jasong

That hole looks like a veritable excavation. Nice job on that piece.

If nothing else you'd think they'd express mail 2 rings out to the 2 guys posting on this thread who haven't got them. $20 bucks versus ongoing bad press on probably the most visited forum when it comes to the 7000... They had this exact same backorder problem on accessories for months when the GPZ was first released, I can't imagine its that difficult to count how many units you've sold and plan accordingly but apparently this will be an ongoing issue. I just don't get it at all. 3 months and still waiting for something they could also just have sent from Digikey or Mouser right now if they are really unable to get them from wherever they have been backordered from. It would sure be nice if Minelab would explain this in either the 4 emails I've sent them or at least a short post on here. Murphy being Murphy, here is exactly what will happen this fall 1200 miles from home when I run into balancing issues and want to send the machine in for repair: "Sir, we are going to need to you to first test the machine with the ferrite ring before sending in for repair"

From Minelab Chris? They sent me an email this morning saying they were still on backorder...

The DJI you posted a link to is what I have, it's cheap and prefab but it does the job and is probably a good way to start. I installed a much more powerful RX with circular polarized antennas, plus patch antennas on my TX radio. Also put in an FPV (first person view) system so that I can fly by videoscreen. My only limitation on distance is battery, which you'd need to go to a DIY solution like the guy in that other thread was posting to increase. I've seen vids on youtube where guys are flying 20 miles out, so distance isn't really a problem if a guy is willing to spend the time and money building his own. But I should mention again for any reading this, out of sight flight is now illegal according to the FAA and they have ticketed some people. It makes sense because you don't want to be causing crashes with manned aircraft. But you can still make a nice little ultrahigh-resolution aerial layer of your prospecting spots just by flying patterns within sight range. With the GoPro you need to get a fisheye filter correction or take your photos in narrow FOV which decreases the resolution so requires more passes, you can batch process them in Photoshop. A 12MP camera without fisheye would be the way to go for Aerials. There is a Russian program which I forget the name of right now which will autostitch your photos much much better than the Photoshop stitcher, It also does 3D recreation of models, like you can fly 360 degrees around a mountain and recreate the mountain as a 3D model from your photos, which is pretty cool itself, you can do with with your own head too. After stitching you can georeference the aerial overlay in ArcGIS or Google Earth and then make a superoverlay from it and host it online or wherever you want if you don't want to share it. That DJI Phantom is easy to fly. Like, it takes no skill at all in GPS mode, the accelerometers correct and you can take your fingers off the controls and just hover there automatically without doing anything. You can also buy the Ground Station module, which may not be legally for sale anymore, and it literally flys the entire thing automatically for you in any predetermined flight path you want.

I've had one for 2 years now. Initially I was going to make my own high-res imagery and sell them as overlays, but the FAA made anything business related with them illegal. I just use it to scout now mostly, but even that's been crippled since out of sight flight is now against FAA regulations too so the usefulness is questionable now. I save myself hikes up mountains and use it to take pictures of ore piles up there to see if its worth the hike, that's about it anymore. As stock they wouldn't be much use for prospecting, but you can get aftermarkets parts for them so the radios go significantly further and so that you are able preprogram flight paths beyond radio distance, at least you used to be when it wasn't against regulations, not sure about now. Anyways, they are loud and annoying, the last thing I'd want is to go prospecting and have a swarm of those things flying everywhere above my head out in the wilderness. Sounds like the loudest swarm of really PO'ed angry bees you've ever heard.

Just curious how it does on depth and sensitivity. Has anyone tested the Elite with some specimen type gold that the GPX misses but the 7000 screams on? Is anyone even running one over here? Most of the comments I see are in Australia. NF looks to also be coming out with a similar coil. I'm just curious how much and what sorts of improvements they give.

For what its worth, the one you found in Rye Patch looks like a candidate to me from your pics even if this one in this post isn't. Hopefully that one turns out. Meteorites definitely aren't my area though, not until NYMEX creates a commodities exchange for them at least. I ran into zircon too when I kept coming up with a dull silverly looking powder in my dredge concentrates and was hoping for platinum. Finally got it XRF'ed and figured out what it was, and under the microscope you could tell it wasn't silvery powder but actual mini crystals.

