rumblefish

Take a long stick/pole with you for poking into the ground that you can't see. Getting stuck in a pool on your own is not funny. Try to walk on rocks wherever possible. And always be sure someone knows where you are heading if you go out alone. For moving your gear you could maybe buy an inflatable dinghy (in the same vein as Ridge Runner's paddling pool suggestion). The rubber ring around the waist is not a bad idea also, if the pools are really treacherous.

In europe at least, it's the school holidays, so probably a lot of people with families are away. I've been using the hot weather to get further into river courses that are usually underwater, It's amazing how the water level in a river changes throught the year if you follow it. There's a weir that I need to snipe once I get my drysuit sorted, and usually in autumn or spring it's quite dangerous because the flow of water down the gradient and across the boulders is very fast, but right now I can walk across the top of it with no worries. The big problem right now is all the bugs!

NIce samples. Try putting the gemstones in water, the colours will really come out. Glad you are feeling better, Paul!

So would this make a 2-coil GPX 4500 + SDC 2300 a better investment than a GPZ 7000?

Is that the new Minelab W00F? I want one!

Everyone knows you have a heart of gold. Just make sure they don't pinch any of it whilst you're knocked out! Take care, Paul!

Scars are the stories that life writes on us. Now your zed has a tale of its own, you wont be so scared to swing it. Same happens with the first ding on a car. Now go find a huge nugget!

Rivers are tricky. You have to know the areas well because you need to recognise the different levels to which the water rises and falls over the years. But most important of all, you need to know that the river actually has gold in it in the first place. As far as where to search, you basically have two options. One is to target very specific parts of the river, as if you were sniping with a drysuit on. Target bedrock areas where the flow of the river drops significantly (sharp inside bends, gravel banks), or obstructions in the river that could trap gold (fallen trees, large boulders) and see if you can detect anything there. But since lead shot has a similar mass to gold you might find trash like fishing weights in those places where you'd also expect gold to have lodged. It goes without saying that you need a waterproof metal detector here and a good pair of waders. The other is to detect in the flood plain areas. The areas of the river where the water flows during a flood. These are the times when the heavier gold gets moved and may be left in terraces high above the present level of the water or in areas away from the main course. You need to look for large, smooth rocks and boulders deposited by the river when the floods force the water to break outside it's regular course. Detecting these areas is drier and safer, but you may need to shift some of the bigger rocks to allow the detector to search deep enough.

Oh, so very sorry to hear about your dog. Always a terrible time when a loved pet and friend has to leave us. Remember the good times and adventures you shared. I'm sure she will be missed. Good luck too you and your family rich ps That's not my dog in the avatar. I help with a rescue organization here in Spain. We save thousands of greyhounds that are abused after the hare coursing seasons. It's terrible the way they are treated. Can't understand the kind of people who would hang a dog up by its neck until it dies. Something very wrong inside them.

Until she sneaks up behind you with a shovel whilst you're digging out a nugget!

Hmmm... is there a book depository on the other side of that grassy knoll? You might want to keep quiet about any slugs you find there...

Agree with what most of you are saying about the SDC. It's very sensitive, even without the sensitivity notched up. I haven't found any gold with my detector yet, but it has picked up very small pieces of lead shot and fish hooks with no problems at all down to about 3". The thing that really sets it off however is metal foil or any large piece of metal such as a nail or a length of wire. I've no doubts at all that if you run it over the right patch it will sniff out that gold like a bloodhound!

Wow that's a nice nugget Ray. Far from average!

Awesome AjR! Don't want to think how cold that water was. Cool dogs too! It's getting hot here in Spain now. I have the opposite problem, I always manage to dig a spot just where the sun is going to roast me all day and I end up toasted and red all down the one side! Keep up the adventures! rich

Very interesting advance.

