jasong

What coil(s) did you guys use for which parts of the testing?

I wish the archaeologists around here would work with me. I've written email after email for years with just crickets for a response even though I volunteer for free, and I really think I could help them achieve one particular goal they've been working on for over 3 decades here with no forward progress. I think a lot of relic hunters and gold prospectors could really help the field as a whole out if they'd just open their minds up a bit to new volunteers but aside from a few stories like this post's subject, it seems to not really happen much though other than occasional exceptions.

Nice, what kind of video projects do you have planned? Prospecting related, or other?

Yeah they started requiring a bond and NOI (mining plan) to operate a dredge in that field office, not in small part due to the irresponsibility of the GPAA and it's inability to police it's claims or members or educate them on basic mining law or respect to other users of the resources. I had claims up there and I also owned claims in Western Colorado and it's the same thing where a different chapter of the GPAA dug a bunch of holes into the bank despite the BLM warning them multiple times not to do it over a period of years. Then I physically witnessed their members doing the same thing in a well known withdrawn area which the BLM kindly allowed prospectors to dredge with a free permit, destroying the area and even dredging all the way into a parking lot. So the BLM got tired of it and as a result of the GPAA came down hard on all claim owners in the district and now we all suffer the consequences. And as usual, they blame the BLM instead of blaming themselves for their own actions. But no way Jose, I was there for years, I watched it and I multiple times walked up to the members and told them to stop and got either head shaking or middle fingers responses and one time a guy operating a blue 4" Proline told me the BLM "has no authority to regulate mining" and laughed at me. So you can probably guess my opinion on clubs there. And the GPAA in general. Clubs which do not educate their members, or police them, end up ruining things for all people. And that was how I made my living at the time so I'm not shy at all to call them out and hold them accountable in public. There were other guys like me making a living there and the GPAA ruined all of our jobs. Then a 3rd time, they got the only other decent public area in Western Colorado shut down too on the Gunnison. Look at their old newsletters, they did club outings there and abused the heck out of it, they'd do outings to go get paydirt for raffles, and it just ended up being too much and the BLM shut it all down there too. Not to mention the non-stop coyote holing, then someone got hurt or died in one from a club too despite many warnings to stop. It was a big reason I decided to move out of Colorado entirely, the GPAA killed all my favorite areas, and they just sit and blame it on the BLM instead of fixing their own problems and they just keep spreading like a cancer there making all small scale miners look bad, while at the same time trying to represent themselves to the public and the BLM as the representatives of small scale mining. If you join a club there, I highly recommend to look at some of the local ones that educate their members, show how to mine responsibly, or have patented land where if they mess up they don't ruin the entire thing for everyone else in the state.

I think he was referring to HR 621. Earlier this week on NPR I heard them talking about it, it was a bill to sell 3.3 million acres of BLM land introduced by Chaffetz. He has since promised to kill the bill after a lot of protest by hunters and other outdoors groups. We had something similar in Wyoming in our state congress which was supposed to initiate the transfer of federal lands to state control, sponsored by the coal companies here. It too was thankfully killed finally after a lot of protest by hunting and fishing groups here too. Anyways, I'm sure this trend is going to continue state by state, something to watch out for. I know there is momentum in Arizona and has been for a while. State land is all posted "no trespassing" around here. Just something to consider.

Interesting, thanks.

There is a public panning/sluicing "beach" in Fairplay not too far from where they are working if anyone wants to go up there and find some gold and watch them film. This is my old dredging territory, there is detectable gold but it's mostly picker size, 3-4 grains with a very occasional nugget around half gram. I mostly worked on the other side of the range though in the Arkansas valley. I never would have expected that to be a place economically feasible to run a big operation if you have all of Alaska and the Yukon at your doorstep. Did they explain why they chose to move there? I have friends who still have claims up there. It can be really rich in some parts and then bam, the gravel is barren.

This is my opinion, but it's not just about sound with a prospecting PI, it's about a sound and context. The "context" part comes with experience as an operator and in this video burying doesn't replicate the sort of context you find in actual field conditions. Some places you want to dig everything and others you can produce far more by being picky, and this is what I think people mean when they say they know "what gold sounds like". Obviously there is no actual "gold sound" on a GPX. But for instance, I have no idea what kind of gold he's finding there and how much it varies, no idea what the ground is like and how it varies, what sorts of trash are there, how the various settings alter the target responses tailored to those specific nuggets and ground types, no idea if he's in a trash-prone area, no idea what the frequency of his trash to gold finds are, how deep is the gold running, how new is the gravel, how old is the trash, etc... But these are all things that I become very familiar with as I prospect for real in the field that vary with each location and only come with experience. And they help me paint a bigger picture where sometimes I can with a good level of confidence decide if something is worth digging or not. Good video, but I just wanted to comment this because I don't think it demonstrates the entire picture that we paint when we as prospectors are actually out in the field and looking for gold. I am one of those guys that definitely think you can "hear" gold, in context.

