jasong

Everything on this machine seems relative. It's like the scales of justice...take one thing away and it tips, you need to balance it with something else. In this case I'm not sure if it has to do with my Sensitivity being 17, running in Normal, or my high volume limit. Sometimes you do want to run the machine slightly unbalanced though and let the scales tip one way or another. If I was running in Difficult, Low Smoothing, Sensitivity 8-12, and lower volume settings then I'm guessing I'd not be able to set the threshold that low, the scales of balance would already be tipped to far to one edge. I'm guessing this type of setup is what is more suitable in hot ground like in Oz or some places Arizona here. After we get done with this snow here I'll make a vid on the threshold and some faint targets. I'm always eager to looking at other people's testing too which may show an even better way to run, not a lot of people posting with test results on thresholds and such though so I'm relying mostly on my own experiments right now - which certainly aren't definitive by any means and only apply for my particular set of environmental conditions here in Northern Nevada. Though when I get back to my patches in Gold Basin this winter I strongly suspect I can run in similar modes too. A place like LSD though, or some hot spots around Q-site - fuhgetaboutit! I do want to mention again though that on that particular target my TH was 1 but normally I run at 5 (which itself is still pretty low). Also, I can still hear a faint hum in the background so it isn't like turning the TH way down on the GPX where there is literally nothing, and then down even further where it's obvious that you are nulling faint nuggets and small trash out. DDancer, I agree. That quick track trigger is some prime real estate. On the GPX I wore through the little green button, on the Z I hardly ever touch it because it seems like the auto track is a lot quicker and more accurate. I'm going to do some more testing on manual vs auto here when the snow goes away and the mud dries up, it'd be interesting to see how much sensitivity is lost. On the GPX it was measurable, curious about the Z since the setup is different and in a sense, if I understand how the machine works correctly, it is kinda of doing a ground balance act with the coil all the time anyways since it's setup on a negative feedback loop that is always differentially monitoring the ground with the 2 RX loops.

Awesome! Your doctor called, he says that you sir, have an official case of the gold fever.

Good question! And in my usual fashion I started writing a 3 page essay in reply. But let me stay simple here and just say it boils down to 2 reasons: The first is just personal preference. I don't enjoy listening to a constant stream of hums, chirps and chatter all day, especially since I spend most my waking hours detecting when I'm out here. I also find it easier to process and pare down the good signals when there is much less noise, which in turn allows me to make more observations outside the detector such as ground conditions, geology, where I'm going, where I've been, etc. A lot of my personal success in finding gold comes from making connections, patterns, and parallels to ground I've found gold in previously. I also don't like feeling like I am fighting my tools which is how I feel after days and days of noise. I run VLF's just the opposite though, mostly because I only use them temporarily and can put up with it. The second is that honestly I just haven't noticed a big difference or advantage to running it higher on the Z. I'm digging 1-2 grainers basically every day at multiple inches of depth already, in some cases places where SDC's and GPZ's have already canvassed. To me, that's pretty good and at that point almost unecessarily sensitive to the small stuff. I could save my arm and gain sensitivity and outproduce the Z by using the Gold Bug 2 instead if those are what I was targetting. While my in-situ testing abilities are limited on the bigger and deeper stuff I still have had the chance to do quite a bit of fiddling around with not only the gold/ground modes but also the audio settings on the targets I have dug. And I just can't personally see very much change other than adding in a bunch of noise by boosting it up. I'm definitely open to new evidence though if anyone else posts some testing up. I do have my volume limit set to 15, which seems to make the volume range of a target also expand, so maybe that is boosting up those target signals above the background threshold better? No idea there. From a settings standpoint one thing I feel like I'm doing (accent on feel, but not knowing haha) is filling in some of those big open areas left by the discrete spacing between the 3 audio smoothing settings when what I really want is a median setting in between no/low or low/high. Well not really technically, but effectively to my ears and brain it appears to work that way.

The manual also states you need to retune after changing ground or gold modes, but I find that completely unnecessary. Running in autotrack it seems to readjust fast enough to not have to do a quicktrack trigger pull between changes also. I just let my coil sit on the ground for about 1-2 seconds after the blanking to let the autotrack balance itself out. Now, I'm sure there is a completely sane technical reason that people who have a deeper understanding of the behind the scenes working of the machine can explain about why this absolutely must be done between every mode change. But in the field I haven't noticed any differences at all but this may also be due to the mild soil I'm in. I'm curious, have others found it to be necessary? Does it relate to the severity of grounds you are in?

