jasong

How cool! What is the blue/grey tool? Is that an oldschool handdredge? Is there merc in the flask? Is it crunchy?

Congrats Paul! That's awesome, and hopefully that pinpointer points the way to many new nuggets and memories for you!

Patenting has everything to do with my argument there otherwise I would not have said it. Again, it removes public land and minerals from the public domain. While that land might eventually be traded or given back to the public, those minerals are now forever exempt from location - even if they fall back into the public domain. Those minerals will never again be locatable, only leasable, thus decisions made by prior generations forever affect future generations. Your claims, if unpatented, may be yours now. But you can still drop them and others may claim them under the General Mining Act and they will continue to stay in the public domain if left unclaimed. See Land Matters latest special report detailing how often this happens, even with claims held over 100 years.. What you won't ever see on that report are patented minerals going back into the public domain because by law they must be withdrawn from location if they do. You are incorrect that I have an abhorrence for mining claim owners. I am a mining claim owner myself, and I am a miner. But I am also a person who sees a problem and I'm not afraid to talk about it even it makes me a pariah. I try to look past my own individual self interests and try to understand the bigger picture. Look, there isn't a person here who wouldn't like some cheap land including myself, but what I'm saying is we need to step back and look at the numbers and ask ourselves if that is sustainable or even ethical to our children, to their grandchildren. We need to stop think about what our country and what the state of mining will be in 25 years, in 50, in 100 years and realize that things can't stay the same forever.

Sometimes my typing fingers and my thoughts don't work together so well and what I say doesn't quite come through as I intended it after I read it a second time.

I think you may have misread my comment Barry. Let me clarify: I am saying "rights" in general must be universal and apply to all people. Thus, "mining rights" cannot exist from purely a numbers or logical standpoint because there are more people than there are resources, so that means only a minority of people could enjoy those "rights" if such a thing existed. Note that I am not saying we have any innate "right to mine", in fact I've been clear on just the opposite for my 12-odd years of posting to online gold forums. Ironically, I was writing that partly in response to yours and others usage of the phrase "mining rights" in the previous threads, such as where you said something to the effect a few days ago of "go out and enjoy our significant mining rights".

Don't look down then. GPR-7000? That is a pretty swanky nugget box Lucky.

I can't get behind the concept that a patent is a "reward" to individuals or mining companies for their hard work, as you are saying. Mining is a business, selling the minerals at a profit is the reward as with any other business. If the minerals can't be profitably extracted on their own then that business should fail. The public and the government should not subsidize or reward business for simply doing their job. If they don't want to do it without a reward, let someone else. In any event, the mission of the BLM is "to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations." The latter part highlighted because it seems to be forgotten so often... Patenting is clearly a direct hit to future generations since their public resources and land are being allocated before they even have a chance to prospect them themselves (or be born). I wrote out a bunch of math here to make a point, but I feel it would just make eyes glaze so I'll just state it outright: the total population of the USA exceeds the total available amount of public land that could be patented or even claimed. There is only enough BLM land to give approximately 12 million people one 20 acre patented (or unpatented) parcel. That means only like 4% of US citizens could file for a claim if everyone sought to do so, and 96% of us would be left with nothing. Further, there are 700 million total acres of mineral estate if you include private lands, state lands, etc and that bumps it up to what, maybe 10% of citizens could file for a mineral claim before it's literally all gone? Of course you can't patent without surface rights, but I'm just showing a point here and using the extremes. There has been a lot of talk about mining "rights" here and other places lately. But has anyone considered the issue that a "right" is something which is granted to ALL people. How can it be a right when only a small minority of people could enjoy that right? And the more people exercise that "right" the more they restrict other's from having the same "right". Patenting does just this though and it's not necessary like production of minerals is. From this line of thought, I don't think anyone could defend patenting as written into law, it's not sustainable as I said earlier, it doesn't make logical sense. *side note: my estimations are in fact grossly inflated given the fact that a huge amount of land in states like WY, NV, UT, etc are of little to no mineral character other than occasionally evaporites, clays, or gravels. The actual number of people who could make patentable claims would be probably 1% or less of the total population I think. Exponential population growth notwithstanding...we'll be doubled up in another 50 years compounding this problem.

