jasong

This bone is in a sand/conglomerate member of a much larger sandstone/mudstone/shale noted for both oil and and fossils. I'm staying semi vague intentionally because I'm the only one detecting out here and this is...well, a public forum. The area lacks any real modern geologic mapping so I'm not 100% certain, but I think I'm in the ballpark with formation ID. Intense amounts of faulting and folding have made it hard to really map things out though. I hear that though! I love living out here so much, my life is in wandering the hills and mountains searching for things. BTW, this place has no written history of gold production, and almost no old timer workings either, at least not nearby. You would never believe there is gold here unless you saw it come out of the ground. I'm 90% sure it's coming from an ancient paleo-river that itself was fossilized into rock and in areas has re-eroded back out and gotten re-concentrated locally in some areas.

It looks like what is called a "limb cast" to me, which is a piece of fossilized wood/branch. Google image search here. Limb casts can be palms, or all sorts of weird early trees/plants that don't exhibit the "tree ring" type growth we'd expect. But it also kinda looks like fossilized antler too. I'd take it to UNLV paleontology department if you happen to be driving by sometime. I'm not good enough with fossils yet to really know specifics 100%, so I take a lot of stuff to the scientitists. Anyway, whatever it is I'd say it's a fossilized "something".

Thanks, I'm still pretty pumped about it. I was just thinking last year about making a video series about what would happen if a gold prospector took up the challenge of trying to find dino skeletons using some of the same research/field work techniques as in gold prospecting/exploration. Never did try to film that, but pretty excited I managed to find a dino bone anyways, it's been a life long goal. Never know what you might find out there, I love exploring!

When prospecting, I try to keep an eye on everything around me. In this case I thought I was in formation about 95 million years old. With the K-T boundary above me, I was keeping a close eye on the rocks around me for dino fossils. I've found a lot of invertebrates before - clams, bacculites, ammonites, etc. I've found leaves, fish, and small mammal (mice) bones in younger formations, but never a dino bone before. Finally found my first one in the wild! It's well embedded in the rock. It's a sandstone/conglomerate, probably representing an old river delta or braided channels. So unfortunately this bone was a 1-off. A dinosaur died and the bones probably got spread asunder in an ancient river. I looked everywhere for the missing pieces, but this was it. You can really see the bone structure close up. I took the photos to a paleontologist at a local museum and he said he thought it was likely some part of the hip structure. He gave me some latin name for the exact bone but it went in one ear and out the other. It's just the end joint part, the rest of the leg or whatever it was has broken off. So unfortunately he said it wasn't of scientific interest to them since it was just a 1-off, and broken. But still, I've been wandering the hills since I was a child and in 3 decades I've never found a real vertabrate dinosaur bone. Pretty dang cool in my book, and one of my favorite finds ever! Was a long field trip, doing some exploration. Got some nuggets too. Nothing impressive, but almost paid for gas anyways. Popped these out with the 15" CC X Coil. I love being the first coil on a site, it's so much easier to really understand a patch and area seeing where each and every nugget came from. Well actually, not the first coil, the first coil was the 11" on the 6000, I discovered this spot with the 6000 and then brought the big gun in to have a look at what laid deeper. On that size/type gold I'm getting 2x the depth with the GPZ/15cc. Easy. Maybe more.

For sure! But if you ask the gas stations in my town, they might have a different view. One lowered it 10 cents to be cheeky, the station next to them lowered 20 cents in response, and within 2 days every gas station was selling $1.50 below what it was a few days ago and now I have to assume they are all close to losing money. I'm loving the cheaper fillups though... Garrett might well find themselves in one such of a price war if they get too far ahead of their skis on their first run of the season. No clue though, just theorizing one potential reason behind outwardly illogical pricing...

ML can always drop the 6000 price and/or announce a potential upcoming new lightweight GPZ too to make things real interesting in Australia if Garrett got a toehold and ML wanted to recover customers or prevent potential Axiom sales. I'm guessing some tactics/ideas like these went into both the US and AU pricing. Price wars benefit the customer greatly, but they are usually massive profit sinks for the corporations, maybe a fine line is being walked to not wake a sleeping giant? No clue, that's the type of strategizing I'd be considering if I was on the marketing department of either company though.

I'd certainly be interested to see how the Axiom does in Australia, even as a US-only prospector myself.. Steve has said a number of times that he mostly used the mono, even in the hottest CA magnetite/serp ground. A statement I find pretty amazing personally. Definitely makes me curious to see how it does in hot Aussie ground in the hands of an experienced Aussie prospector. The cost to send one over there probably pay itself off 5x over in free advertising for Garrett if it performed well! If one could use a mono in normal(ish) timings in places that otherwise require Enhance or a DD, there could be some nice performance gain there. Hard to know without someone trying it first though...