To me that's the definition of a good time to switch to Difficult. Same time I'd reach for the Enhance switch on the GPX.

I was going to work on building something like that Norvic but I've gotten so wrapped up in prospecting now that I just haven't had time. That and the fact that after giving the Z GPS a try I've never really used it again since I don't find it that useful and haven't been motivated to work on anything that I won't be using.

Yep, there are a lot of interesting and useful layers you can add to GE. I have probably 200 or so. You can add mine locations from the USGS and also a couple nice geology layers. You can also add network linked layers like WMS - One of my favorites is the realtime snowpack from NOAA. You can see exactly where in North America there is still snow and how much, it is vital for me to figure out where I can go and where I'm gonna waste time getting stuck. Also to estimate times meltoff will stop for planning dredging trips. I think Google Earth has realtime navigation too, though I haven't tried so I may be wrong. So you could grab a Google tablet like a Nexus 7 and navigate realtime over your (non-networked) map layers if so. If you want to get more advanced you can georeference your own maps. For instance the Bureau of Mines has a ton of old hand drawn maps by mining geologists showing geochemistry results, trenching, etc, or higher resolution geology maps, prospect and mine maps, etc. These things are solid gold. One thing I'm working on (well mostly in theory at this point, other than a few basic runs so far) is doing ultra-high res aerial drone imagery of some of the more popular prospecting spots. It's high enough resolution that you can see individual dig holes for instance. I stitch it all together, georeference it, and I can browse almost realtime ultra-high res custom aerials.

That's awesome, can we hope for triplets though?? Arnie's bigger brother Shaq.

I've already scratched my screen up too, those protectors are a good idea, going to Walmart tomorrow to find them. I agree, any $99 cell phone has Gorilla Glass these days. Not sure how that choice of plastic got put into one of the most critical areas of one of the most expensive detectors around...

Best prospecting partners ever. The doggies. I didn't hit much today except some small bits. I have two new observations on the GPZ though both potentially of dubious usefulness. 1.) It appears to talk on channel 22 on a radio. I think I was on channel 120 on the GPZ. If I move the radio close enough to the control unit the Z will start transmitting on the radio on channel 22. 2.) Running hot you hit a lot of hot clay balls and other various patches in the ground. These are 90% of the time low-high signals. Which also sound (unfortunately) exactly like a good deep ouncer size nugget. But...after my last vid where the 10 grammer was hitting pretty good in Extra Deep it occured to me that I might try switching into it when I hit those good sounding low-highs as well since if it was an actual target big enough to give a good signal in HY then it was definitely going to be big enough to give a signal in Extra Deep since the crossover for low-high signals is above 10 grams for the kind of nuggets I am finding (recall from my video my note that the nugget was high/low in every setting). But, ground noise/signals should go away almost completely on the other hand. So, it seems like there may be a potential method, depending on your area and on the strength of the signal you are working with (caution caution, smoother and mellower signals may still be targets and get lost by doing this) to eliminate a lot of those false strong signals from hot ground patches by switching into Extra Deep and seeing if the signal is still a good solid signal and then switching back to your normal mode. Switching to Difficult is similar but will lose depth so in theory you could switch to it and the target noise dissapears and you'd think it's ground noise and not dig it. With Extra Deep, on the low/highs, the theory being that if you only do this on the strong targets then the signal shouldn't get much quieter than in High Yield on the nuggets big enough to make a low/high signal to begin with. I tried it today and dug everything I hit and the hot patches and clay lenses were in fact screaming on High Yield but duds on Extra Deep. Good targets above 6 or 7 grams still sound good though (keep in mind a low/high real target will be bigger than that). Does this mean anything? Not yet, not enough testing. But it's a point of interest. I think it'd be even more likely for a signal to be good if it was hitting in both Extra Deep/Normal and High Yield/Difficult. The combination of those two eliminated 100% of the bad ground targets I got today, but again, very impartial testing. On that note, the more I use the machine the more I think something I would REALLY love to see on the GPZ is the ability to make the auto track trigger switch multifunction. For instance, hold it in once and you switch to a full suite of user presets (say HY/Normal/No Smoothing), click it again and you can get a second suite of presets (say Extra Deep/Normal/+5 sensitivity). Hold it in for more than 1 second and it brings you into quick track mode as normal. The user button is nice, but it's still too slow, especially when you want to quickly switch to 2, 3 or more different settings.

