jasong

I guarantee you they do because I've been asked about my opinion by a marketing rep who said they saw my posts here among other things. They watch a lot, Youtube, Facebook, forums, etc. The reality today is that companies can get marketing research for free that they used to have to pay for, just by monitoring social media and most of them understand this now. Some threads on forums get 5000+ views on certain products. On Youtube some detectorists get 1/4 Million+ views a DAY, and those are numbers companies can't ignore if not just for the advertising factor alone. I mean, what's the entire circulation of ICMJ? I bet half of that or less per month. So when people post about how cheap $1500 for a coil is because of all the nuggets they'll find and pay it off, or how $680 is a great deal that we want here, people should know that what they say online means more than it did 15 years ago and does have some effect on actual pricing. I'm not saying social media is an "ask and ye shall receive" situation, but it's definitely monitored and taken into account, maybe more than people think. Sorry to get off topic, but if this detector isn't even available for purchase here then I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about pricing since that appears to be the big story here (in addition to Steve's point on the frequency). It's not just the XP, the GPZ is cheaper over there too, and the 5000 is way cheaper. Usually prices go up where the rush is, but we are seeing the opposite. Odd.

It drives home the point how arbitrary and over inflated detector prices are. some companies are worse then others with this. The manufacturers read forums, they know exactly what people are willing to pay.

I agree and suggested this when they first dropped the GPZ price. It was originally actually $10,700 though, wasn't it? (you know prices have gotten out of hand when rounding results in enough error to buy an entire mid level detector...) Is the deal in Australia that you had to pay full retail price? A consideration may be that few in the US pay retail price. Still, seems like they should offer to those who did. If not then sign me up too, maybe I can resell the coil and recoup some of the loss I had to take after they crashed the used Z market!

There is a difference between patent trolling and squabbling over a name though. Filing overreaching patents on extremely general or common ideas isn't just a problem with the detector industry but with patents in general and the companies/people which seek to take advantage of it. Kinda like paper stakers in the mining world. ML, please don 't turn yourself into a "Dept of Land Transfer" or "Gold Rush Expeditions", it just sullies your reputation. It's one of the major factors that kills innovation and makes it impossible for the "little guy" to make it to market with novel ideas, and it should be destroyed with fire IMO. I hate to see a company who's products I use do this. If I had the money to buy a Deus right now I'd do it just to show support. Until of course XP decides to do the same thing to some other little company and this discussion all repeats again 2 years later.

Geez, that patent looks mostly like an attempt to restrict competition from companies without dedicated legal teams to me. Most modern devices stores and transmit data, how is that even patentable? I guess they need to make sure they can keep releasing new $2k detectors for $11k when a sign of life emerges somewhere other than Australia in the industry.

Wasn't it the same when the GPZ was released? Seems like it was more expensive here, I remember emailing Australian dealers to see if they would ship to the US when it in pre-shipping phase but they either didn't respond or told me it was too expensive to do, memory is fading exactly. Funny how things always tend to be priced right at the upper avg expectation point people discuss on the forums. Almost like manufacturers somehow know exactly what the most $ people are willing to pay...

I agree and that's what I'm saying, it's a function of the places I'm prospecting because the ground/gold changes between them, but nowhere are those changes more pronounced than between the north/south in my experience. The types of gold that are conducive to outperforming on the GPZ are just much more common up north. That's why I'm curious about US testing of the 19". I'm too poor to do it just for fun! At ML prices I can't keep affording to do experiments like this myself. And it's not economic for me to even own a GPZ unless I can be confident its outperforming in the places I detect.

Beauts! This is one oddball I found up there, like a dragon boat or something.

