jasong

Where I live those pieces of land are not easements, they are owned outright by the city (they reserve the right to use them to add road lanes, parking, etc in the future) but the homeowner is required to care for them. I flip houses as a 2nd business and go through a lot of properties, and almost all the houses from the 20's/30's I've bought the lot lines stopped at the sidewalk, not the curb. But I'd be pretty pissed if someone dug into my nice new landscaping without asking, and I'm pro-detecting. In some of the subdivisions starting in the 50's or so, the private property extends to the curb, but often they are missing that strip of grass and it's just sidewalk. 

Property plats also show measurements. Often you can get a plat for an entire subdivision that may not be as accurate as the individual property plat if it's not updated, but it will show how the subdivision was platted in general and usually if an easement exists and where property lines generally extend to for all the properties. In many cases the county assessor will have a GIS online showing property lines too, which is usually pretty up to date. 

Ok, now it's interesting again. 😅 

Is this pinpointer ever going to be available to other countries though, or is it something a person is going to have to jump through hoops to acquire?

On 7/20/2023 at 12:30 AM, dig4gold said:

The Minelab posts were most likely the number of disgruntled buyers of the GPX 6000 & its issues & Minelabs total lack of engaging.

D4G

Gadgetry/mods generates a lot of discussion too. The main gold section is a heck of a lot more active when there are interesting things to use and test out. I'd say there were probably 10 times more X Coils posts than 6000 issues posts, with all the consistent releases they did. Starting with the coils themselves, then moving to spiral windings, then releasing the supposedly impossible smaller coils like the 8", then moving to concentrics and all the different sizes of those. There was just a ton to test out, compare, show finds with, and talk about.

The 6000 is frankly a very boring detector to discuss once you move past it's problems, hence the focus of discussion largely centering around it's issues and not much else. 

Another data point that shows Minelab really doesn't care about it's customers, they actively suppress the sorts of stuff that tend to form communities in other product sectors, it's all about $ and nothing else. And it shoots itself in the foot because of it, creates needless negative feedback, and makes some people dislike them instead of generating fans. 

Thanks for the test vid.

Unless it has the feature that disconnects the coil when off to prevent GPZ interference with larger coils, looks like personally not worth it for me personally to try to wrangle one up from Russia or wherever. I'm pretty used to using the side of the Carrot for small stuff already, it's actually nicer using the side for cracks and smoshing through spoil piles for tiny targets I overshot. 

If that Sphinx pinpointer was available and easy to buy in the US or if it disconnects it's coil when off though, I'd go for one. The stability at high sensitivity is nice.

From those comparisons you did, seems like Garrett could have a small win with a Carrot 2 incorporating the TRX guts but made more stable, and with a coil disconnect. 

@pavelka72 Did you make an entire ad just in response to Strick's Clint Eastwood video or was that a happy coincidence? 😄 I guess the snow means it was made some time ago. Nice work either way...

Curious if Simon got his yet. I can't remember which thread was the relevant one to post about this in, so posting here. 

12 hours ago, phrunt said:

Yes, it would just go to them their trash folder, nobody (including them) would see it.  

😄

Sorry couldn't resist. But in all likelihood, may not be far from reality. Sendto:trash the entire email account, save them the trouble of sorting through pesky customer issues requiring boilerplate gaslighting responses, business department racks up another few thousand $k in savings for the books, win. 

Nice stuff. 

Have you ever looked for diamonds up by the Stateline district south of Foxpark or around that whole area? A lot claimed by companies but I know some people who had some luck finding some smaller diamonds there, after a lot of work. I used to dredge around there but if I ever found a diamond, I didn't recognize it. 

Looks like biotite schist. More biotite = blacker rock. 

Here's a normal mica schist, now darken it by adding more biotite and that's what your rock appears to be. 

You were on the right track with amphibolite, as it's a metamorphic rock. 

A concretion or nodule. You'd have to see what sort of material the yellow rock is, the gray appears to be shale.

Concretions are usually derived from minerals in the country rock. Nodules are replacement features that can be totally different than the country rock. They are used somewhat interchangeably since the line can blur. If they are chert I'd call them a nodule since that's a replacement mineral. If they are ironstone/limonite then I'd call it a concretion since they usually precipitate and don't replace. I'd lean towards a concretion since it appears to have grown. 

