1515Art

I always stay in Downieville when i go detecting up in that area, usually at the creekside inn or the carriage house, Verizon has good coverage in Downieville and both of those places are comfortable and have WiFi. I have very fond memories of both Sierra City and Downieville from the time i spent up there with my grandparents when I was a little kid and the towns haven't changed all that much from back then. Everyone is always very friendly and driving on the roads is refreshing, people are a lot more polite behind the wheel up in the mountains.

this web cam link is a handy view on the weather conditions up in Sierra City, I always give it a quick check when I'm getting ready to go on up to the high sierra along with the other reports on conditions. http://www.sierracountrystore.com/the-sierra-city-webcam#today

mine also did this just one time and it was after the update. it happened around mid day, i restarted and everything was fine and my sound returned to normal. i don't really remember much about it, but I am pretty sure i was playing around with the settings. At the time i just chalked it up to a software hiccup, i also did not change my settings as much after that happened and crossed my fingers, so far everything has stayed normal.

I had the same issue and minelab had me send everything. I boxed it up like new shipping and insurance were about $150 or so and minelab sent me a new replacement 7000 in about 5 days total turnaround.

...that would be the coolest place to work if you wanted to do a little experimenting with your metal detector, want a tiny coil for your gpz, like a special pin pointer... you could just build one. only problem is i'd probably just want to be out hunting all the time looking for giant Aussie nuggets and getting lost in the outback, sure be fun. That is a first rate place and its not very likely someone is gonna out "R n D" em from their garage in some little town. Pretty cool look inside the shrine, thanks for the video.

here are two other jade rings the pink stone is Dushan Yu (Yu, means jade in Chinese), Yu can also mean fish or octopus, my wifes Chinese first name is Yu, so the carver made her the octopus ring for her birthday as a gift. the skull ring is nephrite i think.

Hi Clay, Thanks for the info, i'll bet your mom had a chance to see a lot of nice jade and gems back in the 70's and prices were a bit different back then. i asked for some of the rough material hopefully my friend will be able to bring some when he comes over around the end of the month. then i can see/show what the rough stuff looks like before being worked. this material doesn't look treated and shows the scratches from very fine sand paper polishing on both the stone and metallic areas, but i'll find out more soon. as far as the concerns your moms friend had about treated material, in China every valuable (desirable) jade, gem, lake rock and everything else is also faked, copied and simulated in one way or another and many of the fakes are really good, so its difficult to know if her concerns were about that piece or all pieces of that type. Knowing the studio this jade came from it is difficult to imagine they would bother to carve any stone not of high quality or treated in some way as to risk their reputation.

some of what you are telling me is sounding familiar with what I'm reading, but I'm so new a lot is still over my head. here are some more pictures of the property and a vast area is largely wilderness so its hard to know just what a person would find if he looked around, the oldest temple in the area is also located on this property as are other old structures. XinMi lies around the top right edge of what is called the Qin Ling Fold Belt on the attached map, thats the main sedimentary rock hosted gold district according to the map legend. Pictures are of the jade mine, some mountain property and one creek area and the tunnel short cut across the property through the mountain and passing a motorcycle inside the tunnel. (a good place to keep cold beer is just inside the jade mine shaft as its icy cold, while the temperature outside was over 100)

Steve, i wanted to ask you with regard to chrysoprase and other chalcedony, like quartz is it ever an indicator for locating an area likely to produce gold?

i'll try and find more about this jade, first I've seen it was yesterday afternoon and I don't even know what the rough stone sells for. the jade is high quality and desirable material I'm sure, occasionally language and cultural factors confuse things a bit so it well could be some form of sulfide or something they call gold. I have another friend visiting later this month and i will ask him to bring some if he has access to any, if i can get some i will send you a little piece.

having not had any of this tested i can't tell for certain what the metal mix is, but this comes from the studio of a guy who is very famous for his carving and i'm told this is gold by my friend who has written a dozen books or so on China's master jade carvers. she just flew in this morning from shanghai and brought a bunch of stuff for my wife from these guys for the jade jewelry book she is working on and i thought the jade with gold was pretty cool looking and was a good fit here.

This is the first of this stuff I've seen, it comes from the Xin Jiang area in China same as that giant gold nugget found by the farmer while plowing his land. That doesn't narrow the area down very much, for a comparison Xin Jiang is an area about the size of California... its all very tight lipped as they don't want a billion people swarming into the gold fields looking to get rich. Xin Jiang is also a major jade producing location too, Chris Ralph could tell you all about the relationship to the gold and mineralization I'm sure... I'm not far enough into his book to do the subject justice. My friend in Xin Mi has chrysoprase mines located near some of the largest gold producing area in Central China, the property covers a couple of mountains and valleys. It has been in his family for generations and never been prospected for gold in the time his family has farmed it, jade mining has been fairly recent. next time I'm there ill take a little time and look around a bit, might even bring the zed along. Angela, my wife asked our friend about hunting for gold on his land and he was all for it, said it would be OK any time... just, seems not likely if none has ever been stumbled on before that his land would have gold on it.

it looks like it does in the pictures

I thought everyone might enjoy looking at some interesting nephrite jade, this snake necklace and leopard ring were carved by a friend in China from untreated natural dark green nephrite jade with naturally occurring gold.