Sure - any place with common to semi-common crystalline-type specie gold (north) benefits the GPZ user (to varying degrees depending on conditions) greater than places with more slug-like gold (south). Also, pocket or otherwise in situ gold is more common north and so on average I found the GPZ to much more useful in the north then the south because the types of gold it really excels on are more common. Didn't you or Steve write about this sort of observation on wirey/crystalline gold on a trip you were on together? Or maybe my memory is fading? But also just in general, I was able to produce way more from old patches up north than I was from down south. Really with no exceptions, to the point where I stopped hitting old patches south of Vegas unless I was out of other ideas, but I made wages off old patches in NNV. I don't understand it fully, but that was my field experience, and I wasn't alone. Some is explained by the variance in people working the more known patches and rigour with which the people detected out those old patches, but not all of it. I had good success in patches up north detected over by guys with way more experience than me, but not down south. It has to be the gold or ground difference because I'm not a better operator than some of them. Also, some gold that doesn't appear to be crystalline or odd at all will still just hit a lot harder on the GPZ than what seems like a completely equal piece either in air, reburied, or in-situ. I don't understand this fully either, yet I've observed it numerous times. Those types of nuggets were far more common to me up north. Down south the performance "spread" between nuggets of similar size/geometry/weight was far less to almost be insignificant in many areas. Also the geometry and purity variability of nuggets is more variable up north on average, no idea how or if it effects this but it's an observation I can't ignore.

Did Minelab have anyone test this coil stateside? Seems like it'd be ok to talk about it now if so, since literature is released? Just curious if there was a performance difference between AZ and NNV/NCA like there was with the Z itself, from my experience at least.

I think with a little ingenuity it's possible with any reflective target. Fast enough MCU's now that looking at something like a push button radar-like feature may be possible with a different frequency that need not be related to your pulse/CW in any way. A couple other potential methods too. No idea if they'd work, but defintely some ways to try that old tech can't do anyways, I'm hopeful anyways! If I had the time/money I'd build these sorts of things myself just to see if they worked. The future of detecting can't get here fast enough for me!

Yeah this thing looks kinda like a dedicated lunker hunter. If I were using it some places I'd just not bother with any target that gets kicked over in the first 1-4 inches and get those later with the 14" much quicker. Just from a productivity/time perspective. Which seems like a good time again to mention that what I really want in a detector more than discrim is an accurate depth gauge so I can only dig the ones deeper than x, even more so with a deeper beeper. In a way it is actually discrim by proxy anyways in alot of places... Since I know some ML guys must be conveniently reading now.

One interesting thing from the graph is that the 19" is outperforming in low mineralization soil with larger nuggets. In pretty significant way according to these results, and I'm pretty hard to impress due to my neverending skepticism but if those results are proved in the field then this coil might bring some nice stuff up out of the ground. So if a person has some deep BIG nuggets and good quiet soil then you never know, maybe something big will turn up. I know some of us know places in Arizona that produced 30+ gram nuggets down to 22ish inches with bedrock another 1-2 ft deep yet. Looking forward to some field results. I wasn't too impressed with the 14" down there personally. Conversely, look at the result in HM HY/D on the big nugget, yowch. Also the 19" outperforms the 14" on this graph for every small nugget too, which isn't what the blog says, they said the 14" was better on small stuff. Wonder if they meant smaller than they have on this graph?

I love the casual use of vector calculus in the blog post. Nenad: are you going to do a vid comparing the 14" to the 19"?

That's a breath of fresh air to see - I don't think I've ever owned a detector that I can treat like a real, honest field tool.

Tortuga - there are definitely some places in the Q vicinity like that. I've found sunbakers there and I've dug nuggets at 20 inches with no sign of bedrock underneath yet. MN - Others probably have other techniques but catching faint ones for me (Z or X) is about combining 3 swing concepts: always "feel" where your coil is, always swing at the same speed, always overlap ground. If you do that then your brain gets used to the same "double blip" timing of a faint signal that is rarely to never replicated in EMI and I just end up "feeling" it as a good signal. The two blips are also usually of the same quality and character if your swing is flat and constant, whereas EMI and sometimes even ground noise is not. Ground noise double blips are much more "smooshy" most of the time (not always, especially hot rocks) so your ears can discrim them. Or you can just brute force it: go glacially slow, dig anything remotely spurious, grid twice (90 degrees offset), drag your coil on the ground. That's just for patches for me nowadays though. I'd pay $5k for a detector with a completely smooth threshold and a foot of depth over the GPZ with a 17x11 stock coil as well as immediate availability of a 14x9" and 18" coil, as long as it wasn't heavier than the GPZ. I'd pay $7k and not resell it after 6 months if it had an accurate depth and maybe even size gauge on it. But for reference, I don't think the GPZ should be selling for any more than $2500 new either, so there's that. I think it's possible with octo-core 2+ ghz 64 bit ARM chips and whatnot that we have today. Or a parallel bank of them. I'm sure a detector engineer is reading this and rolling their eyes at me though. But I think it could be done with a delay short enough to be imperceptible to our brains.

