jasong

$2000 gold inflation adjusted from 2020 is about $2400 today. Gold so far has basically inflation adjusted itself. In USD anyways. $3000 gold and I bet we see the inklings of another gold rush in places around the world where the geopolitics allow for it. Right now I'm not seeing a big rush to gold exploration again here with the Jr miners/exploration companies yet. But there is some activity. They seem to have interest in diversifying to copper/gold deposits though. But I'm hearing some whispers of interest whereas it was kinda dead for a few years. Uranium is the new lithium. Lots of renewed activity.

Keep in mind though - I said the same statement after using the X Coils (and I got flack for it too). I said to me the X Coils obsolete the need for the NF coil. And I still stand by that statement today. But the NF is good coil - great to those unwilling to cut a cable. But to me, that coil was obsolete before it was even released. Similarly, my 4500 hasn't left my closet since I got X Coils and especially since I got my 6000. The 4500 and 5000 are to me very obsolete platforms - I have zero interest ever running them again. And I believe as a platform, the 7000 itself in terms of electronics design and ergonomics is already close to obsolete if it had any serious competitor. It's an old, stodgy, dinosaur platform to me that feels like how the 3500 felt to me when I first started detecting for gold. If not for the X Coils, I doubt I'd use it much anymore quite honestly, but I also don't do a lot of ultra accurate patch cleaning anymore these days either, clearly there is no equal to it yet there.

The reason I am stating my opinion is based on what I am reading in the old and newer modified ZVT patents Bruce Candy outlines that technically speaking, ZVT should be superior to any type of PI due to the relative lack of X contamination during sampling without the pulse decay, as well as the lack of a decay time interfering with target sampling. That isn't what we are seeing today with current models though. At least not exactly. Given that the SDC (IMO anyways) has better or at least equal X ground performance generally than the 7000, and that the 6000 can almost keep up with the GPZ in terms of small bit sensitivity - it stands to reason that the 7000 implementation of ZVT was not optimal early on and has room for measurable improvement. From that, it would stand to reason that almost 10 years of development time should have resulted in a more optimal ZVT implementation by now. Especially in terms of dealing with X component in soils, as well as further refining target sampling improvements. If I've made an error in reasoning there, I'd be curious what it is. Because lacking insider information, that seems like the logical conclusion to make based on the data the public have at hand. I understand the whole withhold technology at a drip pace thing Minelab does, for sure. That's another issue, it's hard to predict what the business department does though, and I suspect it changes with the wind sometimes, so I refrain from speculating there. But if they release an 8000 with better X handling than the SDC, improved target response for both short and long time constants, and more ergonomic to match the 6000 then I stand by my statement - to me that would obsolete the SDC, 6000, and 7000 entirely - as in - I doubt I'd use any of those 3 again if I had such a machine. Improve the EMI filtering and my opinion would likely be strengthened.

Well alright then. Pardon my lack of industry connections in which to base my own opinions, I am of course limited to the public information the rest of us are limited to. I detailed the reasoning behind my opinion. But if the conversation is just "I know secret things" then I guess there isn't much to talk about is there? While I may be disappointed if the 8000 doesn't meet my expectations, it's a minor thing. I have more fun looking at technical data available and thinking about what might be. But that's turned into no fun here with the sarcasm, so I'll move on.

Based on what?

Not sure if it's a bean counter thing or an engineering thing. There is nothing to do but speculate since Minelab remains so opaque about literally everything they do. Based on their patents though, I suspect it's the former and not the latter, since the verbiage used in the 2023 patents seems to indicate exactly this - PI's should have no business being as sensitive or as good on X ground as ZVT machines. Yet, they seem to be competitive compared to the 7000, in the SDC's case it's handles X ground better I think while still being quite sensitive. So the logical conclusion to me would be a new ZVT machine improving measurably, at least in terms of ground handling.

Theoretically, the big thing with ZVT was it's immunity to X soil components due to the lack of contamination from having to sample during long decay periods like with a PI. While simultaneously having much greater sensitivity for the same reasons - no pulse decay to muddy the waters, sampling at zero voltage instead, thus it can hear ultra fast transient targets (tiny gold). This should mean that technically the GPZ should vastly outperform the SDC in bad ground. And the 6000 should have no business being close to as sensitive as a good ZVT machine, which means the 7000 was at least semi subpar for a ZVT machine if a PI can match it. I expect improvements. The 8000 seems like it should improve greatly on both sensitivity as well as bad ground handling (well, X anyways, maybe not C/salt). I think many people are expecting far too little from whatever this next machine should be, because all this stuff shoulda been doable by 2017. Now we have a decade of EMI mitigation hardware/algo advancements, better coils, better ergonomics. My expectations are high for this machine. If it ever shows up. I expect a machine that obsoletes the SDC, 6000 and 7000 entirely.

