jasong

6 minutes ago, phrunt said:

If you can pick out which episode it is let me know.

Episodes | Gold Rush: Dave Turin's Lost Mine | Discovery

You can click where it says Season 4 to go back through the older seasons episode lists.

 

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. 😁

4 minutes ago, GhostMiner said:

I wonder if Sanchez still owns that claim. If it's for sale I might be interested in partnering with some people if it proved out. He owns a bar somewhere in Montana as well. Maybe I can hunt him up.

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. 

3 hours ago, RONS DETECTORS MINELAB said:

Minelabs definition of GeoSense-PI™ technology analyses and responds to ground signals with great clarity and precision, so you can detect in difficult environments once thought undetectable. It rapidly suppresses unwanted signals via three overlapping feedback systems for superfast detection of even the tiniest gold pieces.
 

Sounds like Minelab did improve on the 6000 handling with Geosense over the previous DVT & SETA systems by adding a third feedback system. Maybe they can add more feedback systems to even better remove more unwanted signals.
 

Still not overly sure how it works as it does not handle the more mineralized ground conditions we have here. It works more like the salt/gold timings on the 5000 as it can handle conductive ground but will still hear the more mineralized ground conditions.

I wish they weren't so opaque on what it's actually doing. But I suspect - and this is just a guess - that we will see more robust improvements in the future dealing with hotter and more variable ground. Cutting a great deal of ground noise and EMI out while maintaining sensitivity to gold would make a detector I am definitely interested in throwing money at. 

Like with most tech, the initial attempts are usually rudimentary and not very impressive, but improve with further revisions. I'm kinda curious to see what they can do there, wether with Geosense or whatever comes after it and improves on it. 

I'm really hoping the sales on the 6000 and 7000 is early indication they are clearing stock for new flagship gold models and not just axing the EQ600 and backdoor fixing the 6000 coil issues.

And I hope we get surprised and it's not a GPZ8000 but something new entirely. H1 or something. Hybrid PI/Z, I know that's all buzzwordy, but I want to see something truly new after this long of a wait. 

4 hours ago, tboykin said:

The biggest gains to be had with gold detectors lies in their ability to distinguish magnetic/ferrous from highly conductive/low impedance targets. This would be two-fold -

1. Better depth in ferrous ground conditions
2. True iron discrimination

I'm not talking about the ability to do standard discrimination, blanking/muting the threshold over ferrous. But instead the ability to balance a ferrous signal out completely, and "see through" anything with a ferrous component. This would also keep the ability to pick up nuggets covered in manganese or other ferrous minerals.

I think I remember a Minelab patent that covered this, and I would bet that the next big breakthrough will come in this type of detecting. I just hope it comes before I get too old to swing a detector!

Gold detectors already do this to some degree. They look at both X (ferrous) and C (conductive) components of a signal as separate entities. The problem is that gold nuggets are in that unfortunate zone of overlap between X and C I think so they have both components and eliminating or reducing one could affect nugget signal. But as with everything - there are places where this is a bigger problem than other places, and more detector control would allow an experienced operator to change settings and adapt.

I think it's possible right now actually. To some degree, I think this may be an end goal of Geosense, but I'm unsure. Maybe that was an application of the patent?

1 hour ago, phrunt said:

 The 6000 didn't really bring anything new, the sensitivity it has the GPZ already had, but was just locked out with coils. 

The 6000 is more advanced than you give it credit for Simon, and I'm saying this as one of it's biggest critics. I'm guessing it's because you tend to hunt the same places and stick within small, defined areas. Most of the positives I've found relate to using it as an exploration machine. 

The 6000 blows away the 7000 in conductive ground (salt), even with a 10" X Coil on the GPZ. Yet, it retains the sensitivity of the GPZ with the 10". I can explore salty ground 4x faster with the 6000 than I can with the GPZ due to both it's performance in salt as well as the weight reduction. It's far more sensitive than a 5000 with an 11" round too.

Also, I'm not ready to sell Geosense short or underestimate it just yet. I have documented well my issues with what I perceive it to be doing and how it can negatively affect a detectorist without them even realizing it, but I also still use Auto+ almost entirely, it's just too convenient when covering tons of different grounds types while exploring. When in variable ground, it does well adapting and letting me concentrate on other things besides fiddling with settings - it saves tons of time for me and I expect the next iteration will be better.

This stuff here is why I said earlier they really need to get exploration prospectors on the testing crew. Because that's exactly the strength of the machines like the 6000 and they need to start getting input from people that can point out things that I feel a lot of current tests may underestimate if not miss entirely. 

