Horst

many thanks for your very helpful replies. Yes, I am hunting on some iron contaminated ground as it seems that the german farmers burried all trash in their fields.......makes good sense that the machine tries to track into the trash

I would love to participate a forum outing. I'll be in CA in Sep 2019. Attached a picture of my AZ finds. The burro shoe and the grandsons of the original owner...for me the best thing in prospecting is camping in a tent, Joe's special coffee with that little "extra" in the morning and spending time with friends and making new friends. If I found a nice nugget in AZ but did not have such a good time the nugget could not make up for that. Julie, if the good lord grants us more years to be on this beautiful earth and if we both put our time in we both will find gold.

Dear fellow hunters, I am running my new Nox 800 for about 2 months now. Trying to go out nearly every day for 2-4 hours. I did find some nice coins and other cool stuff and some not so cool stuff. Learning the detector is fun. I found a several times when being in AUTO ground tracking the machine got a little loud/unstable. When I looked up the ground tracking it was telling me a number in the 90ies. Switching off AUTO and do manual tracking (pumping the coil) the machine went quiet at 12. I was expecting the AUTO ground tracking to be "up to date". Did you make similar experiences?

wow I'm speechless....to find such a nugget will probably cause me a heart attack or two. But that's when I grow up (I'm just about 55 years old). First I'm wishing for a 1 gram or 1/2 gram......IF you find a nugget that big it would be nice not having the need to sell it. At least I would have a 3D cast made of it.

Dear Julie, I feel exactly the same way. As I live in Germany I don't have many opportunities to detect for nuggets. Last year in March my friend Joe and I detected several LDMA claims at Stanton,AZ. What a breathtaking area. I found lead to cast new bullets, Casings to load them up, sheet metal to put a roof on my house and wire to have it fenced in.... but no gold. Even found a burro shoe way over 100 years old. That was using my SDC2300. Both of us were using the SDC2300 and did not find gold. If you don't swing your coil over gold you're not gonna find any. Just put your time in (I will do too as I'm going back to CA in Sep2019) and the busy will be rewarded one day.....hopefully :-) Try to check spots which are not comfortable at all. Thorns, thick bushes, hard to get to places, cracks in bedrock. For a little over 2 months now I am using a Nox800. I am having big fun with it and found my hunting buddies wedding band which got lost over 1 year ago. So I found gold just not a nugget. It came in at 14 being 4.5 grams in weight. Good luck to you maybe we meet out there in CA one day.

Dear fellow treasure- and coin hunters, as I am very much interested in a trip to the UK I had to find out that those trips are fairly expensive. After more investigations I found something I want to share with you: https://www.farmstay.co.uk/PlacesToVisit There is farms and B&B offering accomodation and there is an option to select by activities. One option is metal detecting. I already contacted 2 farms and wait for feedback.