jasong

Right, I was assuming that part is what you were referring to Barry. But if you ask the BLM about it, they will refer to 3809.31 where it says they may require NOI's for anything the local office deternines to be greater than casual use, and the CFR's are clear that mechanized earth moving equipment (other than suction dredges) are not casual use. Thus, they will tell you the NOI is required. And like I said, each field office makes those distinctions differently, which is authorized by the following. 3809.31 Are there any special situations that affect what submittals I must make before I conduct operations? (a) Where the cumulative effects of casual use by individuals or groups have resulted in, or are reasonably expected to result in, more than negligible disturbance, the State Director may establish specific areas as he/she deems necessary where any individual or group intending to conduct activities under the mining laws must contact BLM 15 calendar days before beginning activities to determine whether the individual or group must submit a notice or plan of operations. Essentially it means that any field office can require a NOI for basically any operation they want to require one for that isn't basic hand tool type stuff. A note to clubs: some BLM offices will say clubs should be required to have NOI's based on this as well but they don't have the funding to enforce it. I'm just posting what is published in the CFR and what the BLM tells me when I brought similar questions up...not saying I agree or disagree one way or another.

Let me say I totally agree that system gaming is bad and one of the big problems we have within the mining community ourselves. But I also wanted to say that there are good (IMO) reasons to stake and county file but then never file with the BLM. I do it occasionally myself when I find a new patch or a nice paystreak while dredging. I've made a discovery and it might support an economic mining operation. But often after further exploration it turns out to be just an isolated patch, or just an isolated pay streak as I explore further. It turns out to be uneconomic. So I never file with the BLM and let it all expire and drop and pull my posts. Saves the BLM time and money, saves me time and money, and keeps land open for prospectors that come after me. There are countless places in AZ with 160 acre claims that were filed over 100x100ft singular isolated patches and it avoids that problem too. Because part of prospecting is being able to explore, to correlate and connect geologic clues across large areas. And that is impossible when everything is claimed up. So, just my opinion, but I think there are valid reason to just stake and file county paperwork. But I absolutely despise the recurring 90 day paper claiming tricks ebayers use.

Yeah, I had a talk with Ken Loda at the Winnemucca BLM about that exact thing. I saw a bunch of surveyor kids out there just staking claim after claim and I went up and talked to them. They said they were contracting for an unnamed company and were surveyors (not geologists). I never once saw them do any kind of prospecting or make any sorts of discoveries, just hammer stake after stake in grids and wire wrap on their claim papers. So I told Ken that I doubted these were valid claims and he said it didn't matter. But the claims adjudicators in BLM HQ in Denver tell a completely different story and told me plainly that a claim without a valid disocovery is not a valid claim and they would require discovery proof if they had the funding to enforce it, otherwise it's a matter for civil court. They provided me with a number of different cases which I can't remember now since it was years ago. Anyways, from what I can tell, those blanket claims by the huge mining corps COULD technically be renderred BS by the courts if a guy had the time and money to fight them, but they have more lawyers than we have small miners probably. Also, the BLM does occasionally devalidate parts of claims due to not being "mineral in character". Via prudent man rule, etc. They require some sort of discovery or prospecting to show it is. It'd be hard for those companies to do that on every one of their thousands of claims. The BLM just doesn't have the funding to enforce it, especially against companies with lots of lawyers that might render expensive lawsuits against the BLM.

The question I have with that method is staking before the 90 days is up requires you to make a discovery first. How do you make that discovery on a valid claim without comitting mineral trespass? I guess you could make a discovery on an adjacent portion of unclaimed land (assuming there was one) and make your borders enclose part of the other person's claim. With a placer claim I guess you could show in court that the deposit was easily inferred to be located on the other claimaint's land. With a lode it might not fly though, especially if your discovery had no actual exposed veins.

I don't understand your first statement, NOI's are in the CFR same as POO's. 3809.1 defines the difference between casual, notice, and plan level operations and 3809.11 defines when a miner must submit a NOI. Each office defines casual use based on whatever their local criteria is, and anything exceeding that requires a NOI. I don't agree with that process personally, but I'm certainly not self initiating my NOI's, the BLM is requiring them from me. Are you just saying the line between casual and NOI level mining isn't defined properly in the CFR thus NOI's should not technically be required? Good in theory, but look at any mining that took place before the 90's, NOTHING was ever reclamated at all. People would just go around ripping stuff up...if enviros are mad now, think how it would be if every joe with a backhoe went around digging up land and leaving it legally. I'm not so certain the NOI requirement is a bad thing personally, even if it's a pain. On the second point: it's not an impression, it's my personal experience. I have a claim on USFS that the BLM requires me to file a BLM NOI and bond to dredge. Not just my claim either, they were requiring it were all claims including those on USFS land on the Arkansas river. I explained to them it was not their land and they insisted it didn't matter so I quit pressing the matter. Unless something has changed in the last few years I believe that requirement is still in place. Feel free to take that one up with them though. Royal Gorge field office in Colorado.

