Gold Hound

I pretty much use headphones all of the time. The best headphones I have used out of many are 'sennheiser pmx 680 spots' headphones. They are in ear type that wrap around your head, they have crystal clear audio and leave enough space to not block your ear so you can still hear your surrounds and close enough to be uneffected by wind noise.

I always take the time to look at and enjoy any thing unusual/special that I come across in the field. Be it an animal large or small, a cool looking insect or plant or tree. Or even a spectacular view or cool rock formaton. It is one of the pleasure's of prospecting for a living, what is the point if you are not enjoying your self? Every day I get up early and full of energy ready to see what the day is going to bring! Never a dull moment for us! It dose help to have good company and I am lucky enough to have that as well! Example: Last season I sat down for lunch in a remote high level gully, I was on my own sitting there after eating just resting and taking in the view. I had dicarded a meat scrap and the meat ants were all over it when I noticed one of the ants walked different to the others. After careful examination I noticed that it was not an ant at all but infact a jumping spider that looks exactly like a meat ant! I couldn't belive it.

No need to sell up!I do not fear any animal, I just have a healthy respect for them! My post was not ment to inspire fear, instead it was suposed to inspire respect and a quest for knowledge on the possible dangers of the Taipan and other snake's. Of all of the dangerous Australian animals the salt water croc is the one I respect above all others, as he actually actively hunts you! You can see it in his eye before he slips into the water out of sight. I saw one in a remote river up near wiepa that was 7m long! We measured his impression on the mud bank, he is a living dinosaur! When he opened his mouth to regulate his temperature you could stand in his mouth he was that big! You Yanks have your fair share of biteys as well I would encourage you to be alert for your snakes and mountain lion and bears! Learn exactly how to avoid a dangerous confrontation and learn what to do if the sh!t hits the fan. Don't fear just RESPECT your animals they are a thing of beauty! I always enjoy seeing any animal even a dangerous one I love them all!

The costal taipan in my opinion is the most dangerous snake in the world.As it is very agressive and bites multiple times when it bites and envenoms on nearly every bite! And the amount of venom per bite is large. That was a stupid thing your associate did there Vic and he paid for it. Most of people bitten die within an hour of being bitten due to how the neurotoxin works it thins your blood and stops clotting which amplify its effects and help spread it quikly trough your body, if you are not treated within 30 mins the fatality rate is 100%!!! Tremain caught one that was well over 3m close to 4m!!!!!!! when he was working for austoxin as a snake handler/milker/catcher. Name another snake that is found commonly near people that has a death rate if untreated within 30 mins of 100%, and they are notoriously aggressive! And its a large snake that bites high. The TAIPAN commands RESPECT! Taipan even means boss in Indonesian.

In Australia Sat phones can call emergency services numbers even if you have no credit or havent payed your bill.

Mine is exactly the same model as Vic's. When I bought mine Inmarsat was the only carrier that had a prepay option rather than having either a expensive monthly contract or disconnection and reconnecting fee's. I'm happy with my sat phone, its saved me alot of time and headaches.

Nice one mate! Any one would be happy with that! All of my largest finds have been crushed and melted, too much bother dealing with scabs and time waisters. Much easier to deal with a reputable gold assayer or buyer.

Here in Australia we have some of the most poisonous snakes in the world! Most notably the inland taipan, costal taipan, eastern brown, mulga, tiger snake, death adder,rough scaled snake, copperhead and red belly black snake. And they are common in the gold fields and if bitten by any of them, the bite if untreated is probably going to be fatal! If you are unlucky enough to be bitten by a brown snake you have about 1 hour if you properly bandage and immobilize the bite until the neurotoxin will make you blind, then shortly after paralysis starts to kick in, then you are screwed! If you are unlucky enough to get bitten by a taipan in the field............ Just pick a shady tree and roll a smoke and start smoking it, you wont finish it! When you use a emergency beacon the average response time is 6 hrs if your lucky, and even then they don't know what is wrong with you they just know you set off your beacon. So if you are bitten by one of the snakes above you will likely be dead before they arrive if you use a beacon. So I regard them as usless to an Aussie prospector that works in remote areas. So instead we carry satellite phones, as they are much better because you can ring direct to the flying doctor's and they will be there much quicker or you can ring one of the property owners and they will pick you up with the muster chopper in minutes not hour's.

I use esri,s arcgis program but for a casual user the subscription fee would be too expensive. But I use it regularly and got sick of crashes in the middle of big project's that cause you to loose everything you just did which was hours and hours of work sometimes.

