jasong

Equalization is very different from noise filtering which is very different than compression. These things matter. The reason it's relevant here specifically is that the GPZ lacks any equalization ability. But in the GPZ you can emulate (kinda) a compressor with the volume limit, threshold, and volume. And the audio smoothing function is more or less a noise filter. Right, I'm not saying JP tailored his settings for the SP01. I'm asking wether the settings he runs/recommends are settings that might be taxing the GPZ onboard audio and creating a perceived need for the SP01 (coincidentally) among others who also use his settings. I don't know, I'm just going to have to test it myself and see because the way I run my GPZ I have never experienced any distortion at all, so step one is I need to try to replicate this distortion that other people see. Or maybe I have been hearing distortion and have been oblivious to it, in which case maybe I would benefit from an SP01 too. Can you give me your exact settings where you hear audio distortion so I can try to replicate it whenever I am able to get out into the field next?

Except that isn't exactly what is happening since Phrunt said on page or 2 or 3 that Pat claims there is no equalization occuring in the SP01. I'm not sure people read my post very closely. I'm sure the booster is doing something. Clearly. If it's not equalization, it's compression or noise filtering, or both. I understand the amp after preamp concept, but I don't personally see the distortion that would necessitate following the GPZ with another amp, and this is part of my confusion, since clearly others do. What I'm unsure about is if it's doing anything that can't be achieved simply by using the onboard GPZ controls more judiciously or by not following religiously the settings JP posted. For example: I don't experience distortion above 8 volume, but I also don't run my threshold at high levels (and I often use low smoothing), I'm usually below 18 and sometimes down to 6 or 8, while JP recommends 27 minimum and no smoothing. This might be irrelevant except that from what I can tell, everyone using this SP01 seems to be following JP's advice judiciously, which means running very high thresholds, and with unprocessed noise from no smoothing, which themselves may be causing this distortion that doesn't seem to happen to me. If the SP01 is simply compressing or filtering the audio to get this "brightness" then you are losing data in the audio stream in the exact same way you would as if one simply ran a lower threshold or used low audio smoothing, which seems to contradict the point of running those GPZ settings to begin with. In fact, running a lower threshold may sometimes bring out that tiny signals that get wiped out by the higher threshold levels, and then completely erased by filtering on top of that. What I'm trying to figure out is if a person needs to spend $250 more and hang another object off their chest just to achieve the same effect one can get for free, and with one less accessory, just by using the onboard GPZ processing. Or if this SP01 is actually doing something unachievable within the GPZ controls (apart from the boosting). Next time I meet someone in the field I'll just have to test it myself I think because something isn't making sense to me here. I get the SP01 for a detector that lacks the audio processing of the GPZ, but I wonder if people sticking to other people's settings is causing some of the perceived need for the SP01 on the GPZ.

Increasing volume is like increasing sensitivity? That's a new on me. Volume is specifically an audio function. Sensitivity is an RX function related to amplification of the raw detected signal, not the audio signal. Is this not the case with the GPZ? If what he says is true, then wouldn't all of us who run at 20 sensitivity want to be running higher GPZ volumes to get more sensitivity beyond 20 instead of lowering the GPZ volume and using a booster to bring it back up?