Let's put together a crew and go find gold in Nigeria, the discovery channel could film the whole hostage situation...

got this golden opportunity in my jade website, they must have looked at links from one of the prospecting forums i am a member of, anyone else getting these? I could take the GPZ to Nigeria, it's swimming with gold, seems pretty safe anyway what bad could possibly happen to an irish italian boy from California prospecting for gold in Nigeria. Good Day, Please i need a good reputable company interested in investing in mining of raw gold in Nigeria. i have about 12 plots of land swimming with gold (available for inspection anytime). if you are interested just contact me on +(redacted phone numbers). ONLY SERIOUS INVESTOR NEEDED thanks

I think you are right there will be much more to come as the software is refined. the gpz has a definite language, it's just a matter of time until ZVT evolves into the features available in VLF technology now and the zed backbone has passed the first update test with flying colors.

i don't remember reading about the 10 second re-set for the ground balance? is that published in a white paper?

I only used the ferrite at start-up and the version 2 software seemed to run just fine without reusing the ferrite later in the session, so my guess is you are better off with version 2.

from the CDNC THE HORN SPOON. Protpectlns for Gold In Judge Hunt's Court-room. Judge Hunt's Court-room was turned into an impromptu mining camp yesterday and a showing of the color found. Some time ago A. T. Brittoa brought suit in the Superior Court to recover $10,000 from W. C. Childs. According to the allegations of the complaint, Childs purchased a half interest in the Valentine mine, Amador county, for $60,000, and paid thereon $20,000 in two payments of $10,000 each, agreeing to cay the remaining $40,000 out of the two thirds yield in the mine. After working the mine for a while, Childs shut down on the work, on the ground that the ore extracted from the mine was not paying. Dnring the hearing of the case yescerday an old miner, Andrew J. Field, was called as an expert to test the value of crushed ore taken from a drift in the mine. In the presence of the Court, counsel and spectators the miner placed a handful of the pulverized rock in a " horn spoon " and proceeded to wash it out in a basin of water in a corner of the Court-room. After a process of filling the spoon with water, shaking and turning off the water for a time in the orthodox style of placer pan mining, the residue was submitted to Judge Hunt for examination. It was found to contain a " color " of gold, which the expert said would yield $15 of gold to a ton. The process of testing with a horn spoon is common among prospectors, but was somewhat of a novelty in a Court. The spoon is made from the horn of a beef, about nine inches long and four inches wide and shaped not unlike a wide Indian canoe. The horn is split and when heated is moulded into the desired form.

I'm jealous you have tractors to play with...

it wasn't easy, but my garmin was turned off and the only thing i had was the trails on the zed... really tough to follow until i got the hang of it and even then it was still slow and go, its great for keeping track of the search area but id plan on it as a last resort for navigation. the weather up in the sierra was great, it had rained the day before so the soil was a little damp. it was cloudy the first day, sunny and a little windy on the second and clear and calm on the third and in the high 60's all three days... perfect weather for walking in the hills and digging holes, my favorite time in the mountains. when i hit that little .38 i was running fine gold, normal, sen 16, tresh 15 smoothing off volume 12 auto tracking, it was noisy but this area is cleaned out so any signal is of interest and i was OK checking a hot rock here and there. the little picker was a sharper high low than the hot ground, all my small gold (thats all so far) has been a high low tone.

went up to the sierras for a few day of hunting to test out the zed after installing the new software update and getting my yellow ferrite. my take, the update made a noticeable difference in the behavior of the GPZ, in basic settings it was much more stable and slightly more sensitive, so much so that I was choosing to run zed a little bit hotter. the ground chatter was readable in a way thats hard to explain and tiny targets were popping, although some subtle signals may have been masked. still i was recovering some of the tinniest pieces of trash and bird shot yet and recovered a .38 gram piece down about 3 or 4 inches, that gave a clear signal after a little boot scrape from a very very pounded patch. i almost had one little mishap while i was wandering through the forrest, as i was walking along stepping over dead wood and rocks it became apparent my pick was not banging on my leg. somehow it came unstuck from my holder and i didn't notice it falling off... so, s**t... i have no idea when or where it went and I've walked quite a ways since my last dig. luckily my ZED gps trails were on and after about an hour of walking with the gpz backwards and upside-down i was able to retrace my steps and with one last effort before daylight fell, found myself looking down to see my pick at my feet, I'm gonna paint the handle orange so its easier to find next time.

i don't really understand why minelab would keep the ferrite as a part of the ground balance procedure when it would make more sense to me if they just tweaked the software to ignore that ferrite mineral in the first place. again in my ignorance and if it can be explained in simple terms, what is the advantage in using the ferrite all the time and letting the GB software exclude that combination of minerals vs just writing it out by programing, because it seems the end result is the same and it would be simpler not to deal with the ring all the time.

thats 40% disappointing... at least the software update is easy to install, so this is a good start.