Heh I read over the GPZ patents till my eyes bled before it's US release here, still not sure I understand how it works exactly Chris. Norvic, there are military bases and various other sites all over the place in the desert SW where I am at so certainly can't rule that out. But it seems like others would be reporting similar issues if that was what was happening? Maybe they are, dunno, figured I'd put this post up and see and maybe figure it out.

How can we be such strong proponents of mining public minerals granted by public law and at the same time be supporters of transferring those minerals into private domain forever? The two concepts are in direct conflict with each other. Not to mention there are miners alive right now that weren't even born in 1990...why should their public minerals and land be distributed via lottery according to birth-order? Patenting public land was a concept from a different era when the country's population was not much larger than the Los Angeles or NYC metro areas. When most of the west was unsettled and the government wanted to emcourage development, when many western states weren't even states yet but territories. I fully support the moratorium myself, probably the only miner who will say so publicly too. Mining as we know it is unsustainable otherwise.

I clean my coil cover out pretty regularly, it's a necessity working AZ washes. This problem is definitely ground related though, there will sometimes be just little 2ftx2ft patches that I can set the coil down on and it will just oscillate, move the coil away to another piece of ground and no problem, set the coil back there, same problem. I've even revisted patches and washes and then hit the same spot and it started oscillating again right there and no where else, and I just go "oh yeah, this place again"... I'll video it next time I run into it. Resetting the machine and reground balancing does get rid of it for about 15 seconds, then it starts doing it again. The machine will work fine if I move away from these specific spots, walk back over and the same thing starts happening again though. It's just in this one area that I experience it, no where else (so far). And even within this area the detector works fine in most spots, it's just specific patches of ground that seem to cause this. Very odd, to be more clear its by no means a common thing just a minor annoyance in spots, I was curious if anyone else experienced the same thing though.

I'm not sure if it's coincidental but since the update I've run into a number of areas that cause a strange oscillation on the GPZ. Basically, I can set the coil on these pieces of ground and not move it at all and it will just go "wee-woo-wee-woo" constantly and loudly as if there is a target underneath, it never balances out, manual or auto. Rebalancing over the ferrite does not seem to affect it, wether the ferrite is over that spot or away from the spot. At first it was small spots and I thought it was EMI related, but now I've found entire washes that do it, yet the next wash over is fine. I was inclined to think it was due to salt, but there is so little salt around here that I went ahead and tasted some of the dirt (yep) and it wasn't salty. Usually I can taste salt if its bad enough to interfere with my machines. These washes have a lot of black sand and a lot of banded iron formation chunks laying about. usually running in normal and switching to difficult takes it away for the most part but sometimes it's still there. Just odd that it never balances out. Has anyone else run into ground like that before? Most bad ground won't sit there and oscillate if you stop moving the coil even if its bad enough to not balance out.

Same, my threshold level ranges from 5 to 30. It depends on what my other settings are and what kind of ground I'm over and how much EMI is around. I only use headphones if it's breezy/windy but my hearing is decent. It's basically how I run all my detectors from X to Z to GB2, the ultimate goal is to get it as sensitive as possible for the prevailing conditions while also reducing the ground noise and EMI without diminishing target response, which takes lots of knob fiddling and button pushing. To me, for any detector, that is the primary goal in adjusting settings and I think every detectorist owes it to themselves to experiment enough to find that point in every environment they work in. In mild to medium ground though I feel there is a pretty tight range of settings that accomplishes this goal most efficiently in most goldfields I've visited from NV to AZ. I see it said that running high threshold gives you "ground information" that is valuable, but I don't feel there is any more information to be gained from the ground past a certain point. After that I feel the noise increases exponentially and the target response only increases linearly and it's possible to lose targets by running threshold too high unless you move glacially slow, at which point unless you are patch cleaning, time is better spent covering more ground from an economic standpoint.