Cool looking forward to it. Yeah, even not all BLM NOI's are created equal. For instance Canon City district now requires a NOI and bond to operate any motorized equipment on the Arkansas river. But it's only like $250. A small scale backhoe operation is 10x as much for reclamation bond, so they aren't really the same thing. even the BLM office refers to dredging as "recreational" or "casual" while still requiring their NOI and bond. The USFS in Medicine Bow Nat Forest in Wyoming requires NOI's for a 2" dredge that I can outdig with a hand shovel too and they cap the nozzle size to 3" even though you have to do a NOI...go figure. 3" is a toy. Also in some cases the BLM handles the NOI for the USFS, also from personal experience in Colorado, same way they manage mineral leasing on other agency's land too. Still, I think it'd be interesting to see a Waivers vs NOI graph by state anyways if you have the time, data, and motivation.

Do you have access to, or does the BLM even have available, the amount of NOI/POO's filed by state and year? There would be a few interesting graphs to make correlating that data to small miner waivers filed. If LR2000 has an action code for notices/plans then they definitely don't bother to update all the claims with it because my last NOI operation was never listed and I already reclamated and got my bond back. I'm also kind of curious how the percentage of claims taking the small miner waiver varies by state. Anyways, good job, I like looking at data visualizations. The surprising thing to me looking at that graph is that in most states there are more small miner waivers being applied to lode claims than to placer claims. I've only met 1 guy doing a small hardrock operation in the field, but I've met 5 or 10 guys doing small NOI level placer operations.

I have one, would definitely recommend it. Don't have a pic offhand but it's in some vids. It's built like a tank and constructed very good but still lightweight, perfect color and fabric choice, obvious that a GPZ user (Doc) designed it. I'm cutting the various straps out of the back to make it easier to pull the battery in and out daily since they get in the way of the battery clips, but even with them there it's still a lot easier to change batteries than with the Aussie covers.

I agree to an extent, but the timings are there for the same reason the hardware and software filtering inside the detector are there and for the same reason we don't have amplifiers with 100x more gain even though we can easily build them. Noise is real and it will mask targets otherwise we'd have detectors that hear a 1 grammer at 10ft - we can make one, we just can't hear the signal in all the noise. There is a point where adding more ground noise doesn't add anything new to the conversation so to speak unless I'm missing something obvious here... There is only so much ground information you can get before it's not saying anything new in the noise, it's just getting louder. EMI increases along with it and unless you like listening to lightning or meteorites in the atosphere from 500 miles away, it's not saying anything useful. The usefulness is in increasing the noise so you also increase the target response as far as I can tell, but at some point there is diminishing returns and it seems to be part of a detectorists skillset is in determining where that point is at. The human ear and brain perceives sound non-linearly - which is why the decibel scale is logarithmic. What that means is that a sound that is 10x louder really only sounds 2x louder to us. So volumes that are double really only sound like very faint variations to our brains. Same with frequency shifts (tones). Volumes or tones that only vary slightly are difficult for our brains to differentiate when the noise floor is raised to the same level as the target. There is also the psychological effect that I forget the name of, but our brains get "used" to repetitive senses and automatically dull them out - like how you get used to a smell and don't notice it but someone who just walks in does, or you get used to temperature of a cold lake after diving in, ears are the same. Anyways, I guess my point is just that running full blast in some cases may be just as counterproductive as running in Fine Gold in places where there is no need for it.

That's awesome with the store database, I didn't think many prospectors were computer computer nerds like myself too haha. So many things you can do with them though, it's endless fun even when it's for work. Creating a tool and watching it work and save you countless hours of time is a great feeling. Databases are one area I don't have a lot of experience in, though I have worked with SQL before in an oilfield database some time ago. I should probably relearn it all. You are definitely more knowledgeable than me there though. My problem is that I get really into doing something, then I finish the project, then I forget everything I taught myself so I have to spend a few weeks relearning when I pick it up again to make something else. That's the reason I like Python though, it's so straightforward to me it just makes sense and it's real easy to relearn for me. But it sounds like database scripting is definitely the way to go for the GPS project you are working on anyways. A hacking GPZ thread would be cool. On a somewhat related topic, but not related to GPS, I was just looking at the update files and I redownloaded the update yesterday out of curiosity, the file now is named different and is 10% smaller than it was when they first released the update. I have both update files, going to try to figure out what the difference is. I asked ML but they didn't reply, which isn't surprising I guess since I highly doubt they want people tinkering around in their firmware but ah well.