Very true. On that subject, I've heard that the users having the hardest time adapting to the Z are the ones who are really used to GPX's. I was definitely one of these people, I really didn't feel like the Z was speaking my language the first few days until I tamed the audio. I was stuck at keeping it off for maximum depth at first. This may be exactly what the guy detecting next to me prefers though. I think it depends how a person had their GPX set up, some ran it much closer to how the Z is set up by default, some ran it on either of the 2 edges of that spectrum. If a new user came up to me with the same concerns I had the first few days of using the machine, the first setting I'd advise them to adjust would be the Smoothing. Either up or down depending how they were used to running their GPX. Threshold would be a close second. As you become more used to the machine it seems like it becomes easier to listen for spots where you should be kicking the Smoothing up or down depending on the conditions.

Jim, I draw out the claims of interest in Google Earth using the polygon tool. Save as a KML then import into BCN as a new track and it will display what you drew. I have a PLSS layer in Google Earth that overlays 1/4 1/4 section grids and irregular lots so I use that as a tracing guide when drawing the polygons. Or if I don't need that accuracy I'l just trace 1/4 section chunks.

Lunk you're killin' it out there, I'm struggling to try to keep up! I can't shake the feeling that everywhere I go and see a bootprint that it's yours. Russ yeah man, I am lucky to have a lot of fairly mild ground up here to work and the detector run crazy. But your pulling out a pretty incredible amount of stuff still if you've flogged your patches with the GPX so seems to be working out well even in Difficult too! Maybe try hitting it with high audio smoothing if you give Normal a shot again. Won't help if your ground is really bad and in need of Difficult, but if its on the border line then it may be worth a shot. I also have my threshold set to 1 (basically as close to off as possible). The idea here is that I eliminate all other noise sources except ground noise and targets so that my brain has less to process - ground noise will come in, but it's so distinctly "smooshy" and dulled down that targets come through as uniquely sharper and sometimes I just put up with a bit of ongoing ground smoosh because on the Z the targets break through that noise much crisper than they do on the GPX, it requires a very much slower swing speed to do this though. But when the ground gets to close to that border line or crosses it Difficult is the only sane way to proceed. But when you can run Normal, you might add another 20% depth onto some nuggets so I agree it's worth a try.

Yeah as long as you have the maps cached for offline use correctly they will show up. Sometimes there is like a 1-2 second delay on my phone before they show up depending how much other stuff I have running. Like GoldHound does, I have a Nexus 7 tablet which I keep in my truck and use to navigate on BCN as I drive, it's synced to my phone so all the same tracks, waypoints, maps, etc are on my tablet as I'm driving around as on my phone. Though I admit I'm a sucker for paper maps still too. They are mostly on my walls though, older the better! Better than paintings in my opinion. GoldHound, what do you use for GIS? Did you buy ArcGIS? I use QGIS since it's free and it seems fairly decent though it really bogs down my laptop or crashes it sometimes if i load too large of a database or shapefile.

So I've tried this a few times and every time it's ended up being trash, but this time it was a good one. Of course I lost patience by this point after a few days of trying and didn't go through the whole routine and test a ton of settings like I had been doing but I still got a few in for reference. But I ran over in HY, General, Extra Deep. And then Normal and Difficult in High Yield. After about 2:30 it's just some futzing around digging (and trying out my new pinpointer) so if you want to see what the nugget looked like for potential geometric type reference then you can skip all that junk and go to the end. I'm really not sure how all the previous PI's missed this one, it wasn't too incredibly deep, right out in the open next to a very potholed dig area, and it seemed like a typical slugo nugget. One side had a flat face though if that mattered, and one side was spongy-ish. It went almost exactly 10 grams after soaking in CLR.

