jasong

The call of gold powers people into many Earthly discomforts apparantly. We have had field geologists and techs working on an exploration project in the AZ desert in 105-115 temps for a month now, few clouds. Not sure how they are doing it. You can't even pick up and hold any kind of remotely dark rock in that weather and the heat just feels like a physical wall of oppression. 45-65 degree AZ winters are close to perfection though in my book.

Now you know at least one. 😀 I lived in the field full time off nothing except my detecting and drywashing/dredging finds for 5 years. And I very commonly would mentally discriminate targets based on sounds and other information in order to increase the ground i cover and to reduce my physical workload, a factor that becomes very important when you detect all day, every day, every week and month and need to remain mentally and physically willing and able to do it the next day and every day after. My experience is that perfect detecting style, including digging every target, is simply not profitable in many places here in the US in this day and age unless just doing it for fun and hobby or only spending time in heavily hit club areas or known patches. When I need to make reliable amounts of finds, I adapt my detecting style to the conditions and often that means selecting targets to leave behind. I can't count how many times I meet people in the field who have spent hours making sure they are emulating the professional advice on forums and then asking me why they aren't finding anything except handfuls of tiny trash. And if I can show them better areas to detect when they are standing within sight of ground i am actively pulling gold out of. Its not about perfect detecting, its about understanding the specific conditions of the area and adapting, in my opinion. Sometimes it really is about knowing what to dig and what not to dig. Based largely on both the feedback your machine gives, and the location you are detecting, as well as correlating specific spots known to be more likely to hold gold or hold trash with what you are hearing on the detector. Technology that would aid in making that technique more reliable would be a boon to those who know how to put it to use and increase finds with it. The more information a detector can give to a user who finds a way to put the data to use, the better in my opinion.

I'm not sure I understand what your graph axis' represent entirely here, but if I understand what you are saying then I think the GPZ already does this. It's what people call the "warble". To me it sounds more like a tone curl than a warble as it "feels" like the audio is curling down or up and then back normal. It reminds me of those portamento things on 1980's synthesizers/organs that you could play by sliding a finger back and forth to bend the tone (or a bit like a whammy bar on a guitar). It's often encountered with tiny iron targets or bits of wire, especially curled or bent. But tiny nuggets, nuggets with odd geometries such as wire, prickly, or bent can also cause the response. And (so I hear) too can deep, very large nuggets, but I wouldn't know about such things. I pretty much ignore "professional detecting style" advice. Along the way, I realized that this tone curl on the Zed can actually be induced on certain targets by not having a perfectly flat swing over the target, and angling your coil up or down on one side depending which way you swing, or by moving the coil up and down slightly as you push forwards and backwards over the target, sometimes angling side to side there too can induce the tone tone curl. Some targets you cannot do this on no matter what. When I can induce the tone curl by moving my coil like that, I can in some specific areas where I'm familiar with the native gold, discriminate targets with a fairly high level of accuracy if the iron junk is mostly wire bits or small tin bits. So, my swing is actually not flat at all most times in those areas, but intentionally skewing about to try to induce different effects on targets in the GPZ audio. I'm not sure if that's what you mean though, as I'm not sure if that audio response is dependent on the signal phase or not, since I don't really understand ZVT all that deeply or how the GPZ processes audio.

