Reno Chris

Yes, thanks for sharing - nice gold! Nice SLQ T1 quarter too.

Most guys I know who try out the 2300 are convinced just the way you are.

Do you plan on living to be 168 years old - that might be what is necessary. The other thing is that loud surface targets like .22 shells hide and mask deeper gold. This summer I had my brother in law out with me and explained that to him. We were at a spot that produced some decent gold but was littered with .22 shells. I dug maybe 10 in a small area and then went back over it with the detector. There was now a fainter that was undetectable when the 22s were present. I told him that was what gold typically sounded like. We dug it and it was a nugget. If we'd discriminated out those 22s, that nugget would still be in the ground. There is a place for discrimination, but in prospecting you need to be careful with it,

Speculating on stuff that you don't really know about is kind of pointless. We will all eventually find out the details. Fisher is supposed to come out with a new technology detector one of these days too. What do we know about that one?

Congrats on the nice gold. Any hot rock issues with the ATX out there? The weather has been unseasonably warm and dry. I figure we will be seeing some more :"normal" weather by the end of this week.

NF Yuba

We actually featured David Obester and this same big nugget find back in the May 2013 issue of the ICMJ. For those of you who have a subscription and want more detail on this find, dig out your back issues and check out the May 2013 issue, I worked with one of Mr. Obester's relatives up in Virginia City and one of the main deep shafts there is named for his family - the Obester shaft.

I work part time for the ICMJ magazine, but its not close to full time. I consider myself semi-retired from the working world and I get plenty of time to get out and prospect.

Depth needs always in proportion to size of target. With a large coil and my GPX 5000, I can detect an an automobile at about 5 meters. With a small gold nugget and the same detector, I may only be able to see it at 10 or 15 cm. So what is the detection depth of the GPX 5000? Is it 5 meters or only a few cm? just depends on what the target is.

The SDC would also sound off on that no problem. Too bad we didn't give it a whirl when we were there as we had our detectors in the car. I could also easily believe stuff like that forming at or nearby to a marble - serpentine contact.

$5000 per ounce = Quadruple spot.

At that mining show at the Nugget in December, they will have XRF guns and they happily do product demonstrations. We could get some gold-silver-copper readings to see what metals are present - just an interesting thing to know.

Last week Steve and I got out to a spot in Northern Nevada that is known for spongy specimen gold. This is the type most PI detectors have some difficulty with because the gold is not solid or well connected - its almost like a delicate jewelry chain formed into a ball. Stuff that is sparse enough in gold content can even be invisible to a PI. However, this is the kind of gold the SDC does really well with - and it doesn't have to be tiny gold either - some spongy, loose, hard to find specimen type gold even in larger sizes can show up poorly on many PI detectors. This is the first time I've had my SDC 2300 out specifically for specimen type gold (though I have found some specimen stuff with it). So I hunted this spot with my SDC 2300 which has been gone over time and time again with the GPX 5000, as well as high frequency VLFs like the GMT and the Fisher Gold Bug 2. I am guessing I was the first one here with an SDC. There were no trash targets at all because it had been so pounded, but right in the middle of the patch were these two specimens, both of spongy specimen gold. Both were about 6 inches deep. Total weight for the two is five pennyweight or a quarter ounce. Tested one of them on a TDI and it only responded weakly when touching the coil. The SDC has really done well for me this year - and has much more than paid for itself. Steve got some pieces of this spongy specimen gold on the same trip with his SDC as well.

Can you cite any authority for that or how you came to that determination?

You know the "hole" in PI detectors sounds like an interesting magazine article to me............

What happened to that guy who told me that if you find gold in an area, you have to dig it all anyway? He also told me how much a detector looses in the way of depth with the filters that give you discrimination. All kidding aside, detectors are tools, and you want to choose the right tool for the job, so its important not to get too locked into one tool or technology. There is a place and situation for most detector technologies (though some overlap of similar detectors by different makers).

very true. The other thing is that it trains your ear to listen for loud targets and ignore faint signals as hot rocks, foil or other trash. Then you switch to gold hunting and 99% of the time the loud signals are the trash and once in a while those faint ones are gold.

Been interested in building a vac set up myself for a while. Interested in seeing your posts.

The finding of nuggets is all in the search. The hardest part is getting your coil over a nugget.

That gold cleaned up real nice - beautiful stuff. No question the Nokta is an excellent detector.

I got this off the http://golddetecting.4umer.net forum - is this the link you wanted to post? https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_A1TSkVUAlxLXpxY1h2bk10OFE/edit?pli=1 I looked at the video. I am sure the gold churn works just fine, I have no doubts of it. However as someone who has spent some amount of time operating a dry blower (AKA dry washer here in the states), I think I could easily run gravel through my dry washer at a rate at least 10 times faster than you are processing it in the gold churn. I don't mean this in any sort of mean way, I ask only as an honest question. Please don't take my comment the wrong way as you have obviously put a lot of time into designing and building this device. I am hoping you will explain its advantages over a standard dry blower. One thing I can see is that you could process wet material and use water - something obviously impossible in a normal dry blower. Still being able to process material in the dry washer at a much, much faster rate is important. I am just thinking that a patch of dirt that would take me 2 days to run through my dry washer might take me 2 weeks or more to process through the gold churn.

Much less of a problem here in the US, and your risk is near zero if you buy from a known, reputable dealer. Buy from Craig's list and you never know - I wouldn't buy a used detector unless the seller demonstrated that it operated properly. There are a few fake detectors distributed here in the US.

The results of any such comparison would be very dependent on the soils at the test location. If mild enough, the GB2 would shine. If heavily mineralized the GB2 would struggle and the SDC shine.

Steve was going to spend a couple days prospecting in Nevada, so I decided to join him for the afternoon - because of family commitments I could only spend the day. So I only used the SDC for the afternoon yesterday, but still got seven little nuggets over at Rye Patch, in a place that has been pounded by everyone and his brother, friend, cousin, and neighbor for the last 20 years - and I got seven little nuggets. The total weight for the seven is only 0.7 pennyweight, or 1.1 grams, but I only detected 4 hours with the SDC. The bottom line is that I had a lot of fun and got some gold - what more can you ask for with a short session on a pounded patch? This time of year the weather can change to wet and cold in the Sierra Nevada, so I've pulled out of northern California to focus more on Nevada gold fields. The weather was beautiful - though this time of year the weather can be chancy and you just never know - but we hit it just right.

Scattered gold out there.