jasong

Awesome Bill! Please do report back. Fingers crossed the smaller coil cuts into the salt instead of making it worse. I have no guess either way, and have been hoping a brave soul would test it out. If you find it cuts the salt down quite a bit I'm going to have to reevaluate my no warranty-voiding decision post haste. And a lot of other people too I'm sure.

One the easiest ways to knock salt response down on a PI while still maintaining or increasing sensitivity to the sub 1 gram stuff is by using a smaller coil. I guess it remains to be seen if that holds true with ZVT or not yet.

You chose to follow it at some point, there is a box up top to the right of the topic title that says "follow" with the people's names who are following it, you can click that box, then click the red "unfollow" button in the new box that pops up, or select "do not receive notifications" if you are on mobile and if it doesn't give you the red button for some reason.

Nice stuff. I'm real curious to read a report about the differences in ground between there and Yuma, what sort of settings changes are necessary on the GPZ between the two.

Pegmatite w/schorl or pegmatitic granite.

He will be missed by many I'm sure. I'm glad we had a chance to speak a few times in email and always wished our paths would cross in the field, Jim seemed like a genuinely good person and a pioneer electronic prospector to boot.

Exceptional these days in AZ, I'm looking forward to hearing how you do in OZ.

Someone, please start another rumor about a GPZ software update or new coil quickly so I have something to look forward to again. If this infographic were true it would seem to be doing a lot at once. Pricing itself into the Simplex market, replacing the long in tooth Xterra without having to change coils to detect smaller gold, tapping into the massive success of river detecting (for relics/bullets) on Youtube where almost every one of the content creators uses a Garrett currently, and potentially replacing the long in tooth Excal too. It would seem like a good product to release from a business standpoint for Minelab. But almost certainly a snoozer for serious prospectors unless someone wants a cheap machine to bang around with in the water. Price would almost certainly have to be competitive with the Simplex otherwise it's hard to see any room in the market for this product today with the EQ 600 being the upper bound, though if it's entirely water proof that would add value. I guess that might be one positive - continuing the trend of decreasing prices. I can only hope someday they start selling something like the GPZ for what it should actually be going for today, which IMO is closer to $1999 max, and I don't see any reason that a machine like the GM1000 should be selling for more than $300 or maybe $400 max. If they really wanted to release a machine that got me excited about the prospect of a greenhorn being able to finally enter the electronic prospecting market, that would be it, and I'd even give up my GB2 finally and get one myself for that matter.

When I was in the oilfield I remember we often had to monitor solar activity and geomagnetic storms. Our MWD tools were sensitive to them, even downhole, the magnetometers would get skewed. It would alter the declination readings, which if I'm remembering correctly means that the local magnetic field of the Earth itself was slightly altered there too. It may be possible scientifically for the sun to have some effect on detectors too when the sun is out vs sun down, by the same token. Certainly less EMI too.

Uh. Minelab slow drips vague marketing intended to generate rumors for all their new machines straight into the social media vein like it's advertising steroids. See: the Equinox. What exactly do you expect? If one creates a monster, they had better be prepared to live with it. Also see: Vanquish video, clearly intended to generate rumor. Is it not Minelab's video? If not, no one has bothered to say so since it's getting free advertising for them either way.

Nice work guys. Chris seems to be getting real good at beating the veterans at final weigh out!

That would be awesome Dave, but with a handheld unit would it be possible to get anywhere close to that kind of useful resolution? Seems like it'd be hard to keep the coil perfectly parallel to the ground or not jiggle it during a normal swing, but maybe none of that matters with GPR? I have no idea about that stuff. To me, the perfect detector is perfectly quiet on everything except the target. No ground noise, no EMI, only target. If there is anything which could be easily improved on with the cheap, readily available microcontrollers today which have stuff like Fourier analysis built in already, it's in signal processing and noise reduction. So if I took a serious guess at whatever the next big improvement in the gold world would be, that would be it. It's doable and within reach. That's also why I still have hopes the GPZ can just be firmware updated since so much of this processing can be done in software today, I'm guessing they had the foresight to put a beefy MCU in the main board to future proof it at least a little since even a good one is like $25 vs $10 for an ok one. Who knows what this Vanquish is. But that's my guess for the future of gold detecting. And maybe discrimination and a bit more depth as we're seeing with the X Coils already being possible.

