jasong

Thanks everyone, and thanks for letting this get some visibility. The sheriff went out there, and after speaking with him and learning some things he found, I have good reason to believe it's someone local, as in within a few miles or so. Also good reason to believe now that they were either prospectors or associated with prospectors. I think there were 2 or more people involved. This narrows it down considerably, plus since most people leave for the hot months there aren't a lot of people there to begin with so that cuts it down to an easily investigatable handful of people. As in, like maybe 10 people. The sheriff has some ideas, and I happen to be a pretty good detective sort myself too, not to mention I talk to a lot of people since I wander around so much exploring, and drug addicts tend to blab eventually, especially when reward money is involved. I'm going to find out who did it. If the thieves are reading this (and I'm pretty sure someone has told you about this post by now), you can gamble on your buddies staying quiet, or we can work something out to get my stuff returned in the next 2 days. Otherwise, it's prison and damages, which are already at $15k to my RV and Conex. Might also ask yourself who along the road in has a camera pointed at the road because you stole from them too. Hmm. 3 truckloads of stolen gear is pretty hard to hide.

Yep, and this area is notorious for meth heads too unfortunately. They go scrapping for old junk everywhere, including people's "not junk" behind gates. I also have people saying they track me down from videos I made, so it could be that too. I had a guy seemingly get angry at me for not taking him to one of my patches, so he said he flew a drone around until he figured out where I was at and left it at that "I know where you are". Usually get a few of them with every video, 50 requests to take people out to private patches, then 1 or 2 that really take it personal when I won't and get angry. Suppose it's possible one got angry enough to go burglarize me. Most likely is local tweakers though, they just did it to a guy a few miles away this winter too, sheriff says they get burglaries out there from tweakers year round.

Sorry for the off topic post, I just wanted to get this out there quickly and please delete if this shouldn't be here. I had a ton of stuff stolen in Arizona, not sure what exactly yet as I have to drive down now to find out. They abandoned my RV on the road since I sabotaged the wheels to prevent theft (after they dragged it 1000ft ruining my axles and drums), but took everything inside, and took a 40ft Conex worth of tools and gold prospecting equipment. So much stuff I'm not even sure what all was in it until I can do a full inventory. So, if anyone sees someone in NW Arizona trying to offload a bunch of drywashers, crusher stuff, cleanup stuff, sluices, especially if they seem like tweakers, please let me know. Also, a Yamaha Grizzly ATV, green, 400cc. Tons of tools, most the battery powered stuff was Makita. Had a Troy Bilt gold vac, a smaller keene drywasher (is it the 141?), a bigger Keene drywasher (black), a puffer Keene drywasher. I'm forgetting a ton of stuff but, you get the idea, if some tweaker is going around trying to sell gold prospecting stuff for cheap to people, get a name if you can. Mohave county Sheriff is out there now, if anyone has heard anything at all, please let the sheriff know. Had all my detectors with me in Wyoming so none of them were stolen. If anyone hears anything, anyone mentioning anything about who did this, please let me or the sheriff know. The gates and the chain were cut, plus cut through 4 large boron carbide shackles. they had tools and it was planned. It wasn't in a place that someone randomly would have found, I suspect they are local and/or prospectors at this time. It sounds like some of my con buckets were stolen, which would look like dirt bucket to someone who didn't know it might be valuable so if they weren't prospectors, they must be familiar with it to take buckets of dirt. It may have happened a few weeks ago, I just now got someone track me down from some papers they found in my abandoned trailer and let me know about it sitting there in the middle of the road. It's been 110 or hotter out there so there weren't many prospectors around but one said he thought he saw my trailer moved at least a few weeks ago. If anyone has info leading to an arrest with at least some of my items found so I know it was them, I will give you $1000 cash. We can work it out anonymously if preferred. Thanks

Yes, so will your Equinox and GB2. In the place I went, I'd use the EQ800 personally for the VDI capability, but that's just me. My buddy does great with the GB2. Be careful though, some of these places aren't really the types you can just wander around and detect randomly. There is a reason a lot of people don't post to forums about it and keep it secretive. I had to do a ton of research just to find a few stray polygons of land, and I'm not talking about the kind of basic research most do to go out prospecting in NV or AZ. Some don't bother with that, and that's gonna get them shut down eventually IMO. These spots are too small to handle much attention and there is a lot of money and power around some of them who would prefer you not be there. The sheriff will ticket you for parking while poor at one spot if he sees your truck on the side of the road.

Looks familiar! It is tough hunting, I dislocated my shoulder and tore my rotator cuff falling down what looked like a hydraulic cut there on my first day and had to leave. All I ever found were square nails with my 4500, I was digging them out of solid shale down 8 to 12 inches deep, no idea how they got there but decided the 4500 was pointless there. Went back two years later with a Fors Core (no backup), and it quit 2 hours into detecting and had to cancel the trip. Ran into another guy detecting there who I saw off in the distance on a big tailing pile, and which turned out to be my buddy and we had a laugh since it's kinda secretive and we both ended up there, and basically on the same hill and same tailing pile on the same day via two completely different paths of discovery. I'm scared to go back with the GPZ and try again, haven't been back for like 4 years out of sheer superstition.

