jasong

Ergo... Worthy of consideration is this: LR2000 is not sufficient. Depending on the state and county you may have anywhere from 30-90 days before you even have to file your paperwork. On top of that LR2000 can take weeks or months to get updated after that paperwork is filed. You still have to go out and look for stakes, which requires "boots on the ground", which requires driving over public roads/land, which requires access. Oregon going the same way as California now recently. Idaho not far behind. I already lost my dredging grounds in Colorado. Honestly I don't mind if people get angry when I suggest that changes need to be discussed, because I firmly believe they do and every passing year only convinces me further. Until the time that sort of thing can be mentioned by a miner without eliciting personal attacks from other miners then I think we're just going to watch state after state fall because nothing else has changed since the day I bought my first gold pan except people have gotten more angry and inflammatory which solves nothing.

That's one of the coolest geology oriented things I've seen in a while. I didn't believe it until I looked it up and sure enough it can happen. Thanks for the link.

I think this thread, if nothing else, shows that there are some basic problems with the way the current system is constructed. As population continues to increase and resources decrease I don't see any alternative other than an eventual restructuring of the system. Everyone else but miners see it. And if we don't all eventually see it then THEY (whoever you want to think the "other" people are) will make the changes for us while we sit and just complain. All I know is that I've been reading the same things regarding mining for 2 decades and in that time nothing has changed except every year its become harder and harder to do what we love. Wether its large scale mining, small scale mining, full time prospecting, or recreational prospecting. Banging heads against the same wall is not going to change anything IMO and its time for a new approach. I have suggestions for a new approach but the problem is that even talking about these things makes people angry and in some cases has even elicited personal threats in private messages against me on other forums. With that said, my general (very unpopular) opinion is that its just not 1872 anymore, it's 2015. Times change. This is one of Jefferson's quote's in stone on the side of the Jefferson Memorial that I think is worthy of consideration: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." With that said I'm heading out to find some nuggets...

I disagree here. Every day I wake up and prospect I am thankful for whoever got rid of the ability to patent federal mining claims. It'd be impossible to prospect at all in the lower 48 with all the private land by now in 2015, it'd be more like the East Coast. What an absolute nightmare to me. And once it's all gone what about our great great grandchildren? They no longer have any ability to mine and chase the same dreams we are chasing. The thing everyone forgets is land and minerals are finite and non renewable. Doesn't matter to the first few generations, but the guys who have the unfortunate luck to be born later has none of the chances that their parents or grandparents did and that is an unsustainable paradigm. Especially when everything is just inherited down the line. You create an environment where the grand children who inherit the land don't care about mining and never will, and people who are born to mine will never have the opportunity because everything was gone generations ago. This is also the same problem we have with people who stake claims and sit on them for 30 years and do nothing, then die and pass them to their kids who don't mine, or into trusts that don't do anything with them for infinity. The other thing that a lot of people forget or just don't know is that once minerals get conveyed to the private domain, they are forever immune from mineral location in the future under mining law, even if they are given, traded, or sold back to the government and become public minerals again. Gone forever. All those patented properties that were patented and then abandoned 10 years later? They are all out of the reach of mining law forever now. I know few people understand this because I've ran into angry claim holders with guns on a handful of occasions trying to run me off their completely invalid claim on federally withdrawn minerals. Also, lets be semantically clear here, mining is not a "right". It's not constitutionally granted. Congress is free to make laws and regulations regarding mining as they see fit, including banning it altogether (which would be phenominally stupid of them of course). It may sound nitpicky but I don't think it is because talking about rights means something subtly but fundamentally different.

Your mileage may vary. GREATLY. I hear this same rule of thumb too in a number of different forms going all the way up to 10 OPT. Hasn't always worked out for me, I've had ores with visible gold that ended up being closer to 0.5 OPT, all the way up to stuff than ran 10 OPT but only if my sample size was a truckload of lucky buckets (to my dismay).