There was a similar thing except reverse for a Minelab detector at first too...I can't remember which one now. GPZ maybe? Where it was almost worth it to pay the airline ticket to go to Australia and buy one there until some kind of price adjustment happened. It was either the GPZ or 5000 I think...there was talk about doing just that for a month or two though on this forum, the exchange rate was more favorable then or something? Do dealers have to deal with USD and then sell in AUD and eat some fees there and raise the price because of currency risks or something maybe?

Oh, didn't know they couldn't sell anywhere as part of their contracts. I am not privy to the inner workings of dealerships. They are allowed to compete with other domestic dealers, but not overseas dealers then?

Simon laid out a case with some basic numbers somewhere for expecting the price to be about what it ended up being in reply to me doing some calculations like what you came up with Steve, showing that it shouldn't cost that much in Australia if you just take the basics into account. But it ends up costing much more in reality. There are so many posts now though that I'm not going to try to search through all that stuff, but it's there somewhere... I wonder if US dealers could work out individual shipping to AUS/NZ for a more reasonable price? I just got a package a bit bigger than the Axiom box, and probably 6 or 7lbs heavier, shipped for $260 from Shenzen, China with DHL.

Stoked to have this option again. Also stoked to see you've (unintentionally?) shown here that the recovery rate definitely seems faster than the 6000 on those surface trash signals, a big bonus for working trashy areas. This machine is going to be great in some specific areas for those who know how to make it work for them.

Probably a stupid question, but I'm not too boned up on Garrett tech yet - does the "non Z Lynk" version of the Carrot play nicely with the Axiom too? In terms of both being on, and off? I have two of them and love them, but they definitely don't play nicely with the Minelabs. Even when off, I can't have the pinpointer lower than my shoulders and behind my back when using bigger coils on the Z for instance. And when on, I have to set the 6k and Z a good distance away to use it.

I was hoping I could get a custom pack with the 11" DD and 11" mono, just so I could compare and understand them and know where to use other sizes of monos and DD's with this machine. Plus on the 6000 I haven't found any use at all for the larger coils yet since I just use the GPZ when more depth is required anyways, and I predict my usage will not change with the Axiom in the mix either. I thought I saw something, somewhere, about a bare bones machine only pack + 11" mono too priced like $400-500 less or something. What happened to that? Or did I see a ghost somewhere?

The delay doesn't bother me when I'm working slowly, or doing patch work either. But when exploring where speeding up and covering more ground is the name of the game, it starts to affect things more. I'm not sure what the 6k headphones/transmitter are rated for, but I guarantee they have a longer delay than 40ms in practice, there is something extra happening there then. I think the actual delay is closer to 100-150ms. My coil is 1-2ft away from targets when I'm in faster prospecting mode. And when I say fast, I mean a speed where I can still reliably hear anything except the faint signals that I don't want to waste time on, so it's not swinging a golf club. To move 2ft further than I do with the speaker in 40ms would mean I'm swinging at 34mph which is half the speed a pro baseball player swings a bat - not possible to do, especially not all day. So something is happening with that 6k BT transmitter. I don't know what, but if it's stated delay is 40ms then it's wrong. Based on reviewing some of my video, at peak prospecting speeds I'm swinging about 6-8mph at the end of the coil, so the delay on the 6k headphones is up to something closer to 75-150ms, but this is all just rough back of the envelope calcs. But I mean, it's irrelevant in terms of the Axiom. I'm just saying - it's a problem with BT. And the less people work patches or ground they know gold exists (and thus swing slower), and the more they start to go off into brand new places where ground coverage is the name of the game, the more obvious the problem will be. For me, it's basically 100% of what I'm doing this summer, and so the issue is notable.

Oh, that was your binoculars I saw glinting in the sun in the distance? Seriously though, I'm positive someone put a tracker on my truck and/or ATV at the RV park. It's why I stopped staying there. A group of people somehow knew the specific and exact areas I was working, like a heat seeking missile, without wasting time on all the unproductive areas in between. Their tracks literally just went directly to my patches I was working that year, even though I went out of my way to take different routes in, leave very little traces, etc. I would highly recommend anyone making videos in the US not show any appreciable gold. I literally had people message me telling me they tracked me down to here, here, and here. Like it was some kind of challenge, and I should be impressed they stalked me. It's a bit scary.

Nice, 17ms should be more than sufficient. Do you think there is a possibility that we could see an even hotter timing than Fine with future firmware updates? Just curious because as you mentioned you stayed in Fine while running through the hottest magnetites and serp grounds in California, I wonder if there might be a little further it could be pushed for those people who detect in milder ground and could use an ever hotter timing?

