DDancer

Take a look at this tread.  US based but they may have what you need

Service Is Still Available From Detector Center For Your Prospecting Detectors

https://www.detectorprospector.com/forum/3-metal-detecting-gold-prospecting-forums/

Well heck the animation is outstanding and the field test was most convincing.  I gotta wonder how many times the developer was hit in the face by the receptioner thingy with antenna's.  Seems like I could just walk in a circle around where the gold nugget and silver bars are to pinpoint but It make more sense trace and retrace the cardinal directions for proper pinpoint.  For soil types I wonder if it has Sand mode?  But as seen earlier in the thread there is no manual for it so it must be pretty intuitive.

Ah god, my sides hurt..... LOL

Cant find the receipt but I still got the detector 🙂 GP3000, coils even the pick.  LOL  Yeah that was a chunk of change.

Sometimes you just gotta go Low and Slow.

Beauty there!

Looks to my like a mixture of large quartz granules and mica schist.  Common in most mountainous area's I've been to.  Keep looking around there maybe crystals.

My thought is that its a wind eroded agate.  Abrasion, in this case by sand, on the harder and softer parts of the agates banding can give a very sculpted appearance.  I've seen simulur in agates from water courses.

With the new member account rules kicking in it'll be interesting to see if it has an effect on the hit and run group.  Personally I enjoy Rock and Mineral forums much the way others do.  They often can be very informative, and as a rock hound, offer me a view of stuff I'll probably never collect 🙂

I used to be fairly active in these forums but I do admit the "What is it" stuff put me off.  However I do pop into read new posts in the event it might be comment worthy.  So I say keep it.

Got my vote 👍

Looks good to me to.  Before you send it off ask around, look around, for business's that buy gold and other precious metals and see if anyone can give you an XRF reading on it as GB suggests.  Some pawn shops have them, gold and silver buyers and recovery facilities.

KDOCAC,

Depending on where the show you saw shoot the view is where the answer to your questions are.  Australia, as mentioned above, has various geology of various ages depending on location.  Here in the US much of or gold geology is pretty much dependent on young and tectonicly active geology, thus rugged and mountainous area's are where gold found.  Australia's geology is much more stable and much older.  Australia's tectonics are more pronounced and younger on the east coast and their west is stable so much of the land is effectively flat there.  The way one aussie explained it to me in the West is that the mountains have essentially eroded away and left the iron and gold behind.  A similar process occurs in our own western deserts.

Having detected WA's gold fields many times, yes much of it appears flat.  Especially on camera.  But there's a  lot of rolling out there as well as some steep hikes.

Thats some fine work 🙂

Its your rock.  I only take the energy to bust them up if there's something to make me think I need to know what is inside or to help identify it.  If it looks cool it sits on a shelf, if not its leaverite.

Concretion, you can see the layering in the pic's and the grainy structure of sediment.  As Jeff said sometimes they can sound off depending on how much iron is concentrated in them.

It does not take long at all for limestone to alter the ph of an aquarium as it's reactive to any acids in the tank.  Think fish urine.  Small lime stones dont tend to cause a problem but large amounts can make ph control impossible and that often leads to sever problems with biologic s~ fungus, algae and some parasites.  This is why aquarium owners avoid lime stone.  You'll be better served with quartz, hard granites and some schists if you want to decorate.

Reminds me of something I was shown, a picture, and told about from another prospector in Australia in an area we were looking around in.  He'd found a nugget that was shaped very much like a chisel, showed me that picture he had of it back at camp, and explained that the slates in the area we were in would capture the gold and due to heating/cooling the rock would expand and contract shaping the gold.  He had a term for it but I cant recall what it was.  I suspect something similar with your find.  Neat stuff 🙂

19 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

The only model I can think of off the top of my head that still has the feature is the Garrett GTI 2500. Garrett calls it “surface elimination.”

The GTI 2000, later the 2500, was the first top end detector I ever used (top end at the time).  The surface elimination function works ok but it's basically a screen for targets detected at the selected depths.  The GTI will simply mute most any target, except large can slaw and the like then it just chirps a lot, and attempt to give positives to deeper targets however its not an inverted audio.  Targets will still be masked using that function so its not something I used very much.  But it does work.