If they are coming out with new detectors, I feel they need to be actually new at this stage. Like the 7000 was. It was a new paradigm. Adding a few controls and tweaks to an old machine doesn't do much for me anymore personally. 

If it's fractional improvements on old ideas, I'll just wait for a new Algoforce or Nokta or whatever at 1/4 the price, no hurry.

Stop milking the same cow already, Minelab. The 7000 and 6000 seemed steps in the right direction finally, I hope they don't go backwards with something like a revamped 5000. Design for exploration prospecting in addition to sensitivity, and get some of exploration prospectors on the testing crews so the engineers have an ear towards the types of concepts that are import there too.

If they revamp anything, it should be the 6000 and 7000, not the 5000 IMO. And even a revamped 7000 at this stage would be a letdown to me as I think a new redesign and model would be better in almost every way. The concept of putting X old detector in Y new updated package has no appeal to me anymore for any model, unless it's done fairly quickly after release - like 2 years. That's just me though. Tech moves too fast now, times have changed.

Nice skills. But that is also one beautiful batea. I'd love to own one a handmade one with great character in the wood like that.

One of those boards has an SMA connector, its usually microwave or similar stuff like cellphones. GPR (ground penetrating radar) is often in that same frequency range too interestingly. Could just be communication with remote peripherals too though I guess like multiple coils, receivers, whatever. Just utter guesses, nothing more. 

He seems to indicate this new detector is his, or related to some company he works with? 

1 hour ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I know a lot of what I call "real miners." Alaska still has plenty of small placer mining operations, many of them family operations. Or serious gold dredgers. Almost to a person they consider metal detecting for a gold a complete waste of time. They have a family to feed and bills to pay and no time for toys. In the world of gold mining metal detectors are toys. Useful toys at times perhaps, but still toys. Me on my favorite mining tool....

There is something ultra satisfying about turning big boulders and new dirt over with machinery. I feel like a kid on a playground running that kind of stuff sometimes. 😁 It's like zen satisfying to watch stuff that would take weeks to move by hand just yield and give way in a few minutes. That kind of digging I like. I'll dig trenches for water, electrical for friends just for fun because it's relaxing for me to move dirt like that, almost feels superhuman.

This was my winter fixup project, old abused ranch mini ex with bad cylinders and swivel, bent dipper. Granted, a few magnitudes smaller than the dozer, but still fun. 

Nice, the one in the bottom right looks like a potentially difficult target for a PI to hit and thus seems the Algo is doing well there for speci stuff.

I totally get what everyone says. So with hesitation I will answer honestly and say I'm the most jaded and miserable SOB detectorist ever here. 😆 I don't care about nuggets if they aren't paying for my trip and time. I usually just leave the tiny shallow stuff and only come back for them when I need some psychological boost. Or leave them there to have a place to take someone new to teach how to detect on the harder targets. 

The thrill, enjoyment, and wonder I read other people detailing here with regards to digging nuggets, I think for me comes from finding where the nuggets are hiding, solving that mystery, and the research and adventure leading up to it. I don't care for digging or the nuggets themselves. I suppose there is a rush in finding the big ones though still, anything over 1/4 oz still gives me an immediate "heck yeah" feeling still. Small faint surface stuff I often pass up unless I really need some rattle. 

I'd dig nothing at all if I could make that pay better though. Nuggets do nothing for me. If I can sell locations instead of gold so I can get back to the hunt quicker, I'm all for it. If I was in the 1800's I'd be a scout like Jim Bridger and not a miner, really love exploring and solving mysteries. 

9 hours ago, phrunt said:

 

Nice find, the weird connector alone is worth that since it's not easy to replicate. At least I couldn't find any when the 6000 first came out.

I'm unconvinced those chips aren't hackable too, with a little sideways thinking on what they are. Not that I would ever do such a thing. But I have thought of some ways it could be done if the world ended and zombies raided my place and my life depended on me hacking that stupid chip to create a super anti-zombie weapon in order to escape. 😛

There may be no great expectation in terms of comparing raw power/sensitivity to the more expensive machines. But this e1500 on paper appears to be close to the 6000 and Axiom in terms of checking boxes for a good exploration prospecting machine. Emphasis added for a reason because it's often overlooked. And in that light, I believe comparisons between them all are apt, and I will in a moment make an argument that in this reference frame it might not be unreasonable to expect it to be better than the more expensive offerings. Key phrase though - in the exploration reference frame. 