Might get in touch with me when you get down there. You helped me get started in jade prospecting a few years back when I was trying to learn what to look for by sending me a nice jade sample and that was a big help, I went from guessing to knowing exactly how to test and look for stuff with that sample. This summer the company I optioned my jade prospects to just exercised the option to buy me out, so that was all a success and I'm able to use that money to get back to the field full time prospecting again. I appreciate your help when I was starting out. Now, I have a new gold project in the vicinity of SNV, and another guy associated with the jade stuff might be out on that one too and might be someone to meet if you are still doing jade stuff in China. I'm unsure of what I can and cannot say at this point though due to non-disclosure clauses so I may not be able to take anyone out to the project until it's completed, but who knows, maybe there is a good connection to be made if so. Also, if you happen to be in Wyoming before then for travel or whatever, I can show you what will be one of the two first new commercial jade exploration projects in the lower 48 in probably 4 or 5 decades.

Only 7 antennas? I got you, Minelab, already obsoleted the competition for you. I put antennas on the antenna. Beat that, know it all scientists! Also massive increased sensitivity to diamonds and meatloaf sandwiches by invoking the imagery of a half donkey/half falcon drawing shooting a plasma beam from it's beak. And only I offer the official flag of Burkina Faso on my products. Finally, in a market first, after 17 years of painstaking research I've finally perfected flame imagery on the handle.

For mono vs mono in mild ground, the best scaling/comparison factor I've found is just by comparing total area of a coil. However, with higher degrees of ellipticity it may not scale as well, but every coil I've tested has more or less followed this rule of thumb. A 24x12 has an area of 226 square inches and a 14" round has an area of 154 square inches. So, IMO, the 24x12 will get more raw depth on stuff above ~1 gram or so generally, in mild ground. But with that much ellipticity, that may only hold true towards the center of the coil, I'm not sure since I've never tested one like that. The only place you'd see a 14" DD get more depth on larger stuff is in bad ground where you have dial down your settings to run the 24x12 mono. On a DD, your RX and TX lobes individually are the effective size of the coil, not the total coil size. Unless something has changed with newer DD designs, I haven't been following very closely. You just have to kinda try and see on your particular ground to know which solution is best if your ground is hot - either go with a DD or dial back your mono with Enhance or whatever you prefer.

I haven't tried to balance on the ML one yet, but I will when I get some free time again to get away from town. The fact that the aftermarket ferrite is conductive is the concerning part to me. Because if a person tries to balance it in manual they will be changing both X and G and leaving it set wrong. At least that's the way I understand it. That, and the X itself may be not matching the X in the ML ferrite either.

I was going to post this in one of the X Coil threads, but it might be of interest to everyone. I bought a replacement ferrite ring since I left my ML ferrite in Arizona. It's one of the Doc's ferrites with the white backside (off Ebay), I did not realize they were not ML ferrites when I bought it. The OEM Minelab ferrites have a black backside. It would not balance on the X Coils at all and actually sounded like a screaming target (I didn't try the Z14) so I reported that to the coil manufacturer. He responded that the white backed aftermarket rings are not the same as the ML rings. So, as I normally do, I checked for myself, bought an authentic ML ring, and he was right. They are the same size, but the Doc's ring is 10 grams heavier (something I noticed immediately but did not have a ML ring to compare to until recently). It is also more magnetic. The Doc's ring is also conductive whereas the ML ring is non-conductive - the Doc's ring was reading about 38 ohms from side to side whereas the ML ring read infinity. And after I sanded the backs to get a fresh surface to check resistances on I noticed the ML ring looks dull and black as a ferrite should, but the Doc's ring looks shiny and metallic, like iron. So, clearly there are differences between the two rings. Thought people might like to know even if you are just using the stock coil, as I'm not sure how this affects the ground balance, but someone could be running suboptimally using this ring.

One more update, after talking to the manufacturer it looks like all coils will now come with these plastic spikes/clamps on the cables.

Not visible in my photo because my coil didn't come with them.

Do you have one of the stock Minelab ferrites Jin? They are a bit black colored on the back. I bought a replacement that wasn't made by Minelab, with a white backing, and the manufacturer said it wouldn't balance on anything but the stock ferrite. Sure enough, it screamed on the white backed ferrite and wouldn't balance it. I haven't tried the Minelab ferrite yet. Andy might be gearing up for some night detecting, dunno. But, here is a picture of my replacement coil/cable inserting into the middle shaft, no problems. Next to it can be seen the old coil cable being re-wrapped onto a 5/16" (~8mm) spindle as the manufacturer suggested I keep the coil and rewrap it rather than send it back. The newer cord is slightly blacker but I'm not sure if that means it's a different material or if it's just because my old cord is discolored from leaving it in the sun to rewrap twice before (this time I used a heat gun). Also, the patch I made in the upper right. Apparantly I still need to wrap it with a lot of layers of tape for strength according to the manufacturer. I think a few layers of adhesive shrink tube should work too though, if that's what Steelphase is doing?

