back to it, I got to dig a few more hooks, sinkers, 2 fly's, more coins, a broken cheap ring, some tiny shotgun pellets, a few bullets, a pellet gun pellet and then the magic happened,  a beep like I hadn't heard yet...

My first gold with the GM1000, first with a metal detector and first gold of the year was a 1" tall pendant (brass plate) with gold flakes and is my first Initial! A true blessing  as the silver was a great find for me, it still blows my mind and if I never find another flake with this machine, I couldn't be happier with how my first experience went!

Thank you to all who have posted about this detector and other forms of prospecting knowledge, I hope I can do the same as I get more familiar with the gm1000 and will do my best to help contribute to any info I may provide in the future! 

                                                                                     Joseph