Wow! A golden cat and a golden nugget. You even found a tin of old flakes (the typography on that tin is beautiful by the way). Thanks for sharing that story! Have to get out with my SDC again soon, but I'm still trying to find the right area to detect in. On Friday I rode three and a half hours up the mountain roads to Andorra on the bike, then five hours digging holes in the sun and three and a half back to ride home. I was exhausted at the end of it, but the scenery right up in the Pyrenees is beautiful. There are a few brown bears up that way, but they are quite rare now. Did see a couple of otters in the river though.

Cool. Nice little nugget shooter. I'd be very interested to see what you guys at Nokta/Macro could come up with for a new folding detector with the ability to change coils. Something as compact as an SDC 2300, but with replaceable coils and a cheaper price tag.

Maye you could use laminates of carbon fibre. It is extremely tough and light, but I'm not sure how much it costs or whether it would affect the coil operation.

Gold from sh*t. I kid you not.

What setting did you have it on this time, AjR?

Hi All, I've been working on something over the last few weeks that may be of interest. My hearing is ok, but not great. So I got to wondering if there was a way to turn the audio signal of the SDC 2300 into a visual signal that I could see on my phone instead. After a bit of playing around I managed to rig up something. It's still very green and I am not sure if everything is working 100% as it should, but I will post below some screen grabs of the first test I did today with a small picker. I placed the gold on the ground and ran the coil over it at a height of about 6cm (3"). I didn't have time to put it in the ground. I'll try that next. There are three images: 1. The baseline signal of the detector (no gold nearby) 2. The signal when the coil has passed over the gold and back a few times. 3. The signal just as the coil is passing over the gold. 1. BASELINE (NO GOLD) Watch the small peak at 800Hz 2. SIGNAL AFTER THREE PASSES OVER GOLD See the ghosted hump above the baseline peak. That area is where the signal jumps to. 3. SIGNAL AS COIL PASSES OVER GOLD You can see how the baseline peak grows in height (audio strength) and pitch (shift to higher frequency to the right) as the coil passes over the gold. I would like to be able to expand the area where the action is happening to make it more visible, and I would like to try and see what happens with other targets such as iron, lead, aluminium, copper, even a magnet rock like magnetite. If I had a garden it would be a lot easier, but I have to travel quite far to be able to get to a place where people don't bug me when i have a detector in my hand! This was an SDC 2300 with an iPhone, but in principle the system should work for any detector and any smartphone. Richard ps I hope the images post ok, never uploaded any before...

I was out with mine to day doing an experiment. I'll post later once I have the images in. AjR, you might want to go back over some of those spots with your sensitivity up. On 2, my SDC wouldn't pick up the very tiny gold I was testing at 5cm (2-3") in the ground but when it was up to 4 or 5 it would pick it up. Same for some slightly larger pickers that were deeper down at 10 cm (5-6") deep. I needed to be on 4 or 5 to hit them, But these are very small pieces of gold I'm talking about. The largest picker was about the size of a small pea, the small one about a quarter of that.

Well done! The SDC 2300 is a great little ("little" being the key word) detector. I'll be very interested to see how it performs for you underwater (I mean really underwater). I'm a diver too and have been tossing up whether to dive some of the deeper parts of the rivers where i usually run a sluice. It's just going to be a royal pain getng the airtanks out there in the middle of nowhere.

I have an SDC 2300. It is my first detector. I bought it because it is really easy to fold-up/carry and because it is waterproof. Apart from the physical functionality it is also really sensitive. I've found tiny shot pellets a few inches down that screamed at me. An old rusty iron spike half buried in the ground nearly blew my ears off. It is expensive, but if the GPZ is a big success you wlll see more and more SDCs coming on to the second hand market. For me it was a toss up between the ATX and the SDC. I went with the SDC because it was physically smaller, lighter and better on smaller gold. The ATX is a great all round machine and possibly more flexible in the long term. It's also cheaper. I don't know about VLF machines, but if the Gold Bug 2/Pro folded up small I'd get one tomorrow. Just ask away. All the folks here give great advice and don't bite.

Hopefully you be able to tell the story whilst showing them the first nugget you ever found with your MXT. The first one stays with you. Good luck out there, Professor. Good on you, Paul.