Knock one open with a hammer, might be something in the middle. 

4 hours ago, Redz said:

I use them for this too. Surely, however, a deeper pinpointer may be less productive as it will sound off on nuggets further away from all sides. I.e. less precise

Never been a problem for me, in the cases I need less sensitivity I just turn it down. But that's almost never while prospecting anyways, I turn it down occasionally when I'm detecting yards.

For cracks/caliche I want as much depth as possible since I'm not usually able to get the pinpointer into anything and I'm just scanning the flat top of bedrock trying to find where to start chiseling. Often I put the Carrot on it's side to get it into a crack a slight bit, and it's slightly more sensitive on it's side. 

Side of holes don't matter to me when prospecting since the holes I'm digging are pretty big compared to what they dig in the parks/yards (Most mine using a 17" coil start off about 24" wide compared to a small hole like 5" wide in a yard. I'm trying to think of the last time I had a nugget in the side of the hole, but it just doesn't seem to happen for me since I generally get a good rough pinpoint with the coil prior to digging. I can recall a few time when I was a using a little 8" coil and a nugget ended up slightly to the side, but when I'm using small coils I almost never use a pinpointer since the edge of the coil works better and usually the holes are much shallower so I can often just widen the hole quickly to see if the target got out. 

Depth is vital to prospecting usage too. I use them primarily for bedrock cracks that can be 2"+ deep or where I have to chisel through hard stuff like caliche, to save time/chiseling. Also when I have a big coil on, it saves the time carrying a 2nd detector with me, so again depth is important. Once you get 2+ft, it gets real hard to keep widening the hole with a 17"-25" coil, and you want to dig just to the target and nothing more than that in hardpack like cement. It's also exponentially easier to nick a nugget that deep without a pointer too as you flail around with a pick trying to loosen stuff up however the pick can fit in the hole. 

I can't believe no one has made a deep one for prospecting like 10 years back already. The purists were against them for a long time is partially why I think, but they save a ton of time if you use them in the right places. I can find and recover a nugget in about 50% the time usually as someone detecting the same spot without a pointer, unless the dirt is soft and easy to dig like in NNV. 

Thanks Chet, will give that a try. Tore my rotator cuff so it's hard for me to reach behind my back now for the pointer.

1 hour ago, Chet said:

 

Some of the newer pinpointers have circuity that disconnects the coil when turned off which prevents them from being a problem except at close range.
 

That's why I was trying the propoint 35 originally, keep hoping Garrett makes one that works and disconnects the coil when off.

5 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I’m a full blown computer nerd, literally from the days before PCs existed, until now. Apple II was my first rig but it was the Atari 800 that got me going with the games. I literally bought the machine after seeing a Star Raiders demo. Adventure games went from text based Zork to first person snapshot Kings Quest to Myst.

Cool same here, I was into it a bit later but not much, just younger. 8088 computer my mom bought to do bookeeping, taught myself to program GWBasic from it's manual and made basic Zork-like text games, had King's Quest but I was a Space Quest kinda guy all the way. 😁 Sierra logo still emblazened in my memory. Later ran a BBS prior to internet being available in my town and had all sorts of text RPG's on it, kinda the precursor to the MMORPG's and forums of today. 

I plan to do a similar retirement as you after I get everything done out in the world I am able to get done first. I am building a server room for future local AI and VR developments and gaming. Maybe detect for jewelry on a beach vacation somewhere nice if my body is up for it. 🏝️

I hope you enjoy retirement Steve and thanks for creating this forum here as well as your work on detectors many of us use today. Prior to the time you created it, I had given up on participating in the other gold detecting communities. The Alaska forum which I really enjoyed went away around then too, so it seemed like there wasn't many places left out there to talk to like minded people for a time until you created this place.

You gave somewhere to go for people who just wanted to concentrate on prospecting and detecting, and talk with other people about stuff we all have in common and are all interested in. 

Good luck with everything, maybe run into you out in the field again sometime! Remember to take a breath from the RPG's now and then and get out into the mountains, I had to force myself to stop playing Everquest and Unreal Tournament when I was in school just to get anything done and get outta there. 😁

I tried two Propointer 35's and sent both back as defective. I assumed Minelab had some kind of design flaw in them that would be fixed eventually but I didn't want to wait around to find out when the Garrett Carrot just worked. 