I emailed Minelab and asked about ferrite material specs for potential 3rd party purchase, this is their response: "Minelab does not recommend using any aftermarkets items on any of its products. Thanks again for your inquiry, we look forward to servicing you soon." A bit confusing really considering I already had to buy 3rd party coil covers, detector covers, and a screen cover (which didn't work because the screen was already scratched due to not having one when it was new) because ML didn't provide them or make them available and in the case of the detector/screen covers they are still not available today. This is one of the most expensive consumer detectors in the world, and expectation of service and quality is inferred and I'm starting to get the feeling ML has ignored that part. If I purchase the penthouse suite at the Hilton I don't expect to have to furnish my own towels and TV. Even Motel 6 understands that for 1/10th the price. I get its a cheap ferrite of potentially dubious usage. But that isn't the point. For me, it's the continuing pattern that is frustrating.

Props for hiking in the Arizona summer heat man...that can be brutal. Nice haul!

I didn't get rain protectors, maybe they only come with the pro-pack? Hmm, well if it was the rain that did it I guess we need to be ultra-careful around moisture because I was mostly under trees trying not to get too wet myself since I was planning to detect all day. I'll try emailing Dilek if I don't hear from them over night, I sent an email to the contact info on their website since I was at 10,000ft and struggling to get a bar of 1X data since I didn't want to leave and go home and thats the first email address I ran across so sent it off and sat down and crossed my fingers and waited on the side of the mountain hahaha oh well. Well anyways, my prospecting trip is aborted. Didn't get a chance to see how it did on nuggets but nefore I left for the mountains I was taking it around to my friend's old yards I had detected to death over the last 20 years and I was pretty impressed with the stuff it was finding that I missed before, target separation was great and its pretty deep even in DI2, this thing should kill it in trashy gold sites, square nails were hitting dead on 20 every time so the VDI seems good too. I did get some gold in a yard - a gold molar, which is kinda weird haha but its gold I'll take it.

Sent an email off to Nokta 2 days ago haven't gotten a response (probably due to the weekend and different time zones), don't think I can call their number in Turkey with my phone though so not sure how else to get a hold of them. I don't have my manual with me and I'm hoping I can figure out some way to get the machine working again since I need to use it right now. I was detecting for a few minutes, it was working ok, then I noticed that all the settings had reset to stock, I tried upping the sensitivity with no luck and realized that no settings were able to be changed. So I turned the machine off and back on and now it's just stuck on the "system information" screen with the operating and gui versions, serial #, etc and the VDI screen in the handle stopped working at the same time. *Also I had been hiking around maybe 2 miles in the rain with the machine on my shoulder, not sure if that is what did it. I figured since the coil was waterproof and all the external stuff has sealed rubber boots it'd be ok in the rain though. Did I screw up there? I'm hoping there is just some way to reset the machine and get it back working again quickly...? I removed the batteries a few times, once I left them out for 10 mins, turned it off and on quite a few times and was trying to press buttons in any sort of combo that might do a firmware reset (if such a thing is even possible) with no luck. Anyone else had this problem and fixed it?

I'm just guessing, but I think this is also at least in part a move to combat rampant counterfeiting which has destroyed Codan's profits, and I think Minelab should have decreased its prices years ago on that front. I can't imagine it costs significantly more for a Chinese company to counterfeit a 4500 or 5000 than it does to counterfeit something else in the $1000-2000 range, especially since at this point the 4500/5000 are legacy technology, at least they would be in any industry except metal detecting. So if the cost of manufacturing is roughly the same but the final retail sale price is two or three times higher its pretty obvious which machine counterfeiters will choose to produce. I've never understood why the business department at Minelab doesn't appear to understand this and keeps pricing their products so high. On that subject, still not sure what they were thinking in the 7000 business department, even though I am an owner I still think they were waaaay off base with their pricing there. I can't help but feel there is going to be some kind of price decrease there too eventually because as much as I hear sales are gangbuster I sure am not seeing a profusion of them in the field like I did when the 5000 or 4500 was released. There may have been an initial rush of buyers but by this time next year I'm wondering what the sales rates will look like on the Z. The used market there is already not exactly brisk right now, there has been one in the classifieds for some time and it's almost brand new.