You can do it, it's complicated though and I haven't tried for a few years so I'd have to figure it out again. Easiest is to just draw the claims and transfer them as KML into BCN, that's my method at least. I georeferenced a bunch of old mining company survey maps in Google Earth for an area I was prospecting in Arizona, I was able to get them in BCN as custom layers. Now what I do is use Google Earth as my main database and then I just draw or outline whatever I'm interested in for the day or week using the geometry tools and then transfer it to BCN as a KML as a "new track". For no other reason than it's simple and quick and it's all I need right now. Generally they are faint 2-tracks, bulldozer pushes, prospect pits not on topos, quartz reefs/lenses, rapid soil changes (potential faults), etc. Basically a pinpoint, lines, or a rectangular outline of the feature of interest. If you'd like to do custom mapping like that then Norvic's suggestion to check out OzieExplorer is a good one. I've used it a couple times and it definitely had more customizing capability but I didn't go much further with it because I didn't need that much in the field. I can see a day where I would though.

OzieExplorer is a great app, but I might suggest checking out Backcountry Navigator just because it's more US centric. For instance you can add on BLM/Federal land ownership maps straightaway (they do cost money though), but also all US Topos (and aerials) are free and already set up by default. It'll save everything in GPX or KML so it's easy to transfer tracks waypoints geometry, etc to and from basically any program. I always have it running on my phone when I'm detecting and I map my finds, geology, and tracks with it. If you want a lot more usability and room to grow and do custom mapping OzieExplorer looks to be the better program though. It's not the easiest to do custom imports or WMS feeds for offline caching in Backcountry Navigator.

I'm becoming a bigger fan every day I use it, I had an awesome short day today, half ounce in 4 nuggets out of a very flogged patch including one where it looks like an 18 or 20" coil did a boot scrape and passed it by but it was a great crisp and fairly loud target to the Z and it ended up being a 3.3 grammer at about 14 or 15 inches. I did some video testing on an undug target using different ground modes (and gold modes too) which some may find interesting to watch I'm hoping the wind doesn't drown out the sound though its crazy windy today, it turned out to be a 10 gram big slug of gold anyways. I'll post the video once I get it sewn together, I had to do it in 3 takes because I was just using my cell phone with no tripod so couldn't dig and film at the same time.

I am often guilty of using overgeneralization in my casual speaking, I did not literally mean every single person running a Z, only that I see a trend, for that I apologize.

Yeah get your ducks in line with access, and have printouts too. I'm not sure who owns those tailings I just remember a lot of them being private and asking around in Atlantic City with no luck. Assesors office would tell you. Back in the early 2000's there was a guy out there across the river by the Dickie Springs paleoplacer walking around with a shotgun on his claims warning people not to prospect anywhere and that everything around there was his (wasn't true) and would approach you even if you weren't on his claims. Not sure if that gem is still around or not, but know where you are at all times. Some people thought they were paper millionaires after Hausel's articles on the area and then the Star Tribune started publishing stories as well later. I imagine it's calmed down quite a bit since then though, last time I was out there 2007 or so I didn't see anyone else anywhere. Do you mean pennyweight or grains? An 18" mono will probably not hit a 1-2 grainer unless maybe touching the coil right on edge. You could probably get a 2 grainer at 1" with the 11" mono, at least with a GPX series you could but not sure about the SD2100 as that machine was before my time. That kind of gold is definitely in the VLF domain generally speaking though. I've hit 1 grainers with the GPZ at an inch but that's a different machine altogether.

Another Wyoming guy here, Casper for me. Funny I never met another soul detecting for gold my entire life out there and now 2 on the same forum. I've wanted to hit those Rock Creek tailing piles for a decade but as I recall they were are all private or claimed. If your buddy has private access you might consider dredging too I have three of em of all different sizes if you want to give it a try sometime when I am back in state. That SD will hit on a 1-2 pennyweight nugget a lot deeper then the VLF's will. I'd be giving it a shot on the tailing piles while your parents run their VLF's at the same time looking for smaller stuff or working the trashier piles, those are some fairly large and deep piles of rock. Find one where you are hitting gold and rake it down and run the VLF's over it too since smaller gold is much more common than larger nuggets in that area. That resin shouldn't affect sensitivity unless it's conductive in some way. Check the ingredients.