Yeah I understand the getting it done perspective, no one would ever release an actual product if they kept doing incremental fixes before releasing it. Right, property lines, outlines of areas I want to detect, structural features I map myself like veins and faults, patches of target formations exposed that I find via aerials, etc etc. Mostly just paths and polygons though when it comes down to it. That's a good idea if I'm understanding you correctly with the geometries. You are suggesting just reversing the conversion process with a KML file back into the ML format that contains paths or shapes drawn in another program like Google Earth? BTW, I'm not a professional programmer by any means. I just learn what I need to write tools to automate jobs I need done, maybe similar to you? I've scripted in Python and JS but I can probably follow along with whatever languageyou are writing in. I'm heading out for the rest of the afternoon, but from what I recall when I was looking at doing a similar thing in March is that the GPZ has some kind of fairly low storage capability when it comes to points and paths which would limit fairly drastically the ability to import shapes. Though if you defined a bunch of shapes as discontinuous paths then you could have a huge number of shapes represnted by 1 path to get around that maybe? I have to admit I haven't even touched the GPS since that time so my memory is not serving well here. It'd be interesting to know if the storage limits are arbitrary and if so what the actual onboard storage capabilities are (in some goldfields I have multiple thousands of points, paths, and polygons) or if the firmware limits are there because of physical flash memory limitations. My pie in the sky hopeful idea for image overlays also has a problem and that is the screen resolution limitation. I'm sure your article series will be very good and many people will discover how to use something they otherwise never would have.

Now that we know the 7000 can be updated it seems like the easiest solution would be for ML to simply provide a patch to allow a user to opt to save GPS data in KML format, which is something I suggested a few times back in March too. Not only does it streamline the process, but it potentially allows for importing of geometries back into the 7000 GPS. Or...potentially image overlays as well. I might actually use it if that were the case, as it is now I still have to velcro my phone to the top of my screen to see where all my outlines are at and there is no reason for me to use 2 GPS units. Right now I look at the GPS as an afterthought more suited for coin or relic hunting where you don't need to map out and locate geologic structures or topography or map thousands of different waypoints. It's ok for low-res gridding or basic navigation as I prospect, but it's not a prospecting oriented feature is what I'm trying to say, it has the same limited functionality of even the most basic GPS apps and no further, but the machine is built for 1 purpose: prospecting; so the GPS should have the functionality a prospector requires and a good first start would to be allow import/export in KML format as well as implementing some basic geometry rendering. I'm not saying this to anyone in particular, more to ML. Anytime I send emails to them wether it's the AUS or US branch I just get boilerplate responses from someone who clearly does not understand what I am trying to communicate, so it seems like this medium is a more effective way to communicate ideas to them.

The problem with cross platform phone development, at least when I was looking into it in the early stages, is that Apple is completely proprietary. To even start experimenting with programming for iPhone at the time I would have had to buy a Mac and an iPhone and learned their weird properietary language. Then Apple polices their app store far more rigidly then Google so I had no way of knowing if I could even distribute my app once I made it. Maybe things have changed now, but that used to be a reason some apps were only available on 1 platform. With Android anyone can use any computer and program for any Android phone using Java which is a globally used and standard language, it's what they taught all the CS classes in when I was in school too so most people already know it. I can go around the Google store if I want and distribute my app even if they choose not to. There are benefits and drawbacks to both - you get more wheat and less chaff with the Apple method, but you get far more ingenuity with the Android method via crowdsourcing. So it's easy to port from phone to phone, but it's not so easy to cross the Apple divide so to speak, it used to be a complete reprogramming. And a lot of smaller developers don't have the time or money to do that. Whereas with Android, ensuring that your app works on a Samsung phone is no harder than ensuring it works on a Motorola phone (generally), it's all compatible already. I still use Backcountry Navigator myself. I haven't found another single app solution that provides everything I need as a prospector in a better package for less money. Actually for most guys the free version will do just fine. Though I highly recommend the surface ownership add on layers. I had intended on creating a WMS server for claims mapping data and seeing if BCN would add it as a mapping layer, but living in the field in a camper with marginal phone internet wasn't cutting it for as much data and updating as it required. Still, someone could pursue that route possibly if they had the resources and motivation and it'd be an awesome prospecting layer to have.

The other place VLF's are still king are prospecting exposed veins or detecting hardrock ore piles. Also in crumbing exposed bedrock stretches. They rarely post, but a lot of guys concentrate almost exclusively on the hard rock related stuff with detectors. Not to mention the GPZ is an absolute bear to use on large steep ore piles.