Good to know. The delay physically makes me lose orientation sometimes, or balance when what I'm seeing my body do doesn't match what my ears are hearing. Kinda like having your own voice echo back to you when talking on a bad cell connection and trying to keep the conversation straight. A worse version of it happens when play drums through Bluetooth LL headphones where I'm moving even faster (32 and 64th notes) - it disorients my brain/eyes from the movement of my body enough that I lose coordination and it's literally made me almost fall off my seat. My coordination is degraded enough recently due to other issues that I really hate having to use devices that make it even worse. Yet I have friends who it doesn't bother at all, but when I listen to them play I can tell their timing is slightly off and they don't realize it. I don't think BT belongs on any tool requiring hand/ear coordination until they get some tech like this with a delay below the threshold of human detection. Until then, me personally, I'm all for proprietary solutions like the WM12 and whatever this Z Lynk is. *this was in response to a post that now appears to be deleted...

If it has less latency than Bluetooth LL, I think it's a win, though I'm sure I'm in the minority here since people like headphone options and I only use them when there is no other option. I can't understand how no one notices the delay in the LL/APTX stuff though. How am I am seemingly the only one? It drives me crazy. A detector like the Axiom seems to lend itself to real prospecting in the same way the 6k does, and in those cases you aren't simply just swinging slow looking for faint signals, and the faster you swing the more pronounced the delay is with LL. The thing I'm wondering about is the inconvenience of needing to have a separate unit to use the headphones rather than built-in. Seems like one more thing to lose or forget unless I keep it attached all the time.

Is there battery discussion on another site? I haven't seen those comments. I suppose in part it's understandable though because when they first started building batteries into phones without replacement capability, there was a ton of issues. Even as recently as my S7, I lost my entire phone after the battery went bad. I also lost 2 cheapy field laptops where it was simply cheaper to buy new than replace the battery. Probably boils down to the quality of battery used, manufacturers today have figured out how to make them last much longer than they used to. A high quality battery shouldn't need replaced in the detector's lifetime. It's like USB - some people still remember the older micro-usb high failure rates and might be turned off by the USB. But the newer USB C is actually pretty reliable. I'm stoked to see Garrett used it so I can just use the cables I have laying around everywhere already, it's standard for electronics today.

The one thing that keeps nagging at the back of my mind is the way the coil connects to the screen. There is like a sharp bend in the coil cable where it goes down to wrap around the shaft. I'm guessing it didn't cause any issues with cable failure though in testing? Just wondering because that's how some of my GPX coils failed in the past, except at the coil end. Though the difference is they got much more back and forth movement/stress down there at the coil, whereas I guess up at the control unit it won't be moving much. The cable is better placed for setting the detector in ATV rifle racks at least though. I'm always worried I'm going to make a cable go bad on my 6k sitting in my racks.

Sounds like it opens the door to potentially use the old GPX trick with Salt Coarse in non-salt ground on the Axiom with Salt when detecting flats scattered with a ton of tiny bits of wire or tin slaw buried like 0-1" deep. A way to do "size discrim" essentially. Is it pretty much just the pulse delay changing, such that larger target depths are mostly unaffected as long as it's used in mild ground?

It takes effort sometimes to type "Axiom" and not "Axion" for some weird reason. Good to see I'm not the only one. Despite being lighter, the Axiom shaft looks burlier than the 6000's. Good looking machine.

Normal and Large mode both are described as timings to use in "highly mineralized soil" in the manual. Sounds like they are some flavor of the difficult timing? Normal doesn't appear to mean what Minelab defines Normal as. Fine seems to mean the opposite to Garrett as it means to Minelab too. I think Garrett's definition is more intuitive and is more like what many people who ran in Fine Gold back in the day thought it should be doing, but it did the opposite. The Axiom timings seem to combine both the gold and ground modes into one mode.

In Wyoming almost all the dealers they have listed are closed down businesses. The only one actually still open is a spa/hot tub sales place primarily. That and this drop ship place that actually seem to be located in Europe. They might want to do some updating... Or the dealers here might want to make sure they are actually listed. In my case I want to put an Axiom in my hands with a local dealer so I could answer a few questions on my own that aren't going to get answered on this forum. It's a 2-3 day round trip drive and 30% of the Axiom price in gas and hotels for me to go visit any dealer active on forums, so that's pointless in my case. So I'd like to find a local dealer.

To be clear: that drop shipper I "mentioned" is who Garrett themselves recommend on their find a dealer page for Wyoming, not me. Gerry asked if there were really drop ship only dealers, and I just answered his question with information from Garrett themselves.