There are certain places with certain types of gold where a person would be wasting their time without using the latest and greatest, which is currently a GPZ. It's not like in the past where the difference between a 4500 and a 5000 meant less than the operator experience and skill. In some places this isn't the case, but there are plenty here in the US. Now to be clear, there isn't a single thing in this entire thread relating to a new prospecting machine which isn't entirely unfounded rumor with zero sourcing. But these threads are for fun. There is always a lot of speculation come 3 or 4 years after the release of a prior machine, and always will be. It's fun to speculate and discuss things. If a person is of the opinion that they can keep using what they have and it will do just as well as anything else then there isn't much use reading or posting in a thread about potential new equipment now, is there? I can't help but notice the various sub forums related to the 5000 and prior are pretty dead these days though. Forums are for discussion, and the unknown is always an interesting topic.

If any other company would make an concerted effort to understand the millions in free advertising they are passing up via implied endorsement on Youtube then Garrett would be on the same path as Tesoro took. I don't think it's intentional marketing that is floating them, their users showed them a roadmap and they are just on cruise control following it now. Very few of these content creators do any real prospecting, so I doubt a innovative prospecting machine is high on their list as of yet, especially with so much competition from Minelab in that arena. From what I see, their products didn't succeed because of performance, I think they succeeded in the mass market because they are affordable and the average viewer can have one via Amazon prime tomorrow. Because they are easy to use and learn. And because they all look more or less the same. If I buy an Ace 250 it looks about like the AT Pro the guy I follow on Youtube is using. Not like a toy model of the Starship Enterprise like say a Go Find. These things don't require innovation or increasing performance, they just require keeping cruise control on and letting others do the work for your platform that found success in mediocrity already. Low effort, low expense, high profit, a company can't ask for more ideal conditions. Until other cars get on the same road with a faster engine anyways, as Klunker alludes to.

Or if they signed non disclosure agreements, someone could be feeding spurious information at a conference full of moles and leaky sieves in order to weed out the leakers. What were your 2 dealers names again? If on the other hand they didn't sign such agreements then they should be willing to step forward surely and be the first to the market with all this hotly anticipated info.

I really hope it's not true. The GPZ to me represented the end of the "new $5k machine every 4 years" cycle. If we've simply moved from that to "new $10k machine every 4 years" instead, then I'll move on and find some other way to do the things I need to do after I finish with my GPZ this winter because that would be my personal bridge too far. If a replacement was in the works it sure would be a great time to rush to release a coil which only works on the machine which is about to be replaced though, before a lot of people stop using said machine. JP called the move "greedy" and implied the coils were not ready for production yet in another thread, with no real reasons given for the greed comment. This would certainly be a reason. I hope JP comes here to deny that line of conspiratorial thinking. ? I won't believe any rumors until I see the machine itself though. All in good fun talking now and that's about it.

Or functionally combining the CTX with the Excalibur 2 or something. The trend is making things do more than one task at once, which the description also alludes to. I just figure if it had to do with gold at all it not be replacing the GPZ, but augmenting or replacing what people use the GPX series for in civil war battle fields, beach jewlery/treasure hunting etc, with some capability for gold potentially too since that series seems to be at the end of it's shelf life anyways. From Minelab of all manufacturers, I kinda feel like we should be past the basic old school VLF thing at this stage, and it should be some fancier new acronyms. Unless it's targeted at the lower price ranges. They usually lead the market with their new releases with something at least somewhat new or novel that isn't in the market yet. Unless it's Go-Find level stuff for the entry level market.

Sounds more like a GPX replacement to me from their "about" description and the tones indicate some kind of discrimination so maybe it's a new detector using new tech found in the 7000 or the EQ instead of pure PI, I can't keep track of all their acronyms these days. Something you can use gold prospecting or on the beach for jewelry or looking for civil war bullets. If it replaced the aging GPX series entirely you might even say it "vanquished" it. ? "For Metal Detecting, water hunting, relic hunting and treasure hunting" from their About section. Gold is a "metal" if one wanted to be vague I suppose and let people interpret it a thousand ways. It could also just be a Go-Find replacement that might also incorporate some prospecting ability. Which would actually be pretty cool since a lot of younger new people who would otherwise love to start electronic prospecting are turned away by the utter lack of an affordable machine that is decent at gold too. There seems to be 3 names out there at various locations oddly, Vanquish, Victory, and Vantage, maybe there are 3 price points in a series of 3 machines with increasing functionality? Each word being a somewhat stronger version of the last. Who knows, just dipping my toes into the guessing game like everyone else. I thought this topic would be relegated to the non-gold sections of the forum by now though, so I figured I'd actually look into it since it seems to be staying here. Drip. Drip. Drip.