I think it's natural to have less discussion about the ground modes because each ground setting's effects are usually immediately apparent and very easy to test. The same can't be said for testing out detecting modes though. DDancer, if your ground allows Normal and the noise is just coming from EMI then hit it with smoothing before you hit it with Difficult. There is too much reluctance online to use audio smoothing and I can't understand why. The amount of sensitivity you lose going from Normal to Difficult (assuming your ground is allowing Normal) is greater than the amount you lose going to High Smoothing, let alone Low Smoothing. Not to mention the amount of EMI cut out by Smoothing is far greater than the amount cut out by switching to Difficult. I posted this in my settings post, but the general procedure for me is to start in Normal, the add Low Smoothing, then High Smoothing, and only then do I switch to Difficult if the ground is still noisy. I have ground modes on my user preset button so I can bump into Difficult temporarily when I'm in patchy hot/cold/hot/cold areas. It seems like everyone is in a rut where we are stuck on no audio smoothing and Difficult, and I can't understand why. You can really get this machine performing crazy sensitive in a lot of places here in the US yet still extremely stable I think since we are lucky to have big areas with mild to medium ground. I could say the same about people being stuck on low sensitivity, I think its mostly because of a fear to use the smoothing and from my testing upping the sensitivity makes up more than what you lose with smoothing but the smoothing cuts the chatter way down so in the end the machine is more stable yet also more sensitive. But that's a subject for a post outside of the ground modes topic I guess.

I'm wondering the same thing, I'm about to add a detector to the arsenal for high trash areas and probably 90% pure gold prospecting usages. I don't mean to hijack your thread but I was wondering is the F19 a good choice for a discriminating prospecting unit? I was really interested in seeing the Gold Racer but it's getting to the time where I need to make a purchase and can't keep waiting. Seems like recent detectors are all pretty sensitive and deep (within a few inches) so it seems like the main criteria is superior discimination and target separation. Watching youtube vids and reading reviews (mostly coin/relic guys though) it seems to me like the F19 or the FORS is the best bet for those of us who can't afford the CTX?

Is there any chance these two guys could come on the forum and do a question/answer session about some technical aspects of the detector and settings? In particular some kind of clarification on General mode would be great. From Minelab various sources we've now heard "5+ grams", then "medium to large", then now "a few ounces" regarding the point where General should be used over High Yield. I understand every nugget is different and it's very difficult to quantify these sorts of things (the White Paper scatter plot data point spreads as a good example). But this 5g, medium to large, and a few ounces defintion is far to vague and broad for me to get any kind of meaning out of it. But even in the white paper it seems that on average even on larger nuggets that High Yield is still outperforming General, or at least staying up with it despite wether the 5000 was in Normal or Fine Gold. Since Phil comments in the video that General is "pushing the technology to it's limits" I am trying to understand this, seems like we should see something more definitive in the results. Also, I'd be very curious to hear wether there will be the ability to add on via software updates, additional timings or other features into the programming. A slider for audio smoothing comes to mind. I have a whole slew of them which aren't really relevant to this gold mode thread but I'd love to ask.

Maybe I'm not understanding your method, but couldn't you just stay in auto-tracking and pull the quick track button instead of switching back and forth between manual and auto with the user button? Seems like it'd be faster, fiddling with the screen is slow and requires stopping swinging. The Z is just noisier in my opinion than the GPX, especially for guys who are really used to running the GPX. GB meteorites won't track out, at least in my testing with a variety of pieces from 2 grams to 450 grams, but the GPX will hit harder on them in a lot of cases. I think I know the pieces of rock you are talking about. They look kinda like dark brown shards, sound like targets, but fade pretty quickly with depth and aren't usually any deeper than 3" or so so I've always just swept them away with a few boot scrapes since I don't run into more than 4 or 5 a day normally except in a few small areas, quicker than adjusting settings. Maybe those aren't what you are talking about. The only other ones out there I ever hit that sound like targets are the weird grainy dark rusty bits that occasionally are rotten enough to break apart in your hand, like partially metamorphosed sandstone, but they are even more rare. Gold Basin is easily the least hot place I detect, just was curious to read this. I haven't had my Z down there yet, waiting for Fall/Winter to hit my patches down there.