I think the last part is definitely true, maybe the first part too. I did some experiments a while back and found that both large iron targets as well as high EMI levels caused the 6000 to adjust itself in manual, not just in auto. Further, by memory, I believe it stayed dumbed down even after the iron and EMI were removed to some degree, requiring a reset to really trust it was back to normal. I noticed this happening in the field at first but was unsure, but when I posted here a while back about this effect, other people didn't seem to see it, so I tested in my shop and found enough to change my trust in the 6000 personally. I've posted about this a few times in the past here. 6000 is a prospecting machine only to me. I toss it into auto+, and use it for what it is. What happens under the hood is too opaque for me to ever trust it over the 7000 for cleaning applications because there is no way to verify if I am running sub-optimally or not. This is why they need to at least provide some bar graph readouts to show an operator what the detector has adjusted, if controls aren't provided. Not knowing is not acceptable for pro-sumer grade machines IMO. I do like having the auto option though, and I believe it will improve in future releases.

Not coincidence, everything you do online is monitored and fed back to you as ads now. Your browser activity is scraped, your emails are read and monitored. And if you think that's bad, it gets worse. A guy on Youtube a year or two did an experiment to see if his phone was listening to him while it was just sitting there idle. Experiment went something like this: He had no dog, so he chose to start randomly talking about dog toys around his phone (something he shouldn't be suggested ever) for a while. Sure enough, eventually the ads he was getting started showing dog toys. They are watching and listening to your daily life, not just internet activity. Everything you do today is monitored and resold in order to get max clicks from you. Your personal life is a commodity and you are not getting comped for the commoditization of it either. Our personal details are the modern livestock.

Yep that's the one, thanks.

I inherited a few boxes of of older publications from an old oil well log library. Among them is a booklet by the DOI called "Gold in Meteorites and the Earth's Crust". I don't think it's available online though. No scanner here, so here is a photo of the chart from this paper on the general gold content in many types of meteorites, just for general interest. 1ppm = 1 gram/ton more or less. So it seems the iron meteorites are the ones that tend to have the highest gold content.

Haha yeah I've been chasing all sorts of blind leads in the lower elevations. We didn't get much snow this winter, so I was able to do a bit of exploring so far. But we just got 2 days of snow so I'm back stuck at home pounding on my keyboard now. 🙂 The ore body prospecting invention I was proposing was something between seismic refraction and GPR: ULF/ELF ambient military transmissions (they can travel through the ocean/around the world/into ground). Depth similar to sound waves, but imaging via conductive interface changes like GPR. But not imaging in fine resolution like GPR, just looking for large scale conductive interface refraction (metallic ore bodies, buried lithium reserves, large salt domes, oil reservoirs, aquifer mapping, etc) as with seismic. Sorta both, but neither. I'm guessing this is what this company is using along with a combo of other sources for finer/deeper occurences when the noise exists? No idea though.

With seismic (sonic) waves, you are not measuring strength but instead measuring the difference in time between refracted or reflected impulse that results from the interface of two different materials which two different velocities which sound travels through it. You are measuring the initial impulse (thump) time and then measuring the arrival time at an array of sensors. It's all time based. Signal strength is only really relevant insomuch as you want a strong enough impulse to travel as deep as you need it to go., but how strong it is is mostly irrelevant for the imaging other than max depth. Time is the critical measurement to generate subsurface imagery. Velocity is a function of time, distance between sensors is known, thus time is your critical measurement for this type of subsurface imaging. Similarly like with sound waves - EM waves travel through different rock types with different velocities. So you can use very similar methods to measure time and determine where formations change. In this case it's not so much the density of the rock (as with sound waves) as it is the conductivity changes in the rock. Seismic refractometers (oilfield thumpers) are an example of the sound wave frequency range tools. GPR are an example of the EM frequency range tools. They both work similarly, by measuring time in order to generate the imaging. Anyways, if one really needs signal strength, you just measure the magnitude of the incident signal at t=0. Then the strength of the reflect signal at t=t2.

I don't know Ray Mills, but reading his class description that Swegin posted, that's the sort of thing I'd be spending my money on if I started from day 1 again, rather than trying to learn it all myself. Learning a gold machine takes a week or less if you spend time testing everything out (and you already know how to use your machines). Learning to actually prospect takes years, and many people never figure it out even after that much time, that kind of experience is invaluable because it can't be garnered in a week of testing, it takes a lifetime of prospecting to understand it and if someone is willing to distill it down into a class and share it, it's probably worth it. And if you are in California you can probably find some smaller/local clubs better than the GPAA that have actual productive ground to work. Or, use the GPAA locations to familiarize yourself with the geologic/topographic settings nuggets are found in and use that to extrapolate to new locations you explore. That's prospecting. Location is everything, even in good locations much of the ground often doesn't have nuggety gold, learning where it's at is key.