Raw depth/sensitivity simply are not the major factors that make a good exploration machine (in some cases they are negatives) - they just need to sufficient. Ground coverage, time savings are much more important. The things that save time also allow more ground to be covered. These things are less EMI to slow you down and reswing/investigate, less ground noise for the same reasons, less weight to swing longer, tailored coil selection, and the ability (however minute) to eliminate some common trash targets that require stopping and digging. 

It's been posted elsewhere, but the main thing missing from the e1500 seems to be autotracking. With this, and the existing availability of coils, and already less weight, I could see a potentially compelling argument where a modified e1500 isn't just in the same league as a 6000 as an exploration machine, but potentially better. Yes, better potentially. Also add the lower price in, plus cheaper versatile batteries. These are less tangible features, but they matter. I find the comparisons between more expensive machines apt for this reason. I'm very curious what an e2500 might look like.

I believe exploration prospecting is the real future of serious detecting in the US. And I also think it will be a major part of the 2nd phase of the gold rush in Africa when geopolitics and gold prices improve.

Yes, you can claim locatable minerals on private land. Reconveyed minerals sometimes are leasable. This is the concept behind the split estate. 

There are a number of different ways the minerals rights may have been retained as public - SRHA is the most common one in my experience. With SRHA the procedure is legally defined more or less, and you can read  the actual law pertaining to prospecting public minerals on private surface lands here. The lead geologist in your local BLM office generally will be familiar with the process and I would suggest talking to them to get more information.

Basically - it requires a bunch of notices and paperwork and compensation to the surface owner. And there is common law to consider such as reasonable surface use. 

You may prospect public locatable minerals on private land if you have permission from the surface owner to enter upon the land. It gets sticky with reconveyed/leasable minerals though technically speaking. 

I don't think there are any coils that could get the 6000 close to the Z in depth performance. Two different technologies.

It's more likely they aren't building larger coils for the 6000 because there is little to be gained from using them. If there were serious gains to be had in terms of depth, I'm guessing X Coils would be doing it with an adapter already.

The 17x13 is underwhelming, and evidence of this lack of performance with larger coils. 

What Woody found is exactly what I was saying too for some time - it's not just the unshielded components, the control box itself lacks shielding and is a source of a lot of noise. I tried wrapping it with carbon fiber but it didn't help a lot, I didn't exactly cover everything though. I'm curious what Woody can achieve. We knew early on the fix was replacing unshielded inductors - these allowed the speaker to couple with the control board and self induce noise. But those components and maybe others as well were also susceptible to high EMI environments as well, so it wasn't just a purely speaker-related thing (this was the easiest to observe though). Both the speaker as well as high EMI environments would force the 6000 into instability. 

There are a ton of different ways that could be implemented now that we have the processing power to do them. A lot of this stuff was techniques that were well known in the 90's because it's what we had to do to adapt lab equipment and tools to specific uses in school. 

A bunch of ideas probably wouldn't work. I probably misunderstand others. That's science and engineering - experiment and try. But I've seen enough in other products and instruments to be pretty comfortable saying that I really don't think detectors are seriously using the power we have available cheaply today.

But again, this is stuff I see greatly benefiting exploration prospecting. Stuff that speeds up ground coverage, saves time. Not as beneficial for flogging old patches type detecting where one is already going slow, and a slow/noisy rig doesn't matter as much.  

In terms of raw power for getting every last deeper crumb out of an old patch, it's going to be hard to be beat an old GPZ with a larger CC X Coil, I agree there. These changes will be smaller advantages for that type of work. That rig is also a poor exploration machine though. 

16 minutes ago, phrunt said:

EMI is a tricky one to overcome, as the detector can't tell EMI from signals, maybe it could use processing power to check for patterns and try filter it out, but then you're adding another pretty risky filter.  Better shielding on the detector itself can help, and that's an area Minelab for some reason is a bit lacking, so they could get minor improvements there.

Right, this is one commonly used method in instrumentation. I've posted about this years ago, but the way it's done is by doing something like a gradiometric analysis. In other words - you sense noise from two different spots in real time, and then look at the rate of change and direction when possible of the E field. Vector gradient analysis. (fancy terms for looking at rates of change and direction)

The difference between the signal from the ground to the coil is much higher than the difference between taking that same reading somewhere else, say the control box.

Now the same analysis can be applied to EMI. Since it originates from the sun, lightning, planes, cell towers, etc the difference in magnitude is far less as it's picked up between those same two points. So you can more easily determine those types of signals are likely to be EMI. Now - with enough CPU speed you can do further analysis on the signals to differentiate them, and still have results in "real time" before the brain hears anything like Fourier analysis on top of the gradiometry. You can even take gradiometry further and do vector (directional) analysis with a fast enough CPU and some clever circuitry to determine which direction the signal is coming from.