The gold not backing currency thing isn't what concerns me, it's a tiny problem when compared to currency to market/bank holding imbalances. Nothing is backed by anything today, so really anything we think has value really doesn't. Consider: There is only about $1.5 trillion in US currency circulating in the entire world. Yet, there is something around $13 trillion held digitally in banks in savings/checking accounts, in CDs, money markets, etc. That's "vapor money". Banks hold many times more money for people than actually exists. So what exactly do they hold? Nothing. It's a macro scale version of the gold not backing currency problem. We have accounts worth currency that aren't backed by currency, it makes no sense. It gets worse. US combined stock markets are worth something like $34 trillion (according to Google in 2018, more now). These stocks are traded daily with money that doesn't really exist, and used as collateral for loans that grant more money that doesn't exist. Same with our housing market, worth something like $33 trillion. And our commercial real estate market is worth something like $16 trillion. And the private land in the US is worth something like $21 trillion. And who knows how much our minerals are worth combined. So, we have about $1.5 trillion in cash. And we have about $100 trillion in "value" for our major economic holdings which derive their value from our dollar. Dollars which can't even cover 1/10th of our bank related accounts if we all withdrew to cash, and which covers 0% of the value of everything we say has "value". So, what is the actual value of our markets and real estate if there isn't enough currency to back them? Well maybe people in parts of the world own a big portion of it then, in global currency? Nope. The actual amount of real currency globally is about $5 to $6 trillion. Total. That's it. There is something like ~$60 trillion in global savings/checking and other bank related accounts though. More vapor money. So, all the money in the world can't even cover 1/10th of the value of our stock market and real estate in the US, ignoring entirely the value of stuff in the rest of the world. Nothing is real anymore. Hyperinflation arrived a long time ago, we just put it off and ignore it, shoveling the problems to the next generations, by not printing the physical currency such as a place like Zimbabwe did and acting like our economy is normal instead. Everyone plays along because the world needs a stable, globally traded common currency, in a stable country. The problem is much, much larger than simply not having a currency backed by gold anymore IMO.

Everything people have mentioned here is old though. Any cheapy phone with access to an app store has a GPS lightyears ahead of the GPZ. Any new high level detector should be expected to have a modern ergonomic design, case, LiPo battery, wireless option, and screen. Even waterproofing. An $8000 detector better have it all in spades, without question. Spiral coils are old news, and already work on the 5000. Even if this new detector included every one of these things, it would only be status quo at best, and 5 years behind the times if I'm being honest. Are people's expectations for an $8000 detector really that low? I'm asking seriously, not trying to stir anything. I just think if that's all this 6000 is, and that sort of release is the new normal, then ML is going to find themselves on the same path as White's when it comes to consumer detectors. I have to believe there is something new, that neither the 5000 nor 7000 has. Otherwise, I fail to see who the customers will be for such a machine, unless it was significantly cheaper than the 5000, which apparantly it is not.

My understanding is that performance on PI's is getting maxed out. And simply just updating to a new case, attached battery, and modern screen hardly seems to justify anyone paying $8k to upgrade from the 5000, or $8k to get those features from current 7000 owners. GPS are cheap, and not a significant upgrade to detectors today. Minelab has never released a gold machine since I've been detecting for gold that is a downgrade from the current flagship. Not that I can recall anyways. It almost certainly has to have some totally new something or another that the 5000 doesn't have, and maybe that the 7000 doesn't have either since $8k is a premium machine price targeted to serious prospectors. Most serious prospectors already own a 7000 and would need some reason to buy a PI again. GPX = PI. So, I'm guessing this machine will incorporate this "Geosense PI" technology we heard about. And I'm still guessing it's something to do with correlating the coil position to the ground and to the target in order to get a better ground balance such as in the patents I posted previously. Or maybe something with improved target signal processing.

It sounds like you may have some kind of metal like lead, tin, zinc etc in your alloy. You probably need to go beyond smelting and try refining a small batch. If its just gold, silver, and copper then it shouldn't be brittle. Arizona gold is often associated with galena and lead. Might try a quick cupel experiment. Look up cupeling, i haven't done it myself and I know very little about refining. But if lead is your problem, cupeling may absorb the lead? Quartz or other iron impurities left over should be visible under a loupe.

Gold is going up globally, but there appears to be more to it. Our dollar is weakening vs more stable currencies like EUR or even the AUD now due to our historically bad economy (record decrease in GDP, record high unemployment still) and our inability to reign in Covid compared to other more successful countries. Check out a chart of gold in EUR for instance (or a similar effect with AUD), it's still up, but they are just above May highs, while we have blown way past that mark in USD. That discrepancy is due to our dollar declining, not just because gold is going up. I'm sure we'll hit $2000 gold and above if our dollar keeps declining. $2500 gold would be great. The effect is mitigated if we end up paying 33% more for a Minelab in a year or two though.