There are places in AZ and NV where 95% of targets deeper than a foot or so are all gold. And very little trash. I have to assume there are places in Australia like this too though I've never been there. But in these sorts of areas, any target at 3ft is gonna get dug if it takes all day or an excavator because it's big gold! A detector that could get another 12"+ of depth in all types of ground over the GPZ while maintaining sensitivity would be killer in places like these. It'd be worth the money, pretty much any deep find like that is gonna be a lunker. If there was a way to put an accurate depth gauge on it so I could only dig targets deeper than a foot that'd be even better. Something like radar ranging except underground so we didn't have the size/geometry of the target interfering with depth calculations.

Well I think a person can break EM based metal detection technology down into what are fundamentally noise problems and mineral problems. Lower the noise floor far enough and you can detect a weak EM field from the next galaxy over. We do it all the time with radio telescopes. EM fields decay fast, but they decay to infinity. Permeable minerals like iron will "absorb" static em fields though, and conductive minerals from salt to metals will reflect EM (dynamic) radiation. We have to deal with dielectric attenuation too. So there are the stumbling blocks. Modern tech does wonder with dealing with noise. And there are other ways to deal with it if you get rid of the coil on a stick philosophy too. But minerals will always present a problem I think when dealing with EM signals. I don't even really care about discrim myself anymore when it comes to gold prospecting. Give me a perfectly stable threshold with a noisefloor waaaaay down south and an RX gain I can crank as high as the ground will let me, and THAT'S a detector I'll be willing to pay good money for.

I think the simplification is going to take a modern case to set precedent though since we now have FLPMA and patenting moratorium, and most of the precedent involves patenting cases and predates many other modern laws or amendments too. So I think the simplest (not necessarily most correct) answer now is to assume all minerals are claimed under any type of claim. Unless one has a lawyer friend and the time to spend in court to prove a point.

Excuse me, but I did not say anywhere that I am taking advice from BLM employees or preferring to listen to them over court cases or congressional acts. You keep reflecting things onto me which I've never said or did and the implication is that my opinion is thus less valid. Also, you've responded to many of my posts on this subject in the past, going back probably 10 years. You know I am more than familiar with mining case law and congressional acts which is what makes your comments to me here all the more perplexing. I'd love to post old records showing this but unfortunately the "other" forum deleted all my posts and my account because they didn't agree with things I said either. I literally just said I'm open to changing opinions if presented with evidence to the contrary. I'm open to discussion. Or was, I think after a decade I'm tired of trying where the inevitable result is someone tries finding (or inventing) a problem with my character rather than my logic or argument. So, people can believe what they choose to believe and that's fine with me.

Here is the direct ruling from Clipper v Eli (regarding prospecting for lode over placer claims). Draw your own conclusions... If there is a ruling similar to this relating to the overstaking of placers over lode or the inability to prospect for placer minerals on a lode claim (which was the original question posed in this thread), then could someone please post it? Few have time to read through entire court cases which may or may not be relevant. "Although a placer location is not a location of lodes and veins beneath the surface, but simply a claim of a tract of ground for the sake of loose deposits upon or near the surface, and the patent to a placer claim does not convey the title to a known vein or lode within its area unless specifically applied and paid for, the patentee takes title to any lode or vein not known to exist at the time of the patent and subsequently discovered. The owner of a valid mining location, whether lode or placer, has the right to the exclusive possession and enjoyment of all the surface included within the lines of the location. One going upon a valid placer location to prospect for unknown lodes and veins against the will of the placer owner is a trespasser, and cannot initiate a right maintainable in an action at law to the lode and vein claims within the placer limits which he may discover during such trespass. The owner of a placer location may maintain an adverse action against an applicant for a patent of a lode claim when the latter's application includes part of the placer grounds." But even here there is some room for debate because it both does and does not say placer claims get title to lodes. So I think nothing is clear cut as it may seem. But again, the confusion comes in when we stop talking about minerals and start talking about titles and patenting. A mineral claim is not a title. So I think when we talk about minerals only, which is all we can talk about today, a person can validly prospect for placer minerals over a lode claim but I'm willing to change my opinion if some precedent can be shown that says otherwise. The converse however, may or may not be true depending on circumstance. I think the topic is not resolved anyways and interesting to discuss.