This is a massive oversimplification but I'm trying to keep it understandable for all.

57 minutes ago, Digalicious said:

Jason,

Multi core / thread processors are pretty cheap. Even fairly basic CPUs in computers have the computational "power" to easily run tasks, that are far more complex and resource hungry than what a metal detector needs.

If all it takes to get much better performance out of a metal detector, is to add $200 to the price to get a "better" processor, wouldn't the engineers have done that by now?

In addition, I'm not so sure about your EMI suggestion. I mean, the bottom line is that a metal detector doesn't know if the signal it receives is coming from EMI or metal in the ground. As such, there is no viable way to mitigate EMI in SMF modes, without losing performance in one way or another. Channel hopping with tiny 0.2 khz increments, isn't going to mitigate EMI, given that the EMI and its harmonics are wideband, and so is the receiver (SMF).

I'm not talking about throwing more power at obsolete design paradigms. I'm talking about adapting new design principals to the power we available today. Until very recently, most detectors were still designed like it was 1995, even when they did use more modern components. Like procedural style programming instead of object oriented. One thing at a time type stuff, it's ultra inefficient. Throwing more processing power at old designs and ideas accomplishes little and is not what I'm suggesting. 

EMI is absolutely something that can be dealt with more effectively. It's done already in scientific instrumentation via numerous different methods, though these are complex. I suggested one simple way that I know already works in electronics other than detectors - real time noise monitoring and channel selection. That alone would save the 30 seconds of noise cancelling plus would keep you on average on a much quieter channel. 

I'm just repeating myself here though. I guess people either understand what I'm saying or not. 

30 minutes ago, Digalicious said:

I doubt processing power is some sort of bottleneck or impediment to metal detector performance. I mean, even cheap processors can easily handle the meager computational requirements of a metal detector. 

It is when you do complex signal processing, multiple things in parallel like the examples I gave. This is nothing specific to detectors, just electronics in general. A lot of this is done in the MCU now in general. That takes clock cycles up. 

Now, running multiple Fourier transforms simultaneously, doing stuff like monitoring all the channels for the lowest noise constantly, analyzing ground constantly, you'd benefit by either multiple cores or faster clock speed when you add a bunch of parallel tasks together that are always operating in the background if you moved to a real time, constant noise reduction and ground monitoring system. The 6000 does this with ground I think, to some degree. 

Add to the signal processing all the routine functions of the detector like writing to the screen, operating audio, bluetooth, user interface/buttons, stuff like discrim/TID calculations, configuring operation of the analog circuitry (changing timing patterns/pulse configuration/etc). It all takes clock cycles up. 

Even if technically you have enough speed to complete all the tasks individually, electronics get "sticky" or laggy when too many processes all compete for those cycles during the same time frame. So you have to slow the operation down or reduce functionality in those cases, even though you have enough speed technically speaking. This is why multiple cores benefit applications running many things in parallel even if you aren't using all the capabilities all the time. Or multiple processors. 

I'm not suggesting throwing more processing power at current or obsolete (IMO) detector designs. It'd be pointless for a 5000 for instance. I'm suggesting changing the way detectors are designed to take advantage of all this cheap processing power today that wasn't available cheaply 15 years ago. 

The x^6 problem is well known, it's not related to the point I'm making though except tangentially (I'll touch on that in a moment).

What I'm saying is that ignoring depth gains entirely, exploration prospecting really can benefit greatly from faster, quieter detectors. This is achievable by throwing more cheap signal processing power at it. Namely - EMI and ground noise reduction. These two things slow a detector down greatly and the faster you can work, the more ground you can cover, the more gold you can find. Noise of any sort massively slows exploration down.

Now back to the x^6 limitation. First off - yes, it's true. But understand that it's an ideal model. In other words - it's like looking at air tests in a Faraday cage with no noise. We don't detect in a Faraday cage, thus we don't use these machines in environments where we get close to that theoretical asymptote/limit. We have to deal with EMI and ground noise. The first thing we do in these cases is bump back RX gain. Then maybe some audio smoothing/stabilizer. Then maybe change timings. All of these reduce us even further from this x^6 limit.

The 2nd thing I'm saying is this: by working on reducing EMI and ground noise we don't just make exploration faster, we can also bump RX gain back up and thus actually, we do gain depth. We can not use smoothing, and gain depth. We can use more sensitive timings, and gain depth. And thus, get closer to that x^6 limit each time we eliminate more and more noise.