What a stunning piece Relichunter, great find! Love the 4500 too and still find a lot of use for it even though I also own a 7000.

I can't seem to get one either. The dealer I bought my machine from said he was mailing them out 5 weeks ago, didn't get one so I contacted Minelab and they said they don't have any to send out. Not even sure if I need this thing, but Minelab seems to think I do so not sure why some people aren't getting one.

I'm pretty sure that is a "fake" nugget created by partially melting fines together then removing heat before it buttons up. See it often in the bottom of my crucible when I smelt my own fines to sell to the refiner. People use HF to dissolve quartz, Whink contains a very dilute mixture of it. I don't see anything wrong personally with soaking nuggets in something like CLR or hydrochloric to clean them up, they aren't coins. In my experience they are worth less dirty as far as selling them goes because who wants to pay for junk weight, but I suppose there are collectors out there who want them caliche and all.

6 continents left, race ya to the finish!

Awesome man, nice work!

Right, I didn't mean to imply one should ignore historical research and only concentrate on new tech, historic research is always the first and maybe most important step. Gather every single bit of information from old maps to old miners diaries in the local museum, digest it all. Research 102 I guess you could call it is how I view GIS systems. There are some things you can't see on even the best old maps that become quite plain doing aerial reconnaissance. For instance, one of the secrets to my success in Arizona came when I realized I could often determine different ages of gravels within an epoch on the ground and then correlate those observations to aerial photos. In the Mojave desert I can almost instantly pick out the specific ages within the Quaternary gravels that will or will not produce nuggety size gold. Even the best geologic maps might only differentiate between Holocene and Pleistocene, but on the 1 meter/pixel aerials it is often possible to see much more accurate divisions between ages in the epoch. Each field generally has a different associate age which produces nuggety gold and after making enough finds on the ground to correlate the gold to the gravel time period I can eliminate a lot of wasted time wandering around gravels that really have a very slim chance of containing the gold I am after. Later I realized that with the 1 meter/pixel new imagery I could also with a high level accuracy determine average quartz content of different gravelsand areas which I hadn't been able to crack before and that lead to another string of new patches that I found almost exclusively from my laptop in my trailer and only verified in the field. Using the same methodology by correlating known finds to specific gravel deposits by composition instead of age this time. This sort of thing is rarely to never mapped or documented extensively enough to be useful, these observations need to be made by the person. It still requires correlating finds on the ground to digital observations though. Which is why I say those who had the advantage of detecting during the time that those leads were much more common have a leg up on those coming in after them as those leads become fewer and fewer and thus the correlations increasingly more difficult to make.

I know its tongue in cheek, but in fairness - the days before GIS/cellphones were also times when a guy could still have a 5-10 ounce day in a lot of famous goldfields located literally right next to the highway or interstate. The game is different today, especially for those of us who joined late and are going at it alone. GIS/GPS is a tool that levels the playing field substantially. As more and more leads are found and removed, the need for subsequent generations of new detectorists to use every research tool available to them becomes greater and greater.