Yep, I agree completely. Especially considering I was responsible for paying return shipping on the broken machines they kept sending me!

For what its worth, the 2 or 3 days I actually used the machine I thought it was a great unit. It was pulling deep silver coins up my other coinshooters had missed back in the 90's and early 2000's in my own yard, also way better at picking through the trash than any coinshooter I used before. I had the Fors Core, not the Gold+, but I'm sure the Gold+ is a good machine too. Good luck, I'm sure you'll get fixed up.

I wrote to Dilek directly at first as was suggested to me on this forum when I reported the issue (I was at 10,000ft on the side of a mountain on the first day of my trip and hoping someone knew how to fix it right then so I didn't have to go back home). Dilek simply informed me that I needed to deal with Kellyco since they are the US authorized repair center. I think I wrote about my experiences with Kellyco in another post here (very negative). Not exageratting at all when I say I lost my entire summer detecting season dealing with that (and wasted a 900 mile round trip detecting outing)...Kellyco told me they don't actually repair anything Nokta there, they just replace the units unless it's something modular or mechanical. I actually never really got to use the detector due to that stuff and since the specific opportunities I bought the detector for are now forever gone I doubt I will use it much.

I had the same problem (among many additional ones), had to send it back and get a new machine (which itself didn't work and I had to send back, and THAT replacement didn't work either). I spent all summer just shipping machines back and forth, at my expense, now summer is over and I have no reason to use it anymore because I'm back in Minelab territory haha, go figure. Even this machine still has a problem with that VDI screen, but I can read it still and got tired of shipping and the season was over anyways, so meh, just writing that purchase down as a learning lesson. Nokta - you guys need to work on your QA/QCing though. May your luck be better than mine...

If they read this they should toss back on the RSS feed to at least the Knowledge Base section, it's good to get automatic updates if something is released there.

The problem isn't metal detecting though, the problem comes in when I find a place I want to mine. Then you have no choice but to lease. And that assumes a company will even be amicable to leasing, which in every case I've encountered so far they have not. But even if they are, I am now paying my lawful legal cut to the government, and then I'm paying a cut to a third party for my own minerals and having to deal with their added beaurocracy on top of it. And to make it worse I'm fairly certain their claim is not even valid to begin with but I gotta pay the blood money because how do you fight 1000 lawyers? If a guy walks around and metal detects and is there and gone 5 hours later no biggie. If a guy wants to mine, it can be a biggie. And since I assume anyone who files a claim, which is what this topic is about, is a miner or has intent to mine, then it should also be a biggie to other miners. The other problem is related to what Chris brought up. How on Earth is any prospector supposed to know what lands are leased? I will go out of my way to avoid those if I know. Buts it's just impossible unless there is some sort of sign. Which I've never seen anywhere yet personally, as Chris says they have a tendency to go missing.

Also regarding these two points in particular: I need 1 million bucks, but I'm not going to go rob a bank to get it. What they need and what they are legally entitled to do are two different things and just because they think they might need something doesn't entitle them to acquire it through invalid methods. On point 2, the irony is that they are doing that exact thing to other miners who would seek to mine land on their own. They blanket claim and then ransom our own public minerals back to us at a premium via leasing. It's like taking a low interest loan from someone and then giving them no other option than to borrow their own money back at 10x the rate. Except I believe the way they acquire those loans are invalid, so it's more like the mafia strongarming cheap money from a guy then giving him no option but to borrow his own money back at a 10x the rate.

