1515Art

spell checkers??? Sun Ray, not sunday probe, although I could have been talking about the one you only use on Sundays. the special Sunday dress detector day stuff. hope the nuns don't bust my nuckles over this one.

ok, not being bright, I just realized I can edit my errors after Ive posted... Hmmmm this new tool I found will be very handy for my typing impairment. 

I have read a bit about the sunray probe on some of the various blogs and for the most part people really like them. the big advantages are you never lose your probe, you get all the discrimination your detector processor will provide, they use the same battery as your main detector and the depth is very good... better than most probes. the cons and there are always a few, on some detector and coil combinations (not many) you may find some noise in certain situations, it adds weight to the detector at least a pound to pound and a half and sometimes people forget to switch back to the main coil and cover a bunch of ground before they remember to switch back to the main coil. I don't remember any quality complaints, a few did not like them or thought it just was not worth it... a lot like them and some just love them and would not be without one. if you google sun-ray probes you will find a bunch about them. the falcon is a whole different ball game, but the most sensitive at 300 kHz, nothing better for fine gold, but the depth is not deep as most other pin pointers at times I've read an inch or even less on very fine gold. still in its application a very good tool to have.

yes, nugget value although Im not certain if there is any standard. I guess the bigger and more unusual the bigger the factor, but I'm certain others on this forum are much better versed than me on this subject. 

Headed out for breakfast in town this morning and stopped in a local antique shop first. Looking around and saw this nice little nugget for sale in one of the cases. Thought I would post a picture for a little Friday inspiration.

Steve, Thank you. 

Hi Chris, Thank you very much for the report and all the help and information you so freely give all of us. I'm really appreciative for the info and it will be a big help for me next month. thanks

with the GPZ, when encountering difficult salty ground, i imagine it is difficult to say exactly where you will encounter this problem other than by how the metal detector reacts. Or, do you tend to find the difficult salt ground to be in more low lying areas or pockets? Is there any relationship to heavy salt concentrations in higher areas that might indicate ancient low ground that may also have collected other heavy metals and by this could the GPZ's extreme sensitivity to salt be anyway advantageous?

Thanks Scott, great lead of a fun outing. Best of luck with the zed.

 Yup. Went out close to home late yesterday, worked some tailings from an old shallow placer shaft, found some tiny nuggets so I started digging out the trash. The first obvious big square nail I dug weighed 2dwt and was made of gold. I was wishing 1515art was there.

beautiful, thats the kind of nail you want and boy do I wish I was there too... just reading about all these great stories is killing me and I need a fix of the nugget hunting kind.

pretty nugget, i bet it was nice hunting down by the river. thanks for  sharing your find!

ah yes, I knew this had to be something some of you had tackled before. Beautiful craftsmanship Steve, when I saw the picture my hopes went up it looked like a product model I could just order. No matter, this also sounds like a fun project to work on and build.

Steve, thank you very much!

cool rocks Scott, great collection for the deck and good memories.

ive chewed my nails a few times and don't think anybody would care for them to much, kinda bland.

Mmmmmm, sushi.

The easily adjustable bungee (bungy) that came with the 7000 is the best thing since sliced bread for me.  I can go up or down a slope and adjust it with one hand and not ground the coil.

Having never had a harness bungee system to compare, i can't tell you if one is better than the other. I use one J strut on the detector side and don't use the extra chest bracket and also find it easy to adjust and swing with the guide arm attached, I did modify the bungee loop on the free end closing it with heat shrink wrap as suggested on another thread to end using that side by accident when re connecting the bungee to the zed.

Gambler, from the little I've seen theres nails a plenty for all up and around that river.

My wonderful sweet understanding kindhearted (are you reading this baby) wife will be out of the country in China for a month beginning around the second week in June and I've pretty much told everyone else if they need anything they are going to have a tough time finding me, I'm going detecting. 

I probably need to head home here and there to do laundry, but I'm going to spend as much time as i can in the Sierra s and n nevada depending on how things go while indulge guilt free. Im not sure exactly what day I'm heading up but it'll be in that ball park.

Clark

bummer on the strut and frustrating to get cut short, but oh how sweet tomorrow may be...