Simon if you test the Sphinx, will you see if it interferes with the GPZ when it's off? That's the only thing I don't like about my Carrot, got to keep it mounted at my shoulder or behind my back (using bigger coils anyways) otherwise I can hear it on every backswing, faint, but enough to drive me crazy since I try to eliminate as much noise as possible. 

Where do you buy these? Only place I see them in stock is Ali Express and it won't ship to my address in any of the listings. The rest are like Russian stores or something where I'm not sure they'd ship to the US either but I can't really tell if they are legit or not either. 

If there is quartz around, I'd sample pan some of the dirt around the rocks too if you are in California. Might be a lead to something good in the rock further up. 

Epithermal deposits do host nuggety gold in sedimentary rocks. I don't know the geology out there in the coast range, but Nevada next door is famous for some spectacular crystalline gold nuggets that often comes from veins in sedimentary and metasedimentary rocks (phyllites, shales, slates, sands, limestones, etc). Colorado is another, there it is in shales IIRC. Keep an eye out for pyrite pseudomorphs in the sed rock along with quartz, something I've also seen come with nuggets in AZ so I'm guessing CA too.

In both cases, I've found some pretty rich placer deposits via pan in the dirt and angular rough rocks eroding from outcrop above, this is also how they pocket hunted back in the days before detectors.

I really have no idea what the mineralization and host rock is like out there, you'd have to read up on it. I'm just giving some general advice though and it's up to you to do the research and bootwork. Generally the streams are your best bet, but there can be good gold elsewhere too. Most nuggets I detect for are not in alluvial watercourse gravels, but dry, angular hillside placers known as eluvial deposits. 

27 minutes ago, phrunt said:

Even when the website came out with the notice they've tried to get out of fixing every detector by saying it's an infrequent problem acting as if it's only rare and on some detectors yet I've not heard a person yet who's had it done that doesn't notice an improvement and many are reporting an improvement even when using headphones.  Then they go on to say they've incorporated the fix into every new detector. 

Minelab has identified infrequent cases where users hear audio feedback when using the internal speaker. Please refer to the product notice on our website by clicking on the link below.

Haha yeah, that was the other thing that really got to me too.  👆👆 It's like...they just basically lied about no problems, then when they make something public it's...kind of another lie in response to try to save face. I really thought there was going to be some kind of clarification after some time passed, but there never was. No problem making the customers look bad for their mistake, but they won't let themselves look bad when it's their own fault...

I personally haven't run across a single 6000 that didn't have the issue. Most full timers I met in the field knew or suspected there was some issue, but the majority of 6000 users I met got out 2-3 times a month and didn't know there was an issue unless I showed them. I believe Minelab may have just been banking on a lot of people not realizing, thus no need to fork the cash to actually implement the fix. Just a guess. 

That said, the 6000 is a good detector when it's working right. They deserve credit for that. But I also believe it has another issue that needs to be addressed via software update which is a lot more subtle and hard to repeat than the EMI thing, and I'm using less and less of it now.  They can pay me next time if they want me to be a beta tester for them though. 😅 I don't work for free. I'm ready to move past Minelab myself, I wish Garrett or Nokta or someone would come out with a lighter 7000 type machine that could run these existing X Coils and let me get rid of both the 6 and 7. Half sine something or another or maybe the zero voltage patents are close to expiring? No clue. There is simply no competition even close anywhere on the market for the 7/X combo though right now though, we just need a lighter one, a bit more signal processing to quiet it down, a speaker, USB C charging, and that's pretty close to the only gold detector I'll need to own with all the coil selection. I pretty much only use the 6 on salty stuff now, or long range exploration as I no longer trust it to always be at the settings I want. 

That's kinda the point of my last post - I'm sure the field testers did tell them. Minelab knew it was an issue. And they already had a fix, when I first reported this being something that was affecting literally every single 6000 I ran across, wether the owners had recognized it yet or not. 

That's the reason I was so frustrated, Minelab knew the issue, figured out how to fix it, but never told us or gave us access to the fix let us hang out to dry. They hid it 100% from US customers. I figured all this out, and still I decided not to post it or tell anyone, and let them have time to fix it. Until I lost patience. I'm not convinced they would have fully come forward with the fix for everyone at all if I didn't do it for them. Or if they would have, when exactly that would have happened since at the time I was many months into reporting the issue and they were still denying it existed.