But that doesn't explain why they claims hundreds of square miles of land with no mineral character, nor does it make paper staking any better just because a large corporation is doing it and not a small time ebay scammer. Nor does it give them any kind of legal or moral justification to skirt claim requirements that we, the citizens that grant them our minerals must comply with ourselves. It doesn't give them a right to stake claims without even knowing if there is anything on it worth claiming. A BLM with proper funding would devalidate the vast majority of those types of claims. They also don't pay huge holding fees. $200 per claim is literally nothing to them. It's an entire claim for less than 1/5th of a single ounce of gold for companies which produces millions of ounces of gold. It adds up in bulk to people like us who don't see the world in terms of dollars signs punctuating numbers with more than 5 or 6 zeros, but it's still a pittance to them. Personally I think maintenennce fees should be increased at least 5-fold, maybe then the BLM would find the funding they need and stop answering every question I ever pose to them with "great in theory but we don't have the funding to enforce that". I understand your argument Steve, I do. I grew up and worked in a state just as reliant on minerals as NV, if not more because we don't have any place like Reno or Las Vegas. I lived the bust and I worked the boom. I also rode the next bust right down to rock bottom. I understand how it works. And it's commodity price that drives mining action, they don't rely on paper staking as a cornerstone of their business and there is no reason they shouldn't be held to the exact same requirements by law that we as non-corporate entity citizens are held to.

These are separate issues though. Unless you mean to say these jobs and tax revenues depend on blanket paper staking?

Not surprising for anyone who has done any prospecting in NV. Still a bit stunning to see in graph form. This is what I'm talking about by corporate abuse of mining claims in the other thread though. Fundamentally they aren't any different than the paper staking on ebay, except many magnitudes greater in quantity, yet I've never once see anyone raise a voice against it other than myself since I've been frequenting prospecting forums and I cannot understand why.

It's probably a lot, but then again not quite as many as people assume. I can say from personal experience, having spent the last 5 years living full time in the field prospecting in every western state except WA and NM, that the only places I see this sort of thing happening rampantly are around club-type goldfields (and California in general). The sellers are generally aiming for people who were in clubs but now want to own their own claims but don't want to put the effort or education in to finding one themselves, and the sellers are generally poor prospectors so they just find slices of unclaimed land in known areas where other real prospectors already did the location work and gave them a treasure map to follow. From my experience the rampant blanket claiming by corporations with no discoveries is far more serious problem by many orders of magnitude to actual small scale miners who need to prospect large areas of land to find their own claims to work. I've seen one mutlinational do a blanket claiming of 2 different areas encompassing probably more land than all the paper hangers combined. And it happens weekly, all year, by many many companies, some of them just US shells for foreign investors monopolizing our public minerals for basically free - ~$200 per claim is peanuts to a billion dollar corp. Also I think the waiver should be limited to like 3-4 claims and also have a total acreage limit, not just a claim number limit. Something like 80 acres. There are single guys who will never in their life touch or mine their claims, who own 1600 acres of claims and file a small miner waiver. There are hundred-milllion or even billion dollar large scale mines operating with less than 1600 acres of total disturbance, there is no reality where 1600 acres is considered "small mining". It's not an uncommon thing either, I see it in practically every goldfield in every state I've been to with these obscenely large, totally unused holdings.

I think everyone agrees that practice is despicable. But does the BLM have regulatory jurisdiction over a claim that never reaches the BLM filing stage and only stays within the county? Like, can they officially count a claim not registered with them towards their BLM-centric small miner waiver requirements? Because there is nothing about that waiver in the General Mining Act. I'm just curious, I know the opinion. But what is the law or regulation? I'm just wondering because it'd be exceedingly difficult for the BLM to keep track of county filings...maybe impossible. They are completely separate databases and some counties still don't even have online access anyways. Let me be clear, neither I nor anyone else here supports that "paper hanging" garbage. I'm just floating a question because I don't know the answer to it. Because the follow up question I have is this: if the BLM has no jurisdiction over a claim filed only with the county then can a miner go and mine as he pleases without filing other BLM paperwork like NOI's and POO's as long as he does it and reclamates before the 90 days is up? In other words, during that period is a miner exempt from CFR and only answering to General Mining Act legislation?

Is the nugget market really soft in Australia? I'm just curious why you melt the big solid slugs down, seems like you could at least get spot for them somewhere instead of 90% or whatever the purity ends up being and then a refiner cut? I have problems selling my quartz/gold (specimens) quickly so I crush and melt them often, but the big slugs always seem to sell. Just curious if its different in Australia?