AFON: I haven't addressed the 80% thing directly on my channel (USMiner), it was just some numbers I was randomly using or guessing at roughly to demonstrate a different way of looking at prospecting, and that there are cases where it pays to not dig it all. I'll grid and dig everything just like everyone else when the situation calls for it though. The way I look at it is kinda like the progression a lot of us went through when we first started running a sluice. At first we try to meticulously save every color, with tweezers if needed, maybe feed a little recirculator with a spoon for fear of one tiny speck going out the other end. And eventually you get to the point cleaning out your dredge 5 years later where you are tossing 100 colors out your pan back into the river because the time to clean them up is better spent doing something more productive. Of course it's not really exactly the same since you might miss a lunker somewhere when it comes to detecting nuggets, but it's a risk I am willing to take especially since I do eventually end up back gridding when times are lean. For the same reason, I probably spend more time wandering around looking for specific types of dirt or specific geology or topography, or just for signs of old timers than I do swinging a coil when I'm prospecting, even if there is no trash around. Which is kinda taking the "don't dig everything" philosophy to the extreme and not even detecting at all now. Because while gold can certainly be anywhere, it seems to me that 80% of the time (random guess again) the better patches are somewhere close to an area that "looks right" to me so I just scout for them and pass over huge tracts of land that previously I would have spent weeks detecting. I probably miss a lot of 1 off nuggets or small patches, but I'm cool with that. Doesn't hurt that I actually like exploring and hitting rocks with hammers more than swinging a heavy coil all day too. That said, there does seem to be a point where someone just starting should dig everything no matter what, for a time. That's the only way to figure out what "looks right" in terms of what produces nuggets when they reach the point where it pays to stop digging everything and start covering more ground later. *PS, if trying this approach I find it essential to keep all your tracks recorded on a GPS and a main database of them on Google Earth or similar. I recently lost a card that held a ton of my old tracks from 2008 to 2015 and it really made things difficult in places I had left incomplete to revisit later. Think of exploration like macro gridding. Find a place you are interested in with good geology then systematically cover it, maybe an area 25 miles square, the same way you'd cover a patch 100 meters square. Keeping GPS tracks is essential in my book. When you find a productive area you can also use your tracks to make sure you've not missed any tiny washes or other productive zones that are easy to miss on the ground.

Sorry Flak I think I inadvertently implied you were a new guy. My second response was just addressed to the ether - anyone in general interested in reading or discussing it as I think it's an interesting topic. I know you've been swinging a coil since before I even knew what one was. ? I think your questions are good questions. And detecting in a field of AR bullets, casings, and fragments can definitely make one start asking a lot of questions, man been there.

Awesome Andy, sounds like you earned that one! Nice work being tenacious and changing your sleep schedule to get some hunting done in the off season, paid off.