I want people to understand how it went, because I didn't post a lot of the entire process of this whole thing at the time, I was still thinking at some point Minelab would come clean, or at least apologize for the inconvenience...something...anything. They seem to have zero respect for their customer's time and money though. Some of us do this full or part time and it's our income. And for people like me, even just getting out to a place that I can test takes a lot of gas money when it was $5.50/gallon or whatever - I was dropping $160 each time to go out and get back. And then the gas and time to go redetect everything where I had to stop or was about to crack the machine over my knee and gave up. 

Minelab seemed to get on any potential problems with the Manticore update. In general, the VLF guys seem to get better service when I browse that section. Minelab completely ignore us from what I can tell, despite the fact that we dole out $6k, $10k for detectors. I'm over $30k total in Minelab products, I expect a lot better.

I wrote to ML directly in addition to early reporting on this forum about the EMI problem. They took a while to respond back to me on the 6000 but I waited patiently and said nothing. Then when they finally responded back, they just gave me a link to the same old "noise cancel" article despite the fact that I just told them in great detail all my field experience and tests, and that noise cancel wasn't working and there was likely a hardware problem affecting all 6000's having to do with EMI/interference. Then they continued to tell me there was no issue.

Hilarious considering by that time I had already found their hidden fix page. Not only did they know there was a problem but they had a fix for it, yet they still were content letting customers go out and waste time and gas money in the field with equipment they knew had not only an design flaw, but that they had a fix available and could have stopped the insanity right then and there, but didn't.

I called a few dealers and realized Minelab wasn't telling them about the fix either (even the repair center hadn't heard of it back then, when I called to ask), IMO it didn't look like we'd ever get it in the US at that point and I was dead tired of wrestling with the issue and wasting time, that's when I showed Simon the semi hidden link (I no longer had access to it from the US) to see if he could view it from NZ. Simon posted it here shortly after, but it was me that found it and decided to publish it so that they would start issuing the fix to everyone. I was trying to be patient and respect ML's privacy and gave them a bunch of time and chances over and over again to do the right thing first before exposing the fix to the public since at first I thought they would do it themselves and vindicate my observation of what seemed to be a wide-scale hardware flaw causing EMI problems, but they made it clear they were not going to do it on their own and I had wasted enough gas money and time and taken enough flack from trolls on my integrity/detecting experience, so that was enough for me.

So yeah, they do appear to have some sort of strange contempt for their customers. They are happy to let us waste our time and money on products they know are defective and that they could fix, but decide not to for whatever reason. Minelab should be happy they have dealers and field testers who are decent, helpful people making the company look good, because if it wasn't for them I'd say the company could fall into the abyss and I'd not care after how much time and money I wasted trying to figure out the 6000 thing just to get lied to and then not even an apology from corporate.

Not a fossil. 

Looks potentially igneous, in which case it'd be something mafic, like a fine grained diabase. Also looks potentially like a limestone/dolomite. 

A mini quartz or calcite geode with some iron oxide staining on the inside. Calcite will scratch with a pocket knife easily, quartz won't. 

11 hours ago, Jim in Idaho said:

Jason, we're going to be in the South Pass area in August. Right now my unit is on loan to the guy in Montana, but if I get it back in time, I'd be happy to meet you over there, and I can show you what I'm doing. I think you'll like it.

Jim

Cool let me know when you get there. I have a claim out there we could run it on, I'd definitely be interested to see how it works. 

Hmm that's pretty cool! It's been one of those things that seemed too complicated to learn myself, but seeing you do this successfully inspires me to give it a try sometime. Seems like a pretty useful tool to have in the toolbox for prospecting.

Interesting stuff. What software are you using? Are you basically doing everything by hand by taking manual readings one at a time and then moving probes, repeating, and then inputting all the readings into the software at the end of the survey?

I've watched the commercial resistivity surveys from a distance on a project I optioned to an exploration company, but never really understood everything going on. One explorer lit a mountain on fire in AZ when something shorted out with a probe or something, which is probably why I was only let to watch from afar...😅