I'd be interested to hear what Nenad or Pat have to say about what the SP01 filter is doing. Info is slim in their literature. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but it appears to me to be doing something like either lowering/filtering the threshold/volume/volume limit or using some type of audio smoothing to "brighten" up the target signals. What I'm wondering is if backing off the threshold or using low smoothing to achieve the SP01 filter effect within the GPZ itself allows one to crank the volume and volume limit up higher without experiencing the distortion reported or needing to use a 3rd party module. I have run low thresholds and low smoothing since day 1 for the most part, potentially why I don't see a need for an SP01 myself? Question: does everyone here relying on an SP01 to clean up or brighten the audio with the filter function run more or less JP's recommended settings with a high threshold (let's say 22+) and no audio smoothing? What I'm curious about is if these settings are just introducing a lot of noise that people are eliminating with the SP01 rather than the onboard GPZ controls because it's considered bad form to do so with the latter, but not the former. That would also create a situation where it's better to run the GPZ at lower volume and then boost it with a module, if the sheer amount of noise is overwhelming the audio processor in the GPZ at any except low amplification. Running a thold too high will mask smaller signals with noise, giving the impression they need to be amplified when the actual sound level may be audible if the noise floor was simply just reduced with the onboard GPZ processing, and the volume stayed the same. The volume could then be raised for those with hearing damage too. The volume limit can also be raised along with the volume, especially when you've cleaned up the amount of noise. I'm curious what people have their volume limit set to as well. I don't have an SP01 to test or I'd try to answer my own questions here.

If it's just about volume boosting then I understand why those with bad hearing use a booster, I still don't understand why people with good hearing swear by them though. What people tell me in the field is that they are enhancing signals, not making them louder, but I've been unable to hear anything that couldn't be replicated for free with the GPZ audio controls so far. I don't understand - what specifically should the GPZ have that it doesn't have or what makes what it does have terrible? The GPZ has volume, volume limit, tone, threshold control, and audio smoothing. With these you can filter EMI and emulate a compressor which seems to me the only things the SP01 could be doing. These control the WM12 remotely. The WM12 seems to just operate as a remote speaker, not a processing unit. Which is IMO the way it should be for a piece of field equipment. A fancier WM12 means they'll charge even more than they already do, and losing or breaking one would break the bank. I think the WM12 is built physically like a cheap toy and I am not trying to say it's a great piece of equipment, but I honestly don't understand the criticism of the GPZ audio processing. To me, it's the right idea, it just needs more Smoothing control, like a slider and not just 3 settings between 0-low-high. So few actually use Low Smoothing or run lower thresholds along with vol limits and volumes but then are totally willing to use filtering on the SP01, it doesn't make sense to me. I can definitely see a use for the SP01 on a unit like the SDC which really does lack audio processing control. But on the GPZ, I'm confused. What I'm curious to know is if the SP01 filtering is doing anything that you can't do for free using the onboard GPZ audio processing controls. And if so, what specifically it's doing which cannot be done with the GPZ controls.

I can understand for those who use hearing aids. What I'm not getting is what exactly these modules do that the onboard GPZ audio processing does not do. What is the SP01 filtering? The GPZ is digital so it's not really picking up analog EMI (aside from case interference such as discussed in this thread, which can be eliminated by not operating devices close to the box). The EMI the GPZ picks up is through the coil, and manifests itself also as digital signals which could just as easily be targets like a gold nugget. A filter has no way to tell, at the end of the processing chain. So if running a 3rd party filter on the GPZ, isn't one running the risk of filtering targets out too? If so, isn't this counterproductive and antithetical to running the threshold high and using no smoothing as most who I've met who run boosters tend to do? Why not just turn the threshold down or run in Low Smoothing instead and have one less thing to clip to your harness?

I'm curious what is lacking on the WM12/GPZ that makes it's audio require 3rd party modules? Wireless headphones I get. But the boosters I don't understand since I cannot see a situation where both the volume on the WM12 is insufficient and headphones are not the better option at that point. The audio is digital and fairly pure tones, so there isn't much EQ to do. You can limit volume and alter tones inside the GPZ. A compressor/limiter I could see the usage of but no one makes one of those. I haven't done a test, but I have to guess it's around 90-100dB at full blast, which is enough to damage hearing. The WM12 can go loud enough to literally make my ears hurt, and I've played punk and metal drums without ear protection for 25 years so my ears aren't exactly ultra sensitive. I must be missing something since everyone seems to be using boosters, but I genuinely cannot figure out what purpose they serve on a GPZ.