Ok, I'm probably about to offend people here, but I have to say something: If you spotted him and he didn't see you and you suspected he was cooking meth then why didn't you call the sheriff to come arrest him? Or at least try to determine what he was actually doing first while he didn't notice you if you were in doubt. Why is your first thought to "strap on a 357" and go confront a guy who didn't even know you were there? Is this 1872? I mean you actually said yourself you didn't know if he really was even cooking meth, what if he was just cooking dinner? Even if he was cooking meth, now instead of the sheriff arresting a potential meth cooker now the guy just drove away...your photo of his plate means nothing when you can't even say wether he was cooking dinner or meth in the police report. Sorry if it sounds like this is picking on you....but I can't do anything but shake my head as I read this. We aren't police, it's not our job, and you might have just ran someone completely inncocent away from a place they had every right to be on, and that makes all miners look bad. Also...I have a lot of respect for your geology knowledge Reno Chris, but suggesting spike strips on a public road in public land...seriously? That is illegal. Also, how is blocking off public roads with boulders (or spikes) any better than when the USFS/BLM closes off roads? I drive onto deadends all the time wether I'm just exploring for fun, fishing, prospecting, or looking for a place to set up a telescope, it just don't matter if it's only his claim up there, it's still public land. I gave a perfectly reasonable and legal method to prevent claimjumpers and trespassers...file for a plan to mine your mining claim. But everyone here knows just as well as I do that few ever actually do that. And I think most people understand exactly why without me having to go into the dirty truth. You can't have it both ways IMO. Buy private land if you want to ninja mine. If you take public minerals and want to requisition public surface rights for yourself as an individual then you need to pay the piper so to speak, and by that I mean paying all the proper fees including bonds, permitting, and taxes on the minerals you produce or people you employ, otherwise it's theft from all of us as US citizens.

Is it like using a cone where you shake/vibrate it around and then dump off everything except the bottom inch or so and then put that bottom portion into a pan to look for color? Or is there a different method to it? Another low-water sampling technique is to take a plastic bottle and fill it with a bit of your sample and then some water and then do a "washing machine" technique and then without flipping the gravel over, look at the bottom of the bottle to see if you see any color. Gold needs to be of a sufficient size though. Might work dry like dry panning too, dunno.

If it's an active claim with a NOI/POO then it's also an official work site. You can't go shooting into a factory or a business (even if it's night and closed) any more than you can shoot into a mining operation. At least that would be my assertion when I call the sheriff. I know some would argue that any claim is a work site by the same criteria, but don't convince me, convince the sheriff/blm. So again, it really comes down to what level of mining a person is involved in on the claim IMO. You also can't apply for occupancy or build a fence without an approved NOI/POO either. At least until the day comes that we have so little crime in America that sheriffs can come out and investigate every mineral trespass call this is how it seems to me. The best response IMO is just to be friendly and respectful to people so they respect you back, and it seems like at that point people just sort of stay away and just ask you for permission if they want to go on your claim.

I totally agree, but I imagine there may be some hearty disagreement forthcoming from others (judging from posts years past on this subject on other forums at least). Even some of my best mining buddies strongly disagree with me on this point, but c'est la vie. Anyways, I ramble a lot and my main point was that the best way to prevent claimjumpers on an active mining claim is to apply for the permits to construct a guard shack or a living quarters. Also a fence around all area incident to active mining operations (which is a lot more than just the diggings). But even then, what do you do if someone just jumps the fence? They are gone by the time the sheriff gets out.

Your comment is tongue in cheek but mine is serious. Very rarely do I find patches where I don't have the bulk of the finds cleaned out in the first few days...nothing superman about it. 20 acres isn't a lot of ground and generally the nuggets are concentrated in a couple (or 1) localized areas within the claim boundaries when you are only dealing with cleaning off the surface (as I stated). Yeah someone can come along and get some dinks or the occasional deeper nugget but when you are dealing with an actual bonded mining operation then those little bits don't mean a whole lot, it's the knowledge of where they are found that is valuable. You can go back for years and pull a stray out here and there but that sort of detecting isn't relevant to the point of my comment, if that's all a claim is being used for then IMO it should be dropped anyways, mining claims are to mine not to recreate on.