At this point in time I think we are decades in to understanding the "dig it all" mantra, and in my opinion there isnt much left to discuss since it's a simple concept that everyone already agrees on. So it kind of surprises me to see how many serious detectorists are content at leaving it there. The more interesting thing to me is when not to dig it all. If anyone thinks there is never a time to pass over targets then I guarantee you are missing more gold by being stuck in old ways than by realizing you can produce more by knowing there is a time to pass some targets up. Consider some basic math, a philosophy which i used dredging and carried over to detecting. Let's say we accept 20% losses because I alter the sluice so it doesnt clog so much and I can run material faster over it (by removing the hungarians as an example) in return for doubling the material I run. In dredging that means I get 8 grams for running the same material instead of 10 grams. But I've doubled my material I run so I actually get 16 grams instead of 10 grams at the end of the day. Same with detecting. Covering more ground is like running more material dredging. I accept say 20% loss of nuggets I miss in return for operating in a way that let's me cover 2x more land. That's actually an underestimate, I probably cover 3 to 10x as much land as a lot of the dig it all people I see detecting cover in a day. An average day detecting on my GPS is 2 to 7 miles walking, usually 4 miles a day is pretty normal. If I am comfortable getting 80% of the gold in half or less if the time and then moving on and finding a new area, not only do I find more gold than if I stayed and dug every target in the end, but I end up with far more known producing areas discovered at the end of the season. And I go back to these areas at the end of the day if I've been skunked exploring and then THAT'S the time to grid and dig em all, and I end up with a lot of these areas in my back pocket to rely on whereas someone who stayed and just dug everything now has nothing left and no new discoveries either, starting from scratch every time. My way always keeps you in the gold and producing. Not just good for the pocketbook, but for the mental condition as well where going on skunk runs can be demotivating. All that aside, having done this for years, I've discovered that even when I'm being highly selective I'm still only missing about 10% of the overall gold I end up finding when I do finally go back and clean up every single trash target. Yet I easily produce 2, 3 maybe even as much as 10x more gold per trip than I would if I simply stayed and dug everything until it was gone. This is how you make detecting pay for itself if you aren't retired or depend at least some on the income you make finding gold. What isnt communicated properly when green horns read forums and threads like these is that a lot of the dig everything guys in the US who make fabulous finds are in fact just in tiny areas of private land or leased land which no one has access to, or claims which have been in the family for decades or longer, with heavy equipment at work. These people can afford to dig everything because they dont need to explore as much as the newer guys do. And a lot of other guys are shown places to go and dont have to put the work in to find them or go on 3 week long skunks and question why they ever bought a detector to begin with after digging 600 pieces of tin. Having recently spent a large amount of time cleaning out old "80%" areas I left behind for later, I've discovered that actually I got closer to 90 or 95% by selectively digging, and that's well within what I consider acceptable. A lot of age old mantras are repeated for a reason, because they are correct. But the trick is understanding when they aren't. For instance, there are perfectly good times you dont want to keep your coil perfectly flat even though coil control on the forums would make you think there is a school marm waiting at every patch to rap your knuckles if you dont. Any different response you can get from a detector is potentially useful information. Data needs to be correlated and interpreted to your specific conditions, and tested and compared to see if it's a bad habit or potentially useful information. This is why I cant get behind this school of thought that seems to be getting common around forums that testing, measuring and comparing is not worth the time. This stuff has all been the key to my success as a person that started without anyone to help or show me where to go. And I know most random people starting out are finding themselves in the exact same boat as I was in, so if you are one of those new guys I'm letting you know that there are other ways to do this stuff, some of which are probably better for the conditions we find ourselves in today, and especially if you dont have a friend or buddy to put you on already productive ground.

It does in Difficult sometimes on the fly spit bits. Not always, but sometimes. Not in Normal except very rarely from my experience. General will sometimes invert the signal or go wobbly on bits that HY sound normal on but not nearly as much as Difficult will do it, in some specific parts of NNV I remember almost all the sub1/4 gram stuff was low high in Difficult when the GPZ first came out and I was trying to figure out if any settings would kill the salt response. Then in other areas it was a mixed bag. On the other topic, sometime in 2015 I had a topic about how it seemed possible to do a sort of rudimentary discrimination by switching from Normal to Difficult or something along those lines, I forget exactly now because it was too time consuming for a guy with such a short attention span as myself haha, just easier to dig em all or mentally discim them out some other way. But it's possible to tell with some degree of certainty better than 50/50 what is iron and what is gold by the signals inverting or not in various settings and combinations. This was why I kept hoping for user customizable quick change setting buttons on a software update back then. The geometery and size change the response a lot though, but for your general bits of coin sized rusty tin can slaw it's possible. And nails need not even switch, you can usually tell just by drawing the shape with the tip of the coil. Coils of wire and boot tacks go all warbly so you can selectively not dig those too if the gold in the area is generally not warbly and there are hundreds of tacks everywhere and again you are a guy like me with a very short attention span. I thought for sure there would be a software discrim update by now based on these observations and my assumption they too had realized this quirk long before I did, and had future plans for exploiting it. Anyways, now I'm just rambling.

The rock in question looks to be Arizona BIF, you'll probably see some more of that in Australia too though lots hotter there and more reddish/yellowish. In AZ the cherty layer has been partially metamorphosed into something that looks very much like quartz but I believe is quartzite. Might be a cool rock to snag because if that's what it is, you are looking at something amazing and precambrian outcrops are rare in AZ. It's an indirect fossil record of the largest oxygenation event on Earth, a process created by the emergence of the first life over a billion years ago, which was bacteria. Same way plants create oxygen, except this was before even plants existed. This made the iron in the oceans form oxides (magnetites and hematites) and settle on the bottom in layers between sediments (the quartzy stuff). Without this life as we know it would not exist, pretty cool stuff for an unassuming rock.

Please do update if you get some pricing for specific pieces, or PM if you can't post it. I've looked this thread 5 or 6 times now and those keep calling to me, I really like the ones with some brown matrix in them still. I'd need something sub $100 unless she has any desire to trade for Arizona nuggets, but looks like she has enough gold already. ?