Ozi explorer is a good simple easy to use program if you are using existing maps or jpegs. But if you need to make your own from scratch like I often do you really need a good GIS program. I use oziexplorer in my tablet and have it on my pc as well. What I do is use ozi in the field and mark any thing of interest. Because it is easy to use and is good whilst navigating or prospecting. Then I take all of the info from ozi and transfer it to my gis program and make or modify my maps in that. I do not use the gis software for navigation or field work as it is prone to drop outs and a pain to use for navigating becuse the images in the gis software are not tiled and are high definition. After I make a new map or image in the gis software I break it into managagle sized images and then tile them so I do not get program crashes in ozi when working in the field.

I use a moving map program insralled on a 7in android tabet that I have in a rugged case. I have a charger wired into my car and bike and special mounts attached to the dash of the car and bike handle bars, you can se it in our video on youtube when I am riding the bike. It goes everywhere with me! And I mark anything of interest on it and build a profile of the area and mark all my find's.

I do a fair bit of work in the dense rainforest here in Australia. You need to learn about the botanicals associated with mineralization in your area. Its not just about being able to see the rock or soil I have found plenty of gold by obsering changes in vegetation.

Metal detecting is easy! Prospecting is a whole other kettle of fish! To become a proficient prospector takes many many years of hard field work and study.

Diorite is a very hard fine gained igneous rock.It is usually black or grey and weathers round like granites. The soil produced by weathering diorite is dark grey and sandy further from the source and very close to the source it can be red/brown. Re-read my conclusion as to why the gold was there. Any igneous intrusion in the right country rock can create a auriferous contact aureole. Some times the aureole can extend for a fair distance from the intrusion.

If depth is your goal I use a minelab gpx 4800 and a 18in detech sef coil for treasure hunting in europe with great success. I dug my deepest treasure with this combo a bronze sword cica 600bc at 1.5m deep. But it will do your head in if you are in an area with alot of modern trash or old iron trash as the discriminator is un reliable. In a trashy area you are better with a VLF. I use a minelab ctx3030 in trashy areas and it is my main detector for treasure hunting.

I use the ctx in heavy trash area's with larger gold like tailings over size piles with good success. But on small gold in trash I'll reach for the gb2 over any other detector! The ctx and gb2 cover my vlf/discrimination need's in the gold fields. But my needs for a VLF in the gold fields are limited as I only use them in trashy area's And even in trash I'll reach for a a gpx or zed first until trash gets unbearable. But maybe a vlf is more useful in a broarder spectrum of areas in America where your soil is less mineralised.

The best indicator for gold is.......... GOLD!I follow the gold to more gold! There are many many different types of indicator's you need to learn the geology of your area and figure out why the gold comes from were it dose. Then you can use this knowledge to either follow the geological feature or identify similar feature's. The indicator could be a fault, quarts reef, iron stone, jasper, chert, grey whack, change in rock type, intrusion, anomoly on a fault like a knee zone, ect ect ect. For example: I was detecting up a gully in the middle of no where, when I started to get a fair few small piece's in a run in the narrow gully. I just kept detecting up the gully and after about 200m the gold run cut out. But about 50m after my last piece I noticed a diorite intrusion cut across the gully, so I immediately realised that the intrusion is the indicator. But it was getting late and I had a looooonnng walk back to camp so I decided that I needed to return the next day. I ended up with 73g in small bits for the day out of the gully bottom. That night I looked over my Topo's and a couple of specialist satellite images in relation to where I marked the diorite intrusion on my gps software. I immediately noticed a anomaly on my specialist image that was right near my last nugget in the gully. So I decided that I would have to have a look at this anomaly that runs parallel to the diorite intrusion but just upstream from my last nugget. So the next day I returned to investigate the area again. I went straight to my last nugget location and then hopped out of the gully bottom up on to the steep hill side. And immediately noticed a narrow arsenic stained quartz reef going up the hill and I also noticed that the soil was slightly different more of a red tinge to it near the reef and on my gps it was exactly on the anomaly that I noticed the night before. I decided to detect both sides of the gully where the anomaly is and on my first pass after about 30 seconds swinging .......waaaaww. I got a good strong target in the side of the bank. After removing about 500mm of over burden I hit bed rock, and the now very loud signal was still in the bottom of my hole in the rock. So I opened up the hole to make digging the rock easier, after I opened up the hole I could see the arsenic stained quartz reef right where the signal was, so I started to get exited, and started smashing into the rock after about 20 minutes of digging into the rock out poped my first bit of leader gold a bit of rock the size of my fist with about 20g of gold in it