jasong

It seems to hold on to the ferrite data even after I've switched the machine off and on, (ie started a new session on a new day). Is this not the case? The reason I say that is because it's only out of balance on the ferrite if I either reset the machine or do a lot of quick tracking on other bits of ground (possibly for more than 10 seconds). But it stays in balance with the ferrite if I just turn it off and then back on again.

Anyone know of a good composite toe, side zip, metal free boot (metal zipper ok) that isn't Bates, 5-11, or Reebok? I used the Converses for years and then Reebok went and cheesed them all up and I can't wear them anymore. The rest all just fall apart after a few weeks of desert trudging or rock kicking.

I'm digging that Sierra Blaster, anyone in AZ using one right now? I'd love to see one work in person.

Cool, I hope you are having luck on your hardrock project BD. The one I spoke to you about turned bust for me. As I dug futher into the ore pile that highgrade totally vanished and it was running around 2 grams/ton and not profitable for me anymore. Shaft was over 100ft deep and just nothing I wanted to work in alone (or at all). I spent some time in your general area looking for some more hard rock prospects earlier this year. Looking forward to reading what you and Adam's adventure is.

We gotta be missing something, maybe JP will explain later. But for me, if my machine isn't getting out of balance then I'm not sure what more could be improved over "not out of balance"....really really not out of balance? Condor: I would not reset your machine if you got it purring smooth right now. If we had to reset after a tailgate then we'd also have to reset after running over a buried old oil can or a big old bolt too, running over overload level iron trash is pretty normal in detecting and shouldn't require resets.

Also, the other benefit of keeping it in autotrack is that when you go over some of those hotrocks that are indistinguishable from a good target you can actually hear that they are hotrocks in autotrack but not manual.Or at least you can do this a lot easier: As you sweep your coil you will hear the tracker adjusting after the initial target attack dies down and the coil moves past the target. Sometimes you can tell just by lifting your coil up over a hot rock and then put it a few inches away over onto mild ground and you will hear it rebalance even though the target sound itself could have been gold. A good target won't do that (unless its under a hotrock).

My GPZ squeeled on the ferrite the first time I tracked over it, and that was it. If it's not out of balance over it then I don't understand the point of continuing to throw it down every session? I'd be curious to know, because honestly I just stopped. Also, from my testing there is no repeatably measurable difference in depth on the GPZ between manual and autotracking running in HY/Normal, give it a test if anyone doubts. Just put it in auto and sit back and let the machine do the work... I doubt a guy can track out a non-hotrock/non-clay lens type target (actual gold, a bullet, etc) as you dig if you heard it on surface, if anyone can show that happening in a vid I'd be really interested to see it because I've tried and I can't get it to happen intentionally at least. Honestly, for me, the GPZ makes ground tracking even simpler than the GPX. Even when I hit different ground it'll learn it just leaving it on autotrack and detecting as normal for 5 minutes or so. I spent hours, days, experimenting around with ground balance, triple reading the stuff ML and JP posted. And honestly all I do now is just leave it in autotrack and detect, haven't had any problems and I've been over everything from white sand mild to fires of hell hot ground from NV to almost every part of AZ now. Am I missing something?

Has anyone tried any of the nonexplosive demolition agents like Dexpan? There are a few other alternatives. It sounds like dealing with powder is expensive here, wondering if they would be worth trying? Or, I have a crazy idea. This wouldn't work in Arizona, but what about drilling your holes then filling them with water and epoxying a cap in place? When the water freezes it should expand and shatter the rock just like a nonexplosive agent should. Or at least that's my theory, if I get a good hammer drill I'm going to put it to test in a video. Rock would have to be nonporous and non fractured though, or filled in. Hmm, actually in non porous/non fractured rock, what about just hydraulically fracking it with a cylinder pump pumping water? Just like the oilfield. I guess it'd only work for a real specifically small set of conditions though, especially on surface. Maybe interesting to try anyways if I get a good high pressure pump. BD, I thought you might have been the author of that ICMJ article.