Then how can it be said that both lode and placer claims grant all mineral rights as Gambler and Reno Chris stated above? Just to be clear here, I didn't assume this. I was posing logical questions. In fact for years I've been posting just the opposite on this subject here and on other forums (some of which regretably deleted my posts and account because they didn't like what I had to say on this and other matters). Most BLM employees I've talked to on this subject have ended up agreeing with me too, no matter what they believed at first. One of them is the lead geologist in Winnemucca, Ken Loda, after we spent a few hours going through his case law book. Mentioning him in particular since I know a lot of people on this forum prospect in that district and he's accesible to speak with and he keeps all the code and case law right on his desk for easy reference and discussion. The conclusion I draw is that lode and placer claims grant exclusive rights to lode and placer minerals respectively. Not all minerals. And a lot of case law regarding lode vs placer is in reference to patenting too, which muddies the water further since the rulings don't necessarily adjudicate on the overstaking of two different kinds of claims themselves but instead on the private ownership of the land where the two different claims had been being worked legally and the dispute came in when one attempted to patent. Clipper v. Eli is another one.

So then if lode and placer claims each individually grant all mineral rights by themselves, what purpose does it serve to locate a lode claim over a placer? An how can 2 different claims be valid if they both cover the same minerals? 1872 grants "exclusive rights" to the minerals, not joint ownership unless multiple parties are on the same claim. Consider one potential situation - most clubs file placer claims, and membership either implicitly or explicitly grants permission to prospect club claims, which means that according to what you are saying members now acquire rights to overstake a valid club claim with a lode claim. If that happens then which claim takes precedent, the lode or the placer? If they can both exist legally then that means both are granting legal rights, which means they must be granting rights to seperate minerals doesn't it? Thus lode is defined as "in-situ" deposits, and placer are defined as "placer" deposits, presumably to rectify this logical impossibility. Otherwise if you have two valid claims covering the exact same minerals, then you have joint ownership which is counter to 1872 and the inherent idea of a claim. And how would that work if the parties conflict? Since the lode claim is just as valid as the original placer claim then the lode claim owner could then kick all the other club members off "his" claim (and thus the club claim). Just as one example of conflict. When it comes to actual mining, imagine the other conflict...does the lode claimaint have to pay the placer claimaint half of everything mined since they both own the minerals equally? Do they each need permission from each other to start a mining operation? There is no code or rules governing this, maybe for a reason. Because it creates a logical impossibility when two different people have "exclusive" rights to something. If the answer is that the lode applies to the lode minerals and the placer applies to the placer minerals...then a person has to assume each claim has a seperate purpose and they are not in fact granting rights to all minerals but only the corresponding lode or placer minerals depending on the claim type. Having two valid legal instruments to grant exclusive and all encompassing rights to the same physical entity, I think, is not possible. Only if two people are on a single legal instrument. Because both parties would have equal right to do anything without permission from the other, which itself means that the claims don't actually grant exclusive rights.

Oh yeah and they also said they have plans to rollout improvements in data access including potential changes or upgrades to claims databases. Which would be awesome. One thing is they said they have plans or have been talking about digitizing paperwork filings so you can pull papers and maps without having to travel to the state office. Already in the Lakewood office they have a program where the public room will email copies of any paperwork (loc certs, etc) to you for a small fee so you don't have to drive halfway across the country to get a copy, but not all offices do that yet.

Well they call themselves "claims adjudicators" when I talk to them or that's what they refer to them by when they transfer me to them, whatever their official title may be. Anyways, I'm just posting what I was told because it might have implications in a year or two, whatever they may be. They said they have been looking at the situation in Washington for a few years and they now have plans to take action to rectify it nationwide. When I prospect and map out the existing claims, probably close to 50% of the claims (especially lode) are filed erroneously or the location certificate is so rife with contradictions and errors that I can't physically locate the actual claim on the ground. So as it is, I talk to these claims adjudicators on a fairly regular basis in a number of different states. They are the ones who work at the BLM state headquarters and determine wether claims are valid or not, or if they need amendments or additional paperwork, or whatever else. Also they are the ones who you get directed to when you go into the state headquarters with existing claim specific questions, I've met a number of them in person. So whatever their official title is, that's what they call themselves.