jasong

Please do. Something just seems fishy here to me. Unless I'm missing something, there seems to be a large scale issue with poor cable/coil shielding. As usual though, Minelab's complete lack of response makes it impossible to do much but guess. I'd send mine in to the shop, but I know what the response is going to be, based on others who've sent in with the exact same problems. And I can't lose a full month of prospecting out of a short 3 month season for no reason. So I'm just going to sell it once Axiom's become available and stick to the locations where it works ok for now, and thus I won't be able to cut it apart and see for myself since I need to sell it to fund the Axiom. I did take some video showing normal and unstable operation, not quite sure where to post it though as really this has nothing to do with Coiltek and I just have written the 6000 off myself now - I'm now positive there is some kind of issue - so it seems pointless to make another dedicated thread on the problem since I know it exists, and don't really care if no one else sees it or not. Jen's point about cable shielding might be a good first place to look though if you cut into things. I'll be curious to see.

The 6000 must have some large scale shielding relating issue on it's stock coils then. Because in the same location as other 6000's, mine acts the same as the other machines - so it doesn't seem as if it has a coil fault unique to my specific machine/coil. Unless literally all the coils sent on 6000's to the US at the same time all had shielding issues? If that's speculation then I'd love to hear an actual, non speculative answer that makes logical sense. Because this one single issue is enough to make me sell my 6000 as soon as I can get an Axiom in hand to replace it with no prospecting downtime. It's totally unusable in some locations, purrs along just fine in others. It's not a loose wire/failing cable/bad connector type problem. That we have to spend another $400 on another coil just to potentially fix what sure appears to be a factory problem or design issue is pretty low IMO, if that is really what is happening.

Sheriff and even BLM rangers all have the power to arrest high graders. They just choose not to, generally. Because in their view it's not easy or even possible to prove the ownership/validity of claims in the first place. Further, actual boundaries are a fuzzy topic and the sheriff can't exactly rely on your own corner posts as being accurate. Things like this... That's why mostly they insist they won't get involved and say it's a civil matter in court. You have one other option: you could try to talk to the county prosecuter. If you can convince them both of the validity of your claim/boundaries (get a real survey), as well that the value of the theft is large, you might be able to convince them that it's a case worth their time to prosecute. If the DA agrees it's worth prosecuting such a case, they might recommend the sheriff patrol the area or respond to a call. But it'd have to be something like systematic claim jumping and theft of a high value. Try different carriers. Verizon used to be best for rural. Now I think ATT is better. Also, wireless cell repeaters/boosters can take 0 bars to 2 or 3 bars, especially if you get the antenna up really high.

If it's really that rich of a claim then why not file for a plan and work it with your own people on site? Or have someone go patrol it once daily with a camera? If you have a plan filed, you should be able to also file for temporary occupation and keep someone posted out there beyond 14 days. Though being in California, maybe things are different, dunno. You can't file criminal charges in a civil lawsuit even if you prove they stole something, so at best you'll be able to recover whatever gold you can prove they stole. And it's going to be an expensive, long suit doing that where 100% of the burden of proof is on you. And in the end they still won't be arrested either. Whatever the case, don't use violence, or even implications of violence. That will put you 100% in the wrong and make YOU liable for criminal prosecution.

Yes, there are places pushes still reveal a lot more gold. It all depends on the depositional environment to begin with. The obvious one is deeper washes. But the key factor, no matter where you are at, is to find spots where the erosional forces bringing rock/soil down onto a patch were either greater or less than the erosional force removing rock/soil from the patch. That's the basic balance to keep in mind when evaluating a spot. In places where high energy events occured - floods, landslides, streams, glaciers, or gravity due to very steep terrain - in general deposit more overburden via erosion than is removed by wind, you might get deeper patches. Where the converse is true, especially where mineralization is not geologically ancient (like NNV), deflation dominates and usually dictates a shallower maximum patch depth. In AZ you often get both a shallow enriched surface (deflationary) patch from wind, together with a deeper, less concentrated patch at depth because of this. Each individual location varies due to it's geomorphological history.

Hmm. Major head scratcher to me. Something doesn't make sense here, I can't put my finger on it yet though. There is some puzzle piece missing. You may have it with the windings...hmm. Well anyways, thanks for posting the results, very helpful. Simon and NedKelly posted Coiltek results on the page prior to this one - I didn't mean to flip the page here, people should check the actual results out on the previous page, rather than reading my rambling.

Something doesn't make sense to me. Geosense is something living inside the control box, not the coil. I don't get why just changing the coil would cause it to work better if Geosense was the problem? If so, it should be a problem with all 6000's then too, wouldn't it? They all have Geosense. Either that or a good percentage of coils are actually bad and a lot of people just are so used to noise that they can't tell the difference between a stable and unstable detector, and that seems unlikely. Mine does the same as yours - every 5-10 mins goes crazy. Does it even more frequently if I set it down to dig a target. But that's the same way basically every 6000 acts that other people own who I know too. Thing is - it's highly variable based on the location I'm using it. Sometimes I can't get it to go stable at all, ever. Other times it almost runs like a dream, then loses it only occasionally. That problem just doesn't seem coil based to me if it changes with location. I'm confused here. It seems like there is either some large scale fault with the 6000 and/or it's 11" coils if these Coilteks make these problems go away. If so, Minelab should be seriously commenting and letting us know wtf and if it'll be fixed without us having to pay to correct it. Or, if there is no problem to fix, comment on why the heck an aftermarket coil seems to fix a problem but in fact it's not really fixing anything because there isn't actually a problem...? Even typing that makes no sense... Which is enough on it's own merit that I think Minelab should comment too to clarify.