Bump for visibility, I'm also interested in this. I've been running pretty hot settings since Mar/Apr (which I detailed in novel length posts back then) and I've wondered the same thing myself, even before the update. I can't tell if the machine has "settled in" or if I settled into the machine, even now after all this time. I know the first week I had it out I couldn't get it to quiet down enough to convince me it wasn't defective. Now I can run it almost all out and still get a nice stable, fairly quiet threshold where I like it to be and I can't tell if it's something to do with the update, my new locations, or what? BTW, regarding the ferrite, I got my ferrite way late too and I balanced over it and I didn't noticed really any effect better or worse so I think your probably safe to do it but I hesitate to say that and have some go awry and feel responsible for it, so just my experience for what its worth and I'll let the pros answer.

I'm curious to see how the 12" does. Seems like a good one for the US because some places here are all about crumbing, but you still want to have a good bit of depth at hand for when the bottom drops out and a bigger one is hiding below. If I had any complaint about these newer coils its that they aren't being made in a 14x9 or 14x11 (unless I missed one??) which is the perfect rocky wash coil IMO.

Dude...that's amazing. What mesh is the gold on average? Is there nuggety gold in that caprock stuff too"?

Nice vid Trent. I didn't catch what you said the recovery rate was? Like how much gets past the bowl and caught in the sluice? Also, what is that cap rock, is it like a cemented conglomerate type material? Or is that more like a quartz breccia type thing? I'd definitely be interested to see some photos of contacts and vein systems or pockets themselves if anyone is willing to share!

Same here Norvic, until the latest generation of coils I thought aftermarket coil advertising was all fluff and I was definitely skeptical with the new releases, but I see some tangible difference in these newer ones. Still not as good as the GPZ, but honestly, I'm a little surprised there isn't more chatter about them around here. I made a vid that showed it with a 17x13 NFE (speaking of depth tests) to fairly little response online when if I was still just owning a GPX it'd be my every day coil easily.

An interesting retrospective, we flogged this horse pretty thoroughly back in March, but we all have a lot more field time in now. My experience pretty closely matches that 2nd graph, especially the right side of it. I get up to 40% on sub 1 grammers pretty commonly in AZ, and I get 200% in NNV on a range of solid nuggets up to about 2 grams. Some places it closer to 5%, just depends, at that point its really a judgement call. Specimen/quartz gold vary wildly with a clear edge to the GPZ as Steve detailed before the US release. Geometry and composition of the nugget makes all the difference from what I'm seeing. I was able to visit NNV for the first time, no prior info, and literally every single old patch I stumbled across gave me nice stuff. Not so in AZ where I have a lot of experience prospecting and should have been doubling or tripling my NNV output, but I gave up hitting old patches here for the most part. GPZ isn't a magic bullet down here in AZ, exploration and prospecting new areas is still vital to make wages. I do think a lot of guys were running their GPX's way too conservatively though, relying on memorized settings, and in those sorts of old patches the GPZ can really clean up. But I can also go into those places with my 4500 and do ok too. So if any guys are on the fence about a GPZ and thinking it might break the bank, make sure you are running your GPX ideal first! And use more coils once you find patches (notice the small coil selection in this Minelab graph? hint). And a hoe/rake/shovel is cheap too. I'd estimate something like 15-50% of the stuff I found in NNV was GPZ-only (highly varying depending on location) and something like 5-15% of the stuff I'm finding in AZ is GPZ-only.

Does anyone have any experience ripping a vein with a dozer? Like if you find a large surface exposure dipping basically vertical, just driving on top of it and plowing through it with the ripper or pushing through it with the blade? I'm just curious what the smallest size dozer is that could do that on like a 1ft wide vein? Is there anything useful in between a jackhammer by hand and a dozer? Seems like a mini excavator wouldn't really make much headway into solid rock unless it had a jackhammer on the end of the arm or something...?

I'll check that book out too, thanks. When you are working pockety country have you ever found veins that only have 1 pocket and then nothing else? How far will you go with lowgrade or nothing before you call it quits on that vein? I'm curious because I've found pockets, but they are always just "1 and done". But I've never gone more than 3-4ft beyond the initial pocket. The quartz around the pockets has been almost barren and went from brecciated/vuggy to solid so I just gave up. Is it worth it to keep going further on those ones?

Cool! Funny how that works. I learned something new too.