I tried fighting it to no avail, after a while I just started telling people they were on my claim and if they weren't a-holes about it I'd say go ahead and prospect just don't leave coyote holes, trash, or dig into banks. Oddly, now I rarely get anyone on my claims, something about forbidden fruit I guess. The only exception is when I have a permitted/bonded operation going because I can't have people crawling all over and getting in my way or potentially hurting themselves or doing things that forfeit or increase my bond. Even then people poke their noses in when you are gone for the night, at that point it's a call to the sheriff who just says there is nothing he can do about it, so....shrugs. Next project I start I'm just going to apply for the permit that lets me put a living quarters (camper) on the premises as long as my operation is active and then I can just watch it myself. If it's just an empty claim without a permitted operation going on then I'm not sure exactly how you prevent claimjumping unless you have a real cooperative sheriff with free time on his hands or a claim real close to town. I don't claim anything that I don't think has some sort of commerical potential. I can detect out a 20 acre claim on the surface in a few days, someone can try to go out there and try to get something I missed after that but it won't be much. For me the real value is in dozing it, or in processing the gravels, and I've never had anyone claimjump with heavy machinery yet so its not a big problem so far in the mineral theft department. It's more keeping people out of my tools and equipment and fresh excavations, at that point you can actually erect fences around the active workings, despite what some people think.

I tried making one out of the $35 Harbor Freight metal detector. Seemed like a good idea since the actual electronics fit in the palm of your hand after you remove them from the casing, would be easy to rebuild into a small and portable discriminating pinpointer and it'd be easy to solder in a double pole switch that breaks the coil circuit when the pinpointer is off. Only problem is the discrimination on that detector discriminates gold out along with iron, at least my particular detector did, so that's a no-go in case anyone else thinks of trying the same thing.

I agree, I'm always just trying to understand how it works, wether it's prospecting gear, a table saw, or a computer, professional work or hobby. I never have success in anything unless I understand my tools. Never had anyone to show me ropes, take me to spots, or teach me, so it's part of my nature to make sure I'm as proficient as possible with the things I use both so I can find new ways to use tools better and also so that if I fail it's only because I didn't try hard enough. *Another related question I have, maybe a stupid one, but it's never really stated wether these balancing procedures apply both for manual and auto track or only manual. Like if I'm on auto track do I still have to use the quick track trigger and do the ferrite spaghetti dance? Or do I just let it auto track over the ferrite? And it's been talked about both on forums and the knowledge base articles that the GPZ is always monitoring the ground and adjusting it's ground balance but it doesn't say if it means it only does that when you are on autotrack or if (as it seems to imply) it is actually constanly doing minor rebalancing and ground tracking even when we are set to manual ground balance. I was wondering if there is some kind of clarification?

So it does retain multiple signatures? In this case one for the ferrite and one for the ground as you do future ground balances? The knowledge base does say it's ideal to re-use the ferrite with every new balance but doesn't say it's required. But the reason for not touching the quick-track button was because the GPZ is constantly monitoring and rebalancing during that time period and we were supposed to expose it to as much ground as possible without resetting the ground balance. The ferrite was produced to shorten this "data gathering period" So if it's always rebalancing then what happens to initial ferrite rebalance if it's not retianing it along with whatever new ground you cover as you prospect? It must be retaining it, or at least some "part" of it otherwise the ferrite would have to stay taped to the bottom of the coil permantly. That's why I'm asking if it stores multiple "signatures" in the ground balance. So, for instance, would I get an even better ground balance if I went excessive and had like 12 different types of hotrocks, 5 different ferrites, a few buckets of different hot clays and then quick tracked over that mish mash? Will it remember all of those? If the GPZ takes 15-20 minutes looking at different parts of the soil and optimizing the ground balance then it seems to me to imply that it will. That is what my question is. If it doesn't recognize different signatures and instead just averages all the stuff it sees, then if it's constantly monitoriing the ground and readjusting the ground balance then doesn't that imply that we need to throw the ferrite onto the ground every 15-20 minutes too otherwise the automatic rebalancing due to the GPZ internal algorithms will overwrite the initial ferrite balance with enough time if only 1 signature is kept? The initial ferrite balance would get diluted with every new averaging or ground sampling the GPZ does automatically until eventually it was averaged out almost entirely wouldn't it?