Yep, field observations is key for small scale prospecting, maps are good for generalization though. There are secondary observations you can make to ID faults on the ground that are too small to see by air, hard to recognize, or just buried now. It's too complicated for a single post though, but it's one of the main "secrets" I (and many others) use in exploration. You mentioned contact zones Andyy, that's a good one. Often you can observe contact metamorphism in these zones too, and these sorts of rocks and minerals can be observed in the float even if the original old fault is no longer exposed. Also dikes can get refaulted and these are sure giveaways on aerial imagery - you follow the line and then BAM, a zig zag in the dike, probably worth investigating. Anyone looking for faults should google image search "slickenside", it's also a good sign that can be hanging around in the float, or maybe one of the walls eroded away but you can see remnants of it on another wall and you know it was a fault and not just erosion. Etc...

https://mrdata.usgs.gov/geology/state/ Click your state of interest, then if you have Google Earth just download the KMZ and open it up. Or use their web browser link, but GE is way more handy and it also has high res aerial imagery which honestly is much more useful for finding smaller, unmapped faults which are more like what we are after as small scale prospectors.

I'm a bit late to the thread, but I think of the metal detector like a automobile radio receiver. Say we are driving around and listening to a specific station, the radio station is transmitting at a set power output which doesn't change, but as you drive around there are parts of the environment that affect how you receive that radio signal. Luckily we are given settings that allow us to adjust to these changing environments. If we drive behind a big hill that radio signal is going to be weaker so we want to bump up the sensitivity so we can hear it better, this is the level of amplification the radio applies to the signal from the antenna (not be to be confused with volume). This is like if we are looking for deep nuggets or to hear faint signals. But if there is a pirate radio station nearby on the same channel (aka noise) then bumping the sensitivity up is going to amplify the pirate radio station just as much as the station we are listening to. This is where audio smoothing (or the stabilizer) comes in. Sometimes as you drive behind trees, buildings, under power lines, etc you will hear another station come in over the one you are listening to. Audio smoothing will take those quick "zings" out. But if you up the sensitivity, then you again raise those "zings" above the level of the smoothing. The timings are a bit more complex, there isn't really a simple analogy. But you know how AM radio can be received halfway around the world and FM often dissapears 100 miles from town? Radio waves interact differently with matter as the frequency and characteristic of the wave changes. This is the idea behind timings (very simply put). Ok, so far these are all adjustments happening inside the radio, ie - between the antenna and the radio receiver electionics. But we also have a big volume knob on the radio too, and that adjusts the audio signal the radio produces. It's only audio though, adjusting volume settings won't give us any new information that wasn't already in the radio, it won't make a faint station clearer, it only makes the speakers louder or quieter. So one last thing, if I'm driving through the mountains in Wyoming and give my radio settings to someone on the suburbs of LA, they probably won't even hear their radio station at all. This is why sharing settings is really only helpful in the same or similar locations. Dunno if I made it more complex or not, but I find that when thinking about how all the detector settings work together it's a helpful analogy. Good luck with the machine, hope you get some nice ones!

I couldn't help my curiosity after reading this so I got up and tested it. Figured I'd make a quick vid to share results if anyone is curious. I don't have a BFO detector but I still got some results on the GB2. I can sleep well now knowing.

Can I get an autograph? That's awesome! I hope you guys track one up here sometime. Are they cold when they hit the ground? I got a proposal for you: glacier hunting at 13,000ft in February, nice contrast with the snow! Kidding. Kinda.

I should correct my statement from "often possible" to "possible" - my samples were pretty limited and they all came from Gold Basin. I was just testing ones I had already found with my 4500 that were in my camper from 2 years back. Interesting though, that the GPX wouldn't even hear the ones you found with the Z. That certainly opens up some potential new meteorite hunting!

Interesting...I agree, I'd be curious to see some further testing too if you guys get around to doing it again. I've taken apart a lot of broken coils including that 15x12 and there doesn't appear to be anything special in those Commanders to me that aren't in a other coils, just insulated wire, foam, and carbon paper pretty much. They all seem to test fairly close as far as resistance and inductance goes too, never measured the capacitance from the windings though. Sensitive Extra does do better on some targets in some ground than Sharp does, but doesn't seem like it'd account for that much depth? No idea, just spitballing... Edit - thinking again, were you guys on 4500's or 5000's? I remember the 4500's had a factory recall on the main board and there was issue with decreased sensitivity or something along those lines (my memory fails). Now I'm really stretching here - but is it possible if both GPX's are 4500's that one was bought used as a backup or something and still has one of the defective boards? Ok, now I'm really out of ideas.