Saw this on craigslist, sf Bay Area, so I posted this for fun... I know nothing about them, it's not a detector exactly, but shows up in a detector search

Ahhh... If only

Rick, ahhhh I know so little... I've been digging it all in the desert, except some of the wash areas are so filled with rusted tin and nothing else that I give up and move on. The one time I tried the zed just below downieville on the yuba river I was overwhelmed by square nails, this was my very first outing with the gpz so I moved on to rye patch area for a little easier detecting I thought, but next month I am planning to take on the nails again and I have a much better understanding of the gpz, so I'm planning on finding a much higher grade of hand forged nail... A whole keg of em. I've not yet hunted an area I'd refer to as a patch yet, but that's mostly been a lack of time to go hunt.

Thanks deathray, it would cut down on the number of times you had to dig nails and such in trashy areas with something portable enough to be practical. Nice to have something that worked like the sun-ray probe, except that it was a simple small VLF that could use the GPZ coil.

it seems the biggest weakness of the GPZ is the lack of any reliable discrimination other than a best guess as to depth due to the double target response. My Whites SST will power up in seconds and is a great detector with excellent iron discrimination and may even give an accurate iron response in proximity to the GPZ, but its not practical to carry both. my question is there a small lightweight detector that would compliment the GPZ mainly by giving the operator a second look that reads for an iron signal on the target in question, something like a pin pointer with some decent depth made for iron.

I got one of these at wally world.  http://www.walmart.com/ip/Schumacher-Electric-6-in-1-Jump-Starter/25955544

 

Use it to charge the batteries on the cell phones and detectors. Works great and lasts 3-4 days on one charge.

 

strick

I like this one better than the one i bought at costco... hmmm, might need two...

Steve, very good article and very technical for me while still trying to wrap my brain around all these new concepts i am reading and slowly re reading. 

I noticed something my last time out by accident, I was running the GPZ and investigating a signal i thought to be ground noise. I had dug a small hole and the signal seemed to be all around inside the hole. I set the GPZ down about 15 feet from the hole and got my whites SST from the car. as soon as i powered on the SST, I could hear the very rapid pulse of the GPZ, the closer to the ground i brought the coil of my vlf detector the stronger the pulse in my head phones. The pulse was also slightly stronger yet when i lowered the coil of the whites into the hole. Wiith all this going on my whites SST indicated hot rock. The way the GPZ charged the ground with its signal made it feel very powerful when receiving the signal through my VLF. All of this was interesting to me, but not something i understand well enough to attach anything significant to in regard to the operation of the GPZ.

lots of good information, I actually did consider some kind of sat phone or something, but i figure the cost on those is pretty stiff and a little caution would do. The rubber vulcanizing tape is great stuff, I keep a roll in the boat but forgot about it for my car and then I tried the trailer, but that just opened a whole new can O worms being different tire sizes an all, you see where this is going...

So, if you need any service out there just look for the severely overloaded old silver Mine Lab 500, I mean ML500 and give a shout, i'll quit digging lead long enough to come give a hand.

Clark

So, I've spent a lot of years in my life working in emergency services and one of the most important things I learned was talking about safety is one of the best ways to prevent something bad going worse, or better yet not having anything bad happen at all.

That being said and me having tire issues in the high n Nevada desert this last time out, the next time I plan to be better equipped. To help my self and be able to help someone else as well, being out in remote areas is kind of like boating in that another in distress becomes your priority if you can assist.

My growing list includes: upgraded tires, two spares, tire plug kit, tire patches, rubber goop, 12 volt tire pump with battery jump start ($80 at Costco), extra quarts of oil, extra gallons water, hand winch and chain/straps, 200 ft rescue rope, small tools, small first aid kit, there are more things I'm sure. Plus all my prospecting tools and supplies... Barely room for me in the car.

What other things do you carry to stay safe and what safety tips do other people have to share?

My vlf is a whites sst, I bought it for the ease of use it being pre set for my local ground type here in california. This detector is up and running in seconds, seems to match the mxt in power, has very fast tracking and excellent ground balance. The 15 kHz makes it a good all around easy machine that is very stable for a newbie.