The only audio inversion I have ever come across was a coil for my GP3000.  I still have it but its been so long I cant remember if its a nugget finder.... any rate it was called a phase inversion coil, it was around in 2005 I believe.  It had a  switch on the coil that allowed one to "flip" the transmit and receive of the DD design making shallow targets sound like deep ones and vice versa.  It worked rather well, mine was the 16 inch, and the inversion function also helped deal with EMI.

Other than that I cant recall anything else aside from audio boosts like the affor-mentioned gold bug.  My thoughts.

Hate to say it GB but that handle is beyond remount.  The wood is all split out in the head and no amount of wedging will make it stable becaus each of those splits is now an individual fiber and will shift and split further each time you strike with it.  The wedges will always loosen up again. Your doing it right but its the handle that will never hold.

Not my area of knowledge but I gotta wonder if the pressure of the press was off on that one and it did not strike hard enough , or maybe long enough, to press the metal into the reeds.  Interesting that the faces have a good relief even without the spread.

16 hours ago, mn90403 said:

I've read (skimmed) all the answers and this is the first one I read that said anything about the 7000 GPS.  I use it to find my car sometimes!  I used it in Australia.  All those trees look alike!

Hahh, out bush it all looks the same and it's useful finding the wayward car 🙂  Before gps got real accurate I even snuck up on my own ute a couple of times.  I still dont understand how I walked around a hill only to sneak up on my ute from the wrong *I thought* direction.😳

22 hours ago, Gerry in Idaho said:

DDancer - You bring up a good point about the GPS on the 7000 and plotting your digs.  When I was in MX earlier this yr I had one of my staff show me to use the GPS on the 7 and it was much easier than I had expected.  It also made things much easier and safer when returning back to the rig after a days hike.  I highly recommend those who have GPZ to learn the GPS for such occasions.  Glad you were also able to find then night-light a month later.  Did it still work?  Thanks for adding input.

Yep the light still worked 🙂  In the time I walked away from my pick 2006 I had a simple garmin gps, not real accurate and had an lcd display, and I was swinging my old GP3000.  I use the gps function of the 7000 quite a bit and its handy for walking back into area's of interest as well as examining the lay of my finds.  Down side is that once I fill it up I gotta dump it 😞  I'm just not tech savy enough to know how to keep the info~ that's what pen and paper are for 😉

It appears you found a very fine and dense conglomerate.  In a way it is a fossil, conglomerate is essentially sand or mud from an old water system thats ossified into rock.  The bits of stone are old gravels and it looks that some chalcedony formed in what was a void in the stone~ the white portion of your last photo.

Been there, done that but I did recover my pick after a few hours of back tracking.  It was the last time I ever walked away from it.  I to got the boot tack but at least it was shallow 🙂 Hahh.  I was out bush in WA in 2006 and sat down to take a break when I walked away from it.  My saving grace was that I GPS'd all my digs but in that area they were far and few between.  On that same trip I lost my head lamp as well in one area, I had a habit of keeping it in my pocket and it fell out.  Me and my partner returned to the area about a month later and I got a good strong signal by a log.  I hopped the log and there the head lamp was.  I was quite happy to recover it because the one I replaced it with was not so good.

It was quite disconcerting with each lose so I feel your pain.

Goes to show its still out there.  Sweet haul 👍

I've wondered this for a long time and decided its impossible but I'll pose the thought here :  Is there any reliable way to return the shine to nickle's and modern nickle/copper clad?

So far in this thread I've seen some pretty cool, and some common, methods of cleaning.  Most of my modern stuff I just tumble in fine sand for a bit to knock stuff off.  Anything of value is just tooth brush and tooth picks.  I like the ammonia formula~ I"ll have to try that.

I call people like that sea gulls.  Just like sea gulls anywhere if you got something they like they'll follow you and swoop in to snatch anything they can.  You can try shoo'ing them away or put up with them.  To bad vlf's dont have the retune feature's like PI's do (different operating principals) or I'd just retune on the sea gull till they got the point.  If you got mate's with ya you can just pack around the sea gull till they leave, or do it yourself if you think you can bugger them off.  Then there's always just dropping you trash pouch around them....  but like you did mn90403 I've left them alone to and just bit the bullet.