You'll be able to get that rig in and out of pretty much any of those roads in Gold Basin where people camp, no problem. Guys take 40ft 5th wheels back there. It's fairly safe back there during prospecting season, It's when everyone leaves during the summer that you have to be careful leaving stuff unattended back there. Some of the prospectors who basically live out there will watch after your stuff while they are there if you make friends with them. The only place I'd feel iffy making camp and leaving it unattended is on the roads behind Gold Basin. The tweakers out of Dolan Springs and White Hills use those roads to go run their meth and stash their stolen stuff, Cyclopic and the Senator mine roads. It's a bit better now with the recent busts but I see some sketchy looking people still every now and then, and when I see people hide when I roll over the hill I assume they are up to no good. Also, if you have to go into a town for propane, water, dump your tanks, etc - I would go to Meadview instead of Dolan Springs. That Dolan Springs RV park is questionable, trash/feces ridden, and I don't trust some of the people that stay there one bit. Both Meadview parks are good, run by good trustworthy people, and the people that stay are not usually the questionable types but just other prospectors or tourists.

Along with Simon's idea, you might also check to see if the wireless device itself is interfering with the GPZ due to close proximity to the GPZ control box. Reason I say this is because my phone will interfere with the GPZ if I bring it within about 1 inch or so of the control box. I noticed this the first week I had my GPZ as I had my phone in my pocket. I thought the coil was picking it up but it was EMI and not signal, and was actually the phone getting too close to the control box. From memory - it only interferes if the phone is basically touching the box, and worse at some parts of the control box than others. If your friend is mounting the aftermarket devices to the control box, he might try removing them at least a foot away and see if the problem persists.

Nice work Oneguy, and inspiring too to see some great gold come from a place a little closer to home.

Do my eyes deceive me, or have they stopped running ads from paper staking firms and LRL scammers? Definitely willing to pay for a subscription again if so.

Well, in fairness, for those who are really paying attention - I posted the confidentiality document in this thread indicating a release on or before Dec 18th over a month ago. The link I posted goes to the actual FCC database, which for some reason is down today (it was up yesterday). Not that it particularly matters, but Steve the link you included is actually a 3rd party data scraping site that is emulating the actual FCC website. Same info in the end though I guess, just about a week delayed it seems. If that link dies, the product code to search the FCC database for this GPX 6000 is "Z4C-0039"

I for one hope that it was all fake. Because if it really was in Wyoming and I ignored this whole treasure hunt entirely as a waste of time, I'll never forgive myself if it was real. Some of those larger nuggets are quite unique and easy to identify. Even if the supposed discoverer wants to remain anonymous, he needs to convert the gold to money or he hasn't found anything. So if those nuggets are sold without melting down, it would be interesting to see who the seller is and if they are related to Fenn somehow. In fact, short of melting down, I'm not sure how the finder would convert any of this to money without being identified, it's all pretty unique stuff and the market for it is not large. I wonder who he bought those nuggets from to begin with and if any of them were detected in the US.