Thanks for the results guys. Keep 'em coming. Man, almost tempted to just keep the 6000 and ax the Axiom purchase if the 6k becomes totally usable with a $400 aftermarket coil. That stability problem is far and away the main reason I want to ditch it. On the other hand, don't want to spend another $400 on something that doesn't help too. Wish someone with another 11" or Coiltek lived anywhere less than a full day's drive from me so I could see... Can't really stop mid-season and waste a month with a detector in the shop either. No good solutions that aren't going to lose me a big part of the summer season or another chunk of wasted change. So strange though. Why would simply changing coils solve the problem? Simon, like your 6k, mine just randomly goes unstable constantly, even when sitting and not moving. Every 6k I've been around does it to some degree. How does a different coil solve that? I don't get it. Did you try JW's new 11" on your machine ever to see if it made a difference?

Inertial navigation using accelerometers and then dead reckoning is far more accurate than GPS for moving systems. It's sufficient for things like general ground sensing. When used in combination with mag sensors and coil data, you could achieve sub-inch resolution easily. Essentially you would make the ground it's own reference frame while swinging the coil using inertial navigation, and then tie that high resolution work "chunk" to a traditional lat/lon reference frame via GPS.

I bought one from either you or Doc (it was off ebay, can't remember who sold it now) and it absolutely was not a real ferrite ring or equivalent to the Minelab one. Just an FYI. It was highly magnetic, same as pure iron, and contained a high amount of actual iron. It was quite a lot more dense than the ML ferrite too. Also, I sanded the paint off the bottom of the ML and that ferrite ring, and that one I bought was silvery/metallic (not ferrite) and the ML ferrite was powdery black (as a ferrite should be). No big deal, I never saw any difference with the real ML ferrite ring. But whatever that one I bought was, absolutely was not equivalent to the ML ferrite and nothing I could do could balance it out due to the high amount of pure iron content in it. Pure iron is not ferrite. Ferromagnetic vs ferrimagnetic.

Agreed. This is kind of what I gather Geosense is trying to do already, though much simpler and maybe not technically "AI" yet. AI needs either constant human feedback to teach it as it makes changes, or it needs to be able to acquire it's own feedback to adjustments. Teaching it to discrim gold and iron using existing discrim (or lack thereof) circuitry is not something neural nets can do unless a human is right there for every target telling it what is good and what isn't - impossible since humans ourselves are not capable of doing this accurately to begin with, and we are slow creatures in terms of feedback to a computer. Neural nets come up with novel, interesting solutions because they iterate billions of cycles through a sort of process emulating evolution. Humans can't provide that much feedback in a useful timespan. EMI and to a lesser extent ground noise however, do not require human feedback because noise can be defined mathematically. A neural net can make on the fly adjustments and see for itself in real time if they've made a positive or negative result, and continually adjust based on that simple algorithm. Their limit is the speed of the CPU, not the speed of the human providing feedback. I followed the Alpha Zero (Google) AI with a ton of interest. I love chess, and it taught itself to be the strongest chess player in history within a few days of just playing itself. AI's do great when they have constant feedback, even if the feedback is only from themselves. If they have to sit and wait for humans to give them feedback, then they aren't much better than a human themselves.

Interesting. Almost tempted to buy a coil to see if it'll fix my 6000 stability. I really don't want to throw more money at it if I'm selling to buy an Axiom though. Were you running with the speaker or headphones? If it's seriously a coil problem and that simple then Minelab should be giving people coils, not making them buy them to fix a factory problem. Interested to see if it's just you, or everyone's stability improves with a new coil.

That's my first thought too though, seriously. Hard to tell, but trying to decipher what's on the screen, I bet this is some software that comes with some $20k Kellyco LRL or something. Edit: here's the first one that came up on Google Images. The first 4 axis rotation icons are the same, just different order. It's probably some older version of this, or similar type program.

Definitely recommend the last one too, after first learning the basics in a prospecting book. They'll talk in great detail about the geology of that specific area - then you can go out and put your eyes and hands on exactly what they are describing, know what it is, and recognize it in other areas. Prospecting is all about pattern recognition. The best prospectors I've ever know all just seem to have a "nose" for gold, and what I've observed is that nose is another term for simply recognizing patterns subconsciously, knowing what conditions were most likely to produce gold in the past. So the more you can familiarize yourself with actual, real conditions in the field in places known for producing gold, the better "nose" you'll have for sniffing out nuggets in brand new places too.

I'm pretty certain it's a limb cast. I've found a handfull of them thinking it's also what you are diagramming there too, but every time I was wrong and it was ID'ed as a limb cast when I took it in to the museum and had the experts look at it. But yeah, definitely get a 2nd opinion if you can. There is a natural history museum in Vegas too, they might have resident paleontologists like the museum near me has. A bunch of people sandblasting bones out of rock in the back of the museum, always seem happy to have someone walk down and show them something new and get their opinions, I've learned a lot from people like that.

Man permissions are getting hard to come by these days too. I have permissions from a few large ranches thankfully. But it's not like 20 years ago. Now a lot of these ranches are being bought up and consolidated by very rich oilmen from Texas and whatnot, and it's getting harder to get in contact with them. Usually I get their attorney or something and they just say "nah, we don't give permission, too much liability risk". They will sell gate keys and what not. But it's like, how many $500 gate keys do I gotta buy through checkerboard land just to get to where I want to go? Argh...

For sure, never know till you check! In my case usually what I'm doing first is driving huge areas with the ATV, just looking at the ground for gravels. I take a bunch of ziplock baggies of sample dirt with GPS coords, pan them later at home. Then come back out with the 6000 and cover about a square mile of land around every sample site that had fine gold in the sample pans. Kinda narrows down the amount of land I have to walk over. I'm sure I'm missing some nugget patches that just didn't have any fine gold in them though too - not uncommon in Arizona to find that for instance.

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?