Another odd move. Considering SDC's are $3730 in Australia, that means they are only $2534 USD if we bought from overseas. Not sure why they would raise the price even more here in USD, it should be going the opposite direction with currency exchange rates. Shouldn't it? Not to mention the margin between invoice and MSRP is huge, $50 would seem to make very little difference in that light.

Was there a lot of old timer activity there, hard rock mines, or is this newer discoveries? Some of that gold looks pretty rough and near the source. I have to admit I don't know a lot about Virginia mining, mostly just hear about Dahlonega and maybe up into NC.

That's crazy impressive for East Coast, that'd even be a great haul for Arizona. Nice work. Man, you are gonna start a gold rush out there.

Ahh, yep. I hadn't considered that option. ? Certainly would make more sense from an Occams Razor standpoint.

Man, the more I look at that coil, the more I wonder if it's made by Minelab itself...? Notice the very odd design similarities in the mounting brackets? The two slots up towards the top? Exactly like the Z14 brackets that are molded into the coil. Quite an odd detail to crossover to a 3rd party design, but I guess possible. Those kinds of things usually get copied over in molds, or CAD programs though, when the same designer is working on a new product. Which itself opens up the possibility for a product more extensive than a coil I suppose too if one really wants to get into letting the mind wander. It has been well over 4 years after all... If this isn't ML themselves, it must be someone working very closely with them.

Looking at that for a moment I thought it might be a hoax due to the high degree of ellipticity and the thinness of the coil, both things I thought were not possible with the DOD construction. But looking closer, and maybe what CoBill meant - that coil has a Minelab GPZ cable on both ends (chipped connector on top), as well as a stock ML cable, ie the whole thing is ML. Not possible without ML contribution. Unless I guess, they just used an entire cable from a Z coil...? Very interesting.

Andy, do you mean the ground itself wouldn't balance on the X Coil, or just the ferrite wouldn't balance on that ground? I was unable to get the ferrite to balance on any coil, not even a little bit (I could "fool" it with the nose method slightly), but all my coils did balance to the ground itself just as well as the Z14. I'm in very mild ground though so, limited in what I can test. I'm just curious with your hotter ground if it's still only the ferrite it won't balance to or if the ground also is hot enough (in that one bad spot you reported) that no tracking method will balance to the ground itself either?

And also like Microsoft, Minelab has patents to a lot of stuff that will prevent any competitors from emerging in the future too so that they can continue letting corporate goals (always shareholder profits, when is not?) drive the business in the wider scope of things that make it to board level. So, I wouldn't be holding my breath. Corporate climates are almost always a decaying orbit into making the quickest, cheapest buck even with people among them trying to drive innovation. I invented something when I worked in the oilfield but I lacked the money to build it. The company I worked for flew me to Houston HQ where I was able to meet with their team of physicists and engineers in the R&D dept. There was a "Bruce Candy" of this particular company who listened to my idea and took me to lunch. The minute he sat down he told me he didn't hear anything I said, we never talked about the idea, and I should fly back home early and forget about it until I quit the company and pursue it on my own. Otherwise he'd be forced to patent it. Why? Because he said their job isn't to build things, it's to patent things so the competition can't build it. It's cheaper to do that and force customers to pay top dollar for old tools then to constantly create new ones which still only get the same day rate, and guess which business model the shareholders prefer? Welcome to corporate stagnation and the end stage of capitalism.

I'm going to take a random guess and say this problem might be worse for us here. You in 105 degree heat at night. Me in 95 degree heat in the full sun, the machine gets quite hot to the touch, at least 120 degrees. The Aussies are in winter right now right? That shrink tubing definitely softens up in the sun, I was able to rewrap my coil by the heat of the sun. Just an idea about why this might be happened...really have no idea. But yeah, the technique I recommended in PM is the easiest. And if that fails when the whole cable gets real bad it needs to be tightly rewound over a 3/8" rod, tape the ends, leave it in the sun, then let it cool. But it'll deform again with a lot of coil changeovers. I'm thinking especially much when it's hot out.

My forum name is straightforward, but my Youtube name - USMiner was created randomly by a piece of software I wrote in the early-2000's which combined letters + numbers sequentially in all combinations and scanned for open domain names for potential development or resale. Years later when I got really into prospecting, I needed a handle and remembered that name, saw the domain was still open. My dogs all got names with related, perhaps uninspiring methods, I'm not good with names.

Andy, as promised here is a visualization of what I'm hearing (not to scale, my photoshop skills suck), the detection field of the coil. As those detection fields get more and more smooshed out its feels more and more "mono-like" (while obviously still not being a mono). This is only looking at the part of the coil the RX overlaps the TX (the two "blades"). It just feels like the detection field is broader to me on these so far. Maybe the spiral more than the bundle, I'll have to check.

Thanks Chet. In my mind you are like having an American JP around the forum, except unbound by non-disclosure agreements. I appreciate your contributions and the technical explainations, I love that stuff. Also appreciate the original JP too! Nice to have both of you contributing technical stuff. ?