A contact zone isn't necessarily a definite, easy to trace line between two types of rock. It can be, but not always. For instance, if you have shearing between two rock types along the contact where structural weakness occurred then you might have quite a large zone (10+ meters) of gouge, and it may look undefinite or difficult to delineate. The gouge is also structurally weakened compared to surrounding rock so it can provide channels for fluids, so it might appear as a large swarm/zone of quartz veining, or at least that may be the easiest way to see it. Calcite is another common one to see here. Veins don't necessarily mean contact zone, faulting or shearing though, conversely. Geology is complex because so much time can pass in which things can change, and one small area can experience a massive variety of different mineralization sequences, erosion, and structural alteration because our planet is dynamic. There is often no simple answer, and each location kinda needs to unwrapped and solved individually. You are asking the right questions though. I don't have the answers to all of them because I am still learning too. Going beyond "gold is where you find it" and thinking about stuff like this is, IMO, what makes the difference between a prospector and detectorist. I think Tboykin also mentioned something else I agree with, and you have spoken about too - a pan is sometimes more useful then a detector looking for pockets/hard rock sources. As most pockets I've ever found or known about have all had a lot of flour gold in the dirt leading to the pocket. If you aren't finding flour in that hillside patch, then it might indicate that wash/stream reworking is occuring as the desert washes during monsoon can just concentrate heavier gold and wash away flour. If you are finding flour but no nuggets in that area with all the interesting looking potential ore, then you may want to spend a few hundred bucks to assay some samples. One good hard rock project, if it has scale, can be worth 20+ years of nugget shooting. Similarly, the depth at which you find the flour can go a long ways pointing you where to look for a source. If it's only deeper than it may mean your source eroded away already, or has been reburied. Finding it on the surface is a good indicator that there may yet be something to discover in situ still. I spend less and less time with a detector these days and more time with an ATV, GPS, and a ton of sample bags. Take them back to camp and pan them, then concentrate on places showing color with the detector. But I am not really looking for nuggets any more, I'm concentrating on larger scale stuff to develop and sell to companies, as the challenge and puzzles never deplete so I can do this for the rest of my life, while nuggets are getting really not very profitable to find these days unless one lives right in the goldfields.

I believe it's backwards - TrinityAU, aka Ray Mills, should be able to find his stuff by one of those two names. Tboykin has illustrated (masterfully) what are known as bench or terrace deposits. I agree it's a likely reason for what you've found. Depending what part of AZ you are in, the situation can be a bit more complex as many of the pediments in which these gold bearing washes are located have been incised, then re-incised many times over, cutting through multiple layers of old wash channels and bench deposits. So, often you will find that one particular wash has cut down into, and intersected an older, buried, gold bearing wash channel, and the small current-day wash is now re concentrating that gold with no apparant hardrock source. No other wash in the area will have gold because the modern day wash has not yet incised the old gold bearing wash channels. It also depends where a newer wash cuts into an older wash, some parts of the older fossil wash channel may not have many (or any) nuggets while some parts may be quite rich. Also many of these old washes are now basically just caliche and some caliche is soft (basically still gravel) while some is hard (false bedrock) and more resistant to secondary erosion, so some erodes into modern washes easily while some is not as easy a few hundred feet away. This is very common in Western Arizona where heavy monsoon rains and a once much wetter climate have created complex layers of washes in the pediment gravels. The situation can be further complicated by the fact that in AZ many of the rich nugget areas were originally fed by lenses/pods (aka pockets), largely surface occurences of very rich ore and not long, continuous veins. Many of these are now entirely eroded away, or buried under the pediment gravels leaving no trace, making the source a "mystery". They can form in swarms, so that you will have one nearby shedding prickly gold and another further up the pediment which is providing more worn gold since it has travelled. So, often you will find both slightly water worn gold along with pocket gold in the same spot, though the gold might have multiple sources. Especially if a modern wash has incised an older drainage. Also, a piece of speci gold that has travelled and then broken up can often have both water worn looking gold crumbling apart on the outside, and more prickly gold on the inside, which can lead to what you have in your hand as that speci erodes downhill and breaks up.

Truly impressive work. I think that decimal point is right...

Getting permission is the way to go for sure, but if that is not possible then check into the Fair Use Doctrine. If you are just excerpting, commenting, or reporting on a small segment of the article then you can often use it, even if it's copyrighted. Basically, I think it boils down to relevancy and size of the excerpted piece. Your work must be clearly your own and the excerpted bit can't really be the entire focus of your content, it has to just be a minor part and you must be creating something "new" to call it your own. This is something I became aware of while making videos, where people commonly take small segments of other people's content and include them in their own videos. But it applies to any media including print. For instance: people would often steal my videos and then repost them as their own, except zoomed in, cropped, or removing audio/adding songs over my voice, adding nothing new, essentially just posting 100% of my content and collecting ad revenue on it for themselves. No attribution given to the original creator. This is a copyright violation (and the most common). Similarly, claiming or branding someone else's content as your own is a copyright violation. Grey area: people would take 10 to 15 second clips of all the popular nugget shooting videos and then compile them all into one larger video, just showing the nugget reveals. Collecting ad revenue for themselves. Might credit the original creator, might not. IMO this is copyright violation, but interpretation can vary. Not copyright violation: taking 5 seconds of my clip, showing it in a smaller window within the video while someone films themselves commenting on the clip, talking about equipment, using the clip to demonstrate good/bad technique, geology, whatever...making something new and original, and crediting the original creator of the excerpted clip. Few make the effort to be legit like this, but this is proper use of the Fair Use Doctrine. The doctrine applies to print media, forums, videos, whatever. But research it yourself, the link I gave is a government website but there are lots of legal opinions you can Google as well.