That distro map is a bit innacurate, it has an area the size of France (all of North Dakota, eastern Montana, eastern Wyoming, and the Canadian plains) that has close to zero gold - well unless you count black gold. Another thing over here is that a lot of those places have little to no detectable size gold, but abundant amounts of micro gold or gold that is primarily locked up in sulfides, tellurides, or just a byproduct of open pit copper mining. Especially out where I live and grew up. Much of Colorado, most of Utah, some of Nevada, etc. It's why even though that map is extensive, you predominately see people posting from 3 main areas - Motherlode country, Arizona, and Nevada. Certainly other states have detectable gold though, to varying degrees. Another thing to consider is that over here a lot of the gold bearing area is covered in snow for 4-7 months out of the year. I would say the large majority of people in the US prospect mainly club claims or the well known goldfields, but there are those of us who do the same as you too. I generally spend 70% of my time exploring completely new areas, and 30% of my time hitting old patches or popular goldfields. I do go weeks without a single find occasionally but I try to keep a handful of patches in my backpocket that I can go and snag at least 1 or 2 out of every day on the way home to keep the spirits up. Like you, most places I detect have little to no ferrous or otherwise trash targets. I spent the last 6 years living out of an RV (caravan?) and trying to do this for a living full time, though in that time I only met a very small handful of people who were spending a lot of time exploring brand new areas, but maybe there are a lot of people doing it and I haven't met them. I have never succeeded in doing more than breaking even, but any success I've ever had has been almost exclusively owed to GPS+GIS software and I firmly believe that in this day and age anyone who is a serious prospector and doesn't use that technology is doing themselves a disservice, I can't even stress that enough. I would do better with Google Earth, my phone, and an Ace250 than I would with none of those and a GPZ 7000. Anyways, even if the area of our goldfields is larger, I very strongly suspect there is just more gold available to detect in Australia though. I see guys posting from OZ with 5-10 ounces for a 2 week trip. Over here if you don't have private land, a 30 year old primo claim, or a dozer here, those kinds of trips are extreeeeeeeemly rare over here, those days ended in the early 90's. Oh also was gonna say you are right about the population. We have very large population bases located pretty close to most of the really rich goldfields. A lot of this part of the country was opened up and settled by those pursuing gold back in the 1800's and well, I guess everyone just stayed. California alone is like 38 million and AUS is like 25 mil people or thereabouts?

I wish I could go to Oz and detect someday! This is from Gold Basin, Arizona. It's only 18 grams but that's lunker territory to me. I thought it was a dead ringer for Australia until I put it next to the map and realized my geography might be somewhat dubious. I sold this one, I think it ultimately went into a paydirt bag as a prize nugget it would be kinda funny if someone got it in their bag and recognizes it, I'm the papa haha. Found this with the 4500, I was going through a dead wash experimenting with an idea I had about using the audio processing to emulate a compressor/limiter, idea being ignore the big signals and expand the range between the small ones and the noise floor, it made this nugget visible at least. I was going to make a vid on this technique this spring but I didn't get around to it.

Am I just seeing patterns in the clouds here? Dunno, too much time on my hands away from the goldfields.

Add this as a new networked link in Google Earth to display land ownership if anyone is looking for a free land ownership layer on their phones or computer: http://www.geocommunicator.gov/ARCGIS/REST/services/SurfaceManagementAgency/MapServer/export? Not sure how to attach a non-image file here so you'll have to do it manually. Keep in mind that since its a networked link it will only work online though. Edit: ok I guess the forum is autoformatting that link instead of displaying the entire text, so you'll have to right click and then copy link and paste. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I have hundreds of various layers I've found, and you can too. Just google for WMS and REST links, most government agencies from the USGS to NOAA have them and they can be crazy useful.

For security, I think the best approach would probably be to keep the GPS data encrypted on the machine but then allow exports through common file formats. It would require a password or similar to access the GPS when you boot the machine up or attempt to export. That would prevent any information from being accessed if the machine was stolen, also prevent people from seeing your data if you sell or lend the machine and forget to wipe it first. It would also enable you to store all your data without worry and not just a very small slice of it which is kind of useless. Of course then there might be complaints about the extra step of needing to enter a password, but this scheme is quite common for work and industry computers with sensitive data, and the GPZ is after all a work tool to many of us, and certainly being marketed/priced that way by Minelab. Even with my cell phone a random person can't just open it and start using it so I think it'd be a reasonable approach.

I still prefer the GPX over the GPZ for general prospecting/exploration, all the coils make them ultra versatile and they are so light and forgiving comparatively that you can cover a ton of ground quickly. Nice hunting by your bud, 3500 in the hands of a good operator is still a great machine.