Not just bullets, there are some types of gold nuggets that the GPX will actually hear deeper than the GPZ and I've witnessed it both in-situ and replanted myself. They aren't always slugs, they can be porous, tangly bits that you would swear upon seeing that the GPZ should be outperforming on but it doesn't. Another example is low-iron stony meteorites, it's often possible to get much more depth with them on a GPX from the results of my testing, the bigger the stone (200+ grams) the bigger the depth difference as a general trend with outliers. I've commented about this quite a bit in previous posts. I suspect often it may have been occasionally viewed as negativity rather than being accepted as actual observations though, so I'm glad other people are testing their equipment too. The 15x12 performance throws me off a bit though, I can't say I've ever seen that much difference in depth between it and the Z14 or it and the 15x13 Evo. Are you certain the operator didn't have metal in his boots or a low hanging pick, or something interfering with the control box in his pocket or something? Was the signal equally strong both directions he swung? Was something like a camera tripod or beer can added onto the ground nearby when that machine was used? I can see a difference on certain targets between 2 different machines using different technology, but between two GPX's using two similar coils it makes me think something may also have been at play?

Still same issue with the keyboard controls on the small map not working. When I first load the page they don't work (but mouse controls do), even after clicking into the map to ensure it has focus and grabbing and rotating the map. But then clicking on the little information button in the corner allows them to work though after I close the popup window. Similarly, I can occasionally get them to start working again by getting a popup for the location dialog or mine information dialog, but only after closing the popup and sometimes I have to be zoomed in past a certain level. It's like Chrome won't recognize the map has focus for keyboard input until an information box is opened and then closed. Fullsize map doesn't have that problem though as you predicted.

Nice! Post some pics when you get it cleaned up?

Works good in Chrome and is real fast and smooth, that's on a 16 core dual Xeon setup. One issue I am having is that the keyboard controls intermittently work. The mouse controls (rotate and zoom) always work though. Once I reloaded the keyboard controls worked, but then stopped after I changed tabs. Reloading didn't help that time, but clicking on the information button made them start working again. I have Adblock+ enabled, not sure if that makes any difference or not.

Ok thanks, wasn't sure.

A question thinking about this QED for anyone in the engineering or lawyering biz - my understanding is that patents only apply for business purposes and people are free to build whatever they want for non-business purposes, patent or not. So, could people be untetethered by patenting quagmires if they just set out to build a good machine for themselves and their friends? Could someone sell a machine like that for cost of parts only and not for profit and still be able to design it however they want without worrying about being sued by some company? If so, then to add to the other topic also on kickstarter - could a person do a non-profit kickstarter and just get a cheap machine out there to replace aging machines like the 4500 and 5000?

I'm not sure what other forums you guys watch to get your info on this machine, but I wonder how tight it packs down? The harness in the video has me worried, I hope it's not another "operator tethered to battery" configuration. Is that the battery issue they are changing? Please let every new gold detector from here on out be wireless and not tethered to a battery... I feel pretty forgiving if its a single person trying to bring an entire machine to market. I get more frustrated when companies with a lot of resources make promises they don't back up. My 45 is going on 8 or 9 years old so I'm thinking its time to start looking for another newer one or a replacement altogether. Is this supposed to be better or worse than a 4500?

Those lamproites down there in the Red Desert are definitely on my prospecting list. I'm not sure anyone has ever found a diamond in that area yet but Hausel appears to think they are pretty likely hosts... Have you heard of anyone finding one yet? I'm finding chromian diopsides in some pretty odd places too along with pyropes in even more locations throughout Wyoming. Above one location I found a depression, and a capped drill hole in the center of it. Almost wonder if they were coring for kimberlite? I lived on a drilling rig for a year down there in the SW part of the state, about 15 miles outside of Wamsutter up in those hills. Nothing more invigorating than subzero temps in 35mph winds on a giant chunk of frozen metal all night!

Nice work. There was big deep gold out there found in the past. I ran a backhoe out there and it's still out there, deeper than the GPX (and Z14) could hear if you know where to look. It's very scattered though... Q has deeper on average and a lot more big gold by sheer numbers, but GB produced a lot of larger specimen type stuff, actually very similar to the big one you found in another field. Both have gold not uncommonly past the 3ft+ mark, so perfect places to test that Z19! Keep us updated. There are people lurking here who know more than I do and were in both places in the 80's and 90's, but they rarely or never post, hi. Also, don't be afraid to experiment with settings. That's some of the mildest ground in the US in Q and GB. It's a bit noisy from Vegas is about the only problem.

Interesting, thanks for the heads up, I'll get in contact with them. I used to have a claim on the Arkansas River for dredging right in the shadow of Mt Antero where I think they film some of the Prospectors show, never did manage to get up into the hills around BV looking for gems since I was too obsessed with gold at the time! I've seen a couple of those shows now and it almost seems like I was concentrating on the wrong mineral when I lived down there in Colorado!