Feel like sharing any of the old tricks of the trade that had to be pried from the oldtimers? I'm also curious about your prospecting methods. Is it basically just going from exposure to exposure, looking for free gold, grabbing samples to take home and crush or assay? Do you use something like a Gold Bug 2? Any helpful prospecting tips? Were your mines re-entries of old discoveries or brand new discoveries that you made? My interests are basically finding a good surface vein and working it open pit style with a jackhammer like in the ICMJ article or maybe an excavator or small dozer, or I guess however the vein determines I need to excavate it, until it gets to the point where I have to do a lot of underground work, and then to sell it once it's proven up.

Holy moly...$60 a bag for a gram? Being unfamiliar with the paydirt scene, is there any market for "bonanza" size paydirt bags? Like 1 lb bags with 1/2 ounce or a 1 ounce of gold inside? Because I'd be willing to make and sell those for $44/gram, put much larger nuggets in (up to 1/3rd ounce), and I'd pay shipping too.

I used Agisoft Photoscan to stitch with, it's standalone, there might be better options now though. It worked better for me than Photoshop's stitcher which stumbled a lot in places like praries where there isn't much but gray ground and bushes and the photos look similar. It was a bit tough to learn though, in fact if I do another aerial survey I'd have to go back and read the tutorials myself again since its been a year or so. Also, if you use a GoPro or another camera with fisheye then you need to do a fisheye correction in Photoshop or similar before stitching if you want to geolocate the overlay and have it match up at all, or shoot in Narrow FOV which requires a lot more flight passes. The fisheye correction isn't perfect either and you generally lose your corners and parts of the edges due to distortion.

Crazy, first time I've seen the Hololens, looks pretty cool. The stumbling block to developing FPV gps tracks that made me stop...is...hard to describe. Like, there seems to be 2 ways to go about it. You could essentially use glasses like that to walk around entirely in virtual reality via something like Google Earth (or similar) where you already have your tracks and finds stored and an entirely virtual terrain created. Problem is that now you are walking in reality but looking at virtual reality...how accurate are they? How accurate is your GPS? How up to date is the imagery? Not accurate enough I think...that bush in front of you grew last year and its not in the imagery so you trip on it, that GPS is accurate to within a few feet or 10 feet, so you keep tripping on rocks. That 4 inch tall rock is too small to show up on imagery so you trip on it too. The other way would be more with the Google Glass type setup where you are actually viewing reality, the same reality you are walking in. But it overlays the data of interest over your actual sight and thus it needn't be as accurate, you just look at your GPS tracks in front of you to get a "general idea" where you walked before. Now I just browsed the Hololens quickly so it's entirely possible you could do this with those as well. But here was what made me stop thinking about making something like this - I thought about it when I was in Nevada and walking these wide flat praries or gently sloping mountains. But what about complex topography? Well we can use DEM's (digital elevation models) from the USGS and create an invisible mesh to overlay the tracks on. But there is a ton of data there. You'd essentually need to build the landscape on the fly, or have a ton of memory to store prebuilt landscapes. But with every turn of the head you are rotating that landscape and the aspect with which you view the updated landscape and track also changes. So there is a ton of translational mathematics to do to render those landscapes correctly, and honestly I sucked at linear algebra and I don't think I could build a project myself like that just on the mathematics aspect alone. But it would be an awesome tool to have! And I still think about it when I walk around in the zone swinging the detector, wondering if there is a simpler way to do it. *Come to think, there is a 3rd option, a simpler way. Just forget absolute accuracy and get "good enough", and I think there are some pretty sharp shortcuts you could take to produce something that is "sufficient" or a proof of concept...hmm. Oh I see now that I look closer, yeah those Hololenses are awesome, you can still view reality too, I thought at first it was entirely virtual.