These things seem to be where the GPZ really excels. I found a much smaller (~1oz) pocket earlier this year that was only about 12" deep under the soil, my 4500 couldn't hear it at all, strong on the GPZ. I'm surprised we haven't seen more finds like these posted honestly, hidden veins and pockets buried under the surface too deep for VLF's and too disseminated or crystalline/thin for PI's, I thought quite a few would have been found by now in some of the older popular goldfields.

Interesting stuff... Does the GPZ retain multiple ground balance "signatures" for lack of a better term then? Like if I did the gb procedure to let it learn the ferrite and then I did the same procedure over a piece of banded iron formation would it keep both of them in memory and use each as it was needed and neither of them if I was on quiet ground? And then a 3rd entirely different signature for the general ground I'm over like if I'm in a quiet low mineralization spot? I can't wait to get to the goldfields and be able to do some testing, I didn't get my ferrite in time so I haven't even been able to try that yet let alone the new firmware update. I'll make a vid on it next month with some test results once I get out.

That's what I was hoping too. I'd love something that could switch between 7khz, 14khz and 28khz inside the software. Might be another one of those machines like the Fors Core that can double as a good prospecting machine looking at the isat and tons of new discrim modes. I've actually rediscovered my enthusiasm for coinshooting lately using my Fors Core so it's kind of nice having a machine that does both. If it had a higher frequency option I could definitely see the end of my GB2. Anyways, bodes well for future gold-oriented machines from Nokta, definitely still a company to watch. Let's see a PI next!

Is that an adjustable frequency setting? Looks like they are using the Racer body? Also, notch filtering - cool. Assuming that is the same as notch discrim? Or is it like literally a notch filter for RF/EMI filtering? Notch discrim is something I've always wanted in a gold machine but for some reason few do it. Hopefully in their new gold machines they implement it. I like the ability to filter out higher and lower VDI's, not just all the ones beneath a certain threshold. If I'm going to be running a discriminating machine it might as well have full discrim capabilities.

That's a heck of a good haul for some pounded land, nice work to the both of you.

Hold em to task, ask ML directly for a warranty replacement. Eventually they'll realize they shouldn't design a prospecting tool like a weekend coinshooting machine. Sooner or later they are going to get tired of replacing stuff and improve their design and material selection to something more appropriate for the world's premier nugget hunting machine.

Hmm, oh well. I was getting excited reading the reports about stability increasing. Good to know ML is doing updates though, bringing detectors into the modern age, opens up the door for interesting updates in the future like new timings and whatnot that could be real interesting.

Anyone had the new update out and on the ground yet? I can't get into the field for a while yet to try it out but I'm very curious if it's stopped some of the hehawing on salt, takes care of clay lenses better, runs smoother over rough ground, etc...? Or any noticable change in stability? I read on the Aussie forums that people are reporting being able to bump their thresholds up now. Any reports?

AUAddicted, do you have the new Nokta waterproof pinpointer that is like the Garrett Carrot or the older one? I have the newer one and I haven't noticed any interference issues when its off (definitely does when it's on and too close to coil) but maybe I've just had it far enough away all the time, not sure.

Sample bags are in my pack too. The ziplocks with the white bar across them for labeling work pretty decently for cheap ones. Something that not everyone has a use for but if anyone likes making prospecting videos, I bought one of those $3 Amazon cell phone tripods with all the adjustable balls and it's the best $3 I ever spent, that thing packs away easy and is so much easier for shooting videos than trying to hold the phone with 1 hand and dig with the other.

Nice, can't wait to get out to the field and try this out.