True, but like Minelab detectors and the Chinese detector forgeries, the cheap cameras are mostly just Chinese knockoffs of GoPro, which is probably one reason they are priced higher comparatively. A GoPro Black 7 is like $250 right now. Its probably the best all around detecting and prospecting camera I've owned. Image stabilization is a game changer, makes videos so much more watchable. Waterproof without any add on gadgets. Voice control for when hands are full with pick and detector. That's why I was curious if there was something even better now, I got this one and stopped paying attention to new cameras for the last year. Maybe I'm just used to outrageously overpriced detectors, because $250 seems cheap to me now. 😄

Oops, I doubled posted somehow.

Curious, what's wrong with GoPro? They work underwater or out of water so you only need one camera. Small, so no problem to take detecting. Lots of mounting styles available. Great image stabilization. For outdoors stuff they have always seemed like the best option to me but maybe I'm missing out on better options.

101 yesterday (on my truck thermometer) and it's supposed to get down to 16 Tuesday here, snow for 2 days. It's going to break all the tree branches here since they still have leaves, which is unfortunate because we just had a massive heatwave and drought which has them on the verge of dying already. So little grows here due to the excessive wind, it takes forever to grow them back.

Bottom of the box, next to the serial number sticker.

It was a bunch of problems I think. The guy I bought mine from said it was really noisy or not stable or something, along with the tiny target issue. He said he had the main board replaced right before I bought it and it solved the problem. I just remember I got a pretty good deal on my machine because he didn't seem to want to mess with with it anymore when he got it back and I just wanted a PI that I could afford. Were it not for that, I never would have afforded a PI and I'd have given up detecting long ago because I was not doing great with my GMT. Thanks for messing up, Minelab. I guess.

Mine is serial# 1000007. I bought it slightly used from a US dealer in 2008 (or 2009?) who I believe used it prior to the "official" 4500 release. It was probably one of the first units to arrive in the US. Lucky #7. Also, with those old units, you might want to check to make sure the board was updated. My memory is foggy, but there was some kind of main board recall after they were first released and not all of them got the faulty boards replaced. I think anyways. There is a green tag on mine that I believe says Feb 2008, but it's too destroyed to really read.

It's too bad none of those old timers seemed to post much to the forums where their words could be remembered. They were mostly gone or no longer in the field by the time people like myself started detecting for gold, I never met them or heard their stories. I've run across many of the areas they once detected just by systematic prospecting, and that's about it. I have a big 4'x6' metal sign sitting on my land out there from the old truck stop coffee shop when it was called something other than T&A. Sapp Bros maybe? I believe it was taken there by an old detectorist called "8lb Dick" and/or his buddies who mostly worked that area in VLF days. I got the mining prospectus for the project when I bought the land, and it shows a big operation out there with many trommels, jigs, dozers, excavators, they even had suction dredges set up in the tailings pond, but that was people from (coincidentally) Wyoming operating it at that point. I'd love to be able to hear the history and stories of what they found and where, but unfortunately now it's mostly just piecing together bits and pieces of 2nd hand accounts since it appears all the people involved are now passed on and few alive remember much specific. Anyways, nice to see posts like this, it documents some stuff that few would have ever seen otherwise.