No, Android can handle 64 bit numbers, and there are already 64 bit smartphones (more next year). Android is a full fledged Linux based OS like any on your computer and modern smartphones CPU's are definitely just as powerful as the laptop I am typing on now. It doesn't really matter anyways, most sensors are 8, 16, and 32 bit. Most built for MCU's like aftermarket magnetometers and accelerometers are 16 bit still, and 32 bit for something like a coil or antenna provides plenty of resolution, more than you'd need for a metal detector I'd guess. You can make a professional PI or VLF with a 16 bit MCU running under 25mhz. A 32 bit quadcore phone running 1.2ghz is much more than powerful enough, add on a standalone DSP chip and a frontend analog filter and you have miles of open processing power to use. Not to mention you can now buy a full fledged 64-bit dev board with MCU and operating system installed for $15, with multiple SPI and I2C busses open even after you add in the HDMI and USB ports. Dunno what the ADC is though it might still be 32 bit, I don't see a real need for 64 bit precision with a metal detector anyways. $15. Kinda shows how incredibly cheap the modern detectors are and how much markup we are paying for them...and also why it's just easier to replace and entire machine rather than pay a repair person to fix it. I'd be honestly surprised if the GPZ costs more than $200-$300 to produce for instance, there isn't any pixie dust inside, it's a piece of plastic and electronics just like anything today. *Also, check this chip out, coming to a phone near you! That'll make my desktop computer look like a fossil. **Also also, you can still do double floating point format in Java (as with other languages) just by declaring type double, even on 32 bit processors and I believe it stores the number in memory as two 32 bit binary numbers. But again, it's not really necessary.

Man oh man, this is a concept that I was pounding my fist on Nuggetshooter forum when I bought the first Motorola Droid, the first day I had it all I could think is "this is the future of metal detectors", and it fell on completely deaf ears, back in 2009 or so. Fewer people owned smartphones then though, the concept seems even more doable now. You needn't have everything in the coil even, there is no reason you couldn't have a "dumb" box mounted on the shaft still or inside the shaft for that matter. The main thing is analog circuitry, you need the battery, oscillator and amp (actually, just the amp really) maybe a few analog filters. The DSP capabilites of a generic smart phone is lightyears ahead of what would be required for a normal detector, you could do so much digitally that is now taking space and weight up physically. Imagine if physical detectors (the shell) were sold by many companies as one unit, and the digital component (the brain) in the form of an app were sold by other companies as another unit, and you could mix and match and combine as desired to make different machines...? Also, depth isn't just a problem of mag fields decaying as 1/x^3. Decay may be exponential, but it still decays off to infinity and off in infinity is still a detectable signal, just diminishingly small. So in theory, if you can lower the noise floor enough then you can "hear" a signal from quite far away. Even in some cases when the signal is below the noise floor. Galaxies away with radio telescopes, granted we don't have an array of coils so no direct comparison (hmm...why not though?). So you can brute force depth by throwing more power at it, or you finesse depth by making a very sensitive "ear" and using very complex digital filtering to reduce noise so that the weak signal remains. Such things should be possible now that we have companies who are actually using modern technology instead of trying to crowbar old news into something resembling a modern paper. Conceptually speaking at least. In practice always much harder of course. But it's fun to think about.

I was thinking about doing the same sort of thing with something like Google Glass where you can see all your previous GPS tracks and nugget finds overlayed onto the actual ground and terrain as you walk around and prospect, let you quickly and easily fill in the blanks you've missed. It's crazy expensive still though, and quite a few unique challenges to even try to make it possible involving a lot of linear algebra that I've mostly forgotten, but I think it's doable with DEM's from the USGS and a fairly accurate GPS and a good smart phone as the brain. Just not sure how useful it'd be after all that work and money.

I haven't read the book or article, but I'm guessing the idea is something along the lines of nuclear transmutation, or in other words changing one element to another via bombardment of high energy radiation. Gamma rays are high enough energy to be ionizing and thus it is possible that they could alter the physical or chemical structure of a rock (or human DNA/cells). Maybe the idea is to change sulfides into oxides so you can crush and not leach, I have no idea I'm just guessing. Not saying it would work either way. Outside the atomic level ionizing radiation can also lead to molecular alterations too, so maybe that's what he was getting at, dunno...making materials brittle and such or encouraging some kind of reaction like oxidation maybe? But, also like Chris and brogansown said, gamma rays travel through pretty much anything too, which is why you need so much concrete encasing nuclear reactors. But that doesn't mean it doesn't interact with matter. The author or article may be bogus, but I'm just pointing out that gamma radiation can affect material properties or even potentially change the material into something else entirely. *Actually, I think I'm wrong about the atomic transmutation part. Not possible without some kind of particle interaction. I was thinking about how transmutation happens in cyclotrons. But the gamma rays can still affect things molecularly, and rocks are assemblages of molecules. Just not sure if it has anything to do with freeing up gold or not without reading what the dude is talking about.