Daaang, nice. Time for me to sell some nuggets to fund some more prospecting adventures this winter! Anyone looking to buy for spot or even slightly under at these prices?

Nice. I hope you are right that it's as sensitive, or more sensitive to the small stuff than the GB2, I'm ready to get rid of my GB2 and just have 1 prospecting-centric detector and maybe an Equinox. Still 1 month+ from being able to get out to use my coil, so watching your reports with interest in the meantime. I take it from the GB2 comparison that you feel the 8" is measurably more sensitive than the 10" on the tiny stuff now that you've had it in the field on real gold and ground? Or did you find the 10" to be as sensitive as the GB2 as well?

Reg was always helpful to me and other friends in common in Colorado where he sometimes visited when we dredged. He helped me fix my GB2 in the field over the phone when I was prospecting with his brother, and gave me detecting advice on forum PM's. I always hoped I would have the chance to meet in person but we always seemed to be in different places at different times, but I'm grateful I had the chance to talk to him and learn a thing or three while he was here. I will remember him.

ML have filed a lot of patents the last few years regarding "improved metal detectors" or something to that effect. I wonder if this logo might not be a full detector but some kind of technology with it's own logo. Like MPS, SETA, etc etc. For instance, something like this patent which seems to determine the position of the target in the ground related to the position of the coil using some coordinate system, and then plots it on the screen. This patent here is similar, except seems to use similar ideas to improve the performance of auto ground balancing, and specifically references PI machines so maybe the new "thing" has to do with it? I just read the abstract but it almost sounds like it uses GPS coords to "remember" the ground balance it learned at that spot, and uses the same information to re-ground balance to the same settings when you go back to the same spot? I dunno, I need to read the full patent some day, that seems pretty innaccurate since GPS is only accurate to like 9ft on a good day. Or maybe I was thinking about this patent. Similar idea, with some diagrams of the guy moving his coil around. Of other note, there are some patents related to enhanced signal processing (potentially discrim, or better ways to deal with variable ground) and dealing with salt. Also newer patents on constant current machines (the GPZ is one of these). It sure seems like a new prospecting machine should be on the horizon, but it just never seems to arrive... Anyways, cool to have some mystery to look forward to again at the least.

Detecting with the aim to find nuggets to sell is a break even proposition at best in the US, and that's only if you have a lot of location knowledge and detecting experience already. However, detecting with the idea to use the information acquired to search for large scale overlooked gold deposits can be profitable enough to provide or augment an income if you have the field experience and knowledge to recognize what others have missed over the last 150+ years. Developing that experience takes a lot of time and money which you may never get back. Also, anyone looking to make money via prospecting needs to have the ability to recognize all nature of potentially valuable ore or minerals one might encounter in the field, as well as a finger on the pulse of the changing economics of the mineral industry and the ability to switch gears and learn something completely different at moments notice, and to become proficient enough at that new thing to compete with those who were already there first. Concentrating on just gold means a lot of potential paychecks are overlooked in the process. Again, for gold, I can't stress enough that the real money is in recognizing large scale deposits or trends in the field that others have missed. It requires believing in yourself and having confidence in your assessments when no one else does. I'm not talking about a mineshaft level prospect, I'm talking about massive open pit mineable deposits, because that's where the demand is today. Then, you have to have some skill at business in order to convince someone with money to see what you've seen and invest in exploring it. In the end, detecting and detecting skill are a very minor part of it all, but still quite useful nonetheless. The information you get in the field is worth far more than the nuggets. Here in the US anyways.

Round doesn't mean mono, you can see the (presumably) "O" TX loop outline in the photo in my post which mysteriously appeared even though I didn't put it there. It has to be a DOD coil, I don't think mono coils work with ZVT.

Cool, 990 grams for the 12" Z Coil according to their webpage now. That's 110 grams lighter than the 12" X Coil I have! Unfortunately says release delayed until September. Hopefully they get some product here in the US by this winter, I'm very curious how they perform.