Sample Weight? Just a guess, like the weight of the ore sample they are atomizing for the flame? I don't know much about AAS though. Doesn't it use some kind of sample of whatever element you want to analyze for too? Like if you want to look for gold lines don't you need a sample of gold to start with? Could be that too? I have an analytic chemist friend who I can ask next time I see him.

I got it through Arizona Outback, I was on his waiting list but there may be stock available now, not sure. You'd have to verify with Chris about price but I believe it's listing for like $495.

Doing a bit of testing on the new Evolution coil. Some may recall I was skeptical of the newer generations of coils and I said I would post a testing video when I got one of them to test. Results were not entirely surprising for those who don't like watching videos, but overall I am satisfied with the Evo. See below video for summary. GPZ is definitely king of the dinks, but superior overall on all targets too. If I had some crystalline or highly disseminated specimens to test it wouldn't even be a contest. These tests pretty much replicate my experience in the field - on medium sized stuff I am generally getting 1-3 inches deeper with the GPZ which may be like 10% improvements, but on smaller stuff I am seeing more like 40% depth improvements. Evo is definitely more sensitive and deeper than the 17x11 on every piece of gold I tested. Question is whether it's more sensitive then it's direct size equivalent which would be a 15" round mono. I think it would be, I'm guessing it's probably closer to a 16" round or maybe even a little better when it comes to the small stuff which is (like the GPZ) where I think the biggest gains are at since a 16" round mono would probably not pick up the last nugget I tested at all, or if so only right on the edge where the winding is at. What I'd like to test is whether or not it has greatly increased sensitivity to the crystalline/disseminated stuff but I sold all of it that I found this spring. After the last few generations of newer coils, this one seems like the first to make a noticeable change to me, but don't expect miracles. In other words, it's easily noticeable to me, but slight...but in a game of inches that can be everything. I have now made the Evo my default coil on my 4500 and put the 17x11 on the shelf for the first time in 5 years. For long exploratory trips where I spend all day weedwacking nonstop I'll still use the 17x11 because its much lighter.

Wow...nice work man. Are they difficult targets by your estimation or is it that most people just ignore the gold/pulltab targets generally? Or both?

Some cryptocrystalline silcates are occasionally associated with gold when they are mineralized in banded iron formations from my experience. I've (very rarely) found nuggets with dark red jasper inclusions and found layers or pods of it or chert in situ in abandoned gold mines. I've seen chalcedony in layers in areas with gold bearing quartz veins and pockets but I've never found it directly included into (or vice versa) gold itself and it generally looks like it came later to me. But like Steve says, it's everywhere. Associations might be concluded in very specific areas, but to use it as an indicator anywhere would probably test a person's patience. But if you find BIF and jasper or chert together you may want to give the area a closer look.

That's awesome looking area Scott. It snowed here in AZ yesterday in the mountains too but nothing real like that. Tis' the season for detecting! 50 degrees and overcast is my ideal prospecting day.

Amazing stuff if that's gold. We have a lot of nephrite around Central Wyoming where I live, I used to find it when I was a kid. It was associated with rubies out there but I never even considered gold.

So most of us have read about how during the war gold mining was not allowed since we needed to concentrate all our mining resources on useful industrial materials that could applied towards the war effort (iron, vanadium, uranium, tungsten, etc). But after visiting a number of old abandoned mines that ran during the war years I'm left wondering if some of these mines were actually still going after gold and reporting some minor tertiary commodity as their official "product" instead like iron. Has anyone ever run into the same feeling at certain mines? Is there there any documentation showing that this happened? I'm guessing no since it would have been illegal at the time, but I'm just curious. Were any mines ever caught mining gold when they should have been mining something else? Are there records from whatever dept monitored mines back then to make sure the miners were not going after gold?

The one thing I might add which makes a big difference to some people like me - and I say this as a Nokta fan so don't take it the wrong way - is that Nokta's service dept in the US is KellyCo and Fisher does their work in house. It took a week for Fisher to repair my GB2 and get it back to me. It took the entire summer of dealing with faulty detectors (I'm on my 3rd FORS Core now and this one has a problem right out of the box too, I'm just tired of returning them) and Kellyco's glacially slow and often completely unresponsive service department. It was my first time dealing with Kellyco and I'm completely unimpressed by them personally. Just something to consider for both consumers and Nokta.

GPZ does it and the GPX does too with mono coils on extra/sharp (not as much though). You can go to salt mode and it helps immensely on the GPX. I'm betting they've been working on some kind of salt mode for the GPZ (if it's possible with ZVT) and if so I'm guessing that should make detecting around vegetation a lot more pleasant if such an update is released.

Cool thanks. That was a great contest Chris, I'm surprised a ton more people didn't enter.