Not me, but Jim has. 🙂 Separately, a company I sold a project to did some resistivity surveys with a professional contractor. That contractor ended up unfortunately lighting a part of the mountain face on fire in doing so a few years back!

If you measure the noise signals at a set reference point as a baseline then you do have a known reference frame. Then you measure how the signal changes at different points of interest around the baseline to see how the environment affects it. Wether you generate/transmit that signal or you use an existing ambient signal, it's still a usable signal. A similar concept already exists that can see through walls using ambient wifi RF. Similarly, you could use tectonic movements from half the planet away as stimuli for seismic refraction measurements (depth to bedrock measurements, formation layers, etc). Essentially taking the place of the stimulus from a thumper truck, dynamite, a sledgehammer, etc. Problem being these events are not happening constant enough to depend on alone or to be highly useful. Technically you'd just need to look at how the signal changes across many measurements/locations though to generate some useful information about underlying geology, I'm not sure a baseline would even be required to get useful data, as the reflection/refraction times themselves just need to be measured relative to the time of the initial impulse (thump) rather than magnitudes, but dunno. Not totally unlike the way GPS works, in a way, except listening for "echos" of reflectance/refraction relative to the time of arrival of the initial impulse. Extrapolate from that and you could also use blasts from nearby quarries, or other ambient noise. Going further, you can move from the sonic spectrum into the EM noise spectrum, especially very low frequencies, and you can penetrate some distance into the ground and get info from those as well. These signals are more common. All of them combined I imagine is closer to whatever this company is measuring - to get a wider frequency range picture and to ensure there are at least some elements of some frequencies present wherever in the world they deploy.

These sorts of ideas are for large scale prospecting - ore body scale.

Interesting. This is similar to the large scale conductive ore body detector I proposed a while back using existing ULF/ELF submarine and other ambient low frequency transmitter frequencies out there. An idea I've had for over a decade and had every electronics/detector techie sort I've told this to tell me it was not possible. 😅

It might have been a few of those first season ones? Definitely E1 and E102 from the thumbnails. I'm way disconnected from TV these days. I must have seen their operation out there after they were already done, which means they probably didn't get very far on it.

Could be hah! Hard to know. I'd guess that nugget in specific came from the general area though at some point. That whole area is detected to death about like Rye Patch though these days I think. Especially now if they put a big map on Discovery channel haha, I didn't know that. *Wait, I just looked at that map. Hahaha never mind. 😁

Eh, I bet you could find better. I think that's just a part of an old channel that probably pops up other places too. Though, looking at that big nugget - if it really did come out of there - it seems likely to be locally derived, not nearly as water worn as I woulda guessed and bears crystalline structure remanants. It's just basically this little chunk of gravel up on a hill. It'd be mined out quick IMO.

Thanks, hmm I'll have to look and see if they ever made a full episode out there. Man those guys really shoulda hired someone like me or Lunk or any of Gerry's crew to go help them detect that place for a day. 😅 I had my X Coils with me even, which at the time I believe were the only ones in the US, they coulda made tv haha.

Ah yep, that must have been the show, the Lost Mines one, and I think Sanchez sounds familiar in terms of last names of whoever owned that when I looked it up a while back but I can't remember exactly.

He was out working that Marble Rock prospect or whatever people call it in NV with a mini ex for some TV show that wasn't this one, I was ATV'ing around and saw the machine down in the pit then someone said he was set up next to them at the RV park. That show never make it to TV, or what happened to it? I was hoping to see what kind of gold they got out of there - I'm positive that's an old tongue of a paleoplacer, lots of boulders in that whole area for miles that aren't coming from the mountain there, and I've never known or met the owners to see what type of gold comes out of that place, I suspect it's river worn gold and not the local area crystalline stuff? Woulda liked to see more there just for knowledge sake. I love searching for those old river channels.

Those are the best places to detect! I love that feeling where you think yeah I can take the camera out here and probably not be wasting time. Some of NZ reminds me of detecting the Rockies here, except of course minus the nearby ocean. Looks somewhat like home. The quartz face may be a slickenside. You can find it in shear zones, areas with lots of faulting, etc. It's when two faces move/grind across each other with enormous pressure, which ends up polishing the surfaces (and often leaving lines/striations called slickenlines). Similar things can result with glaciers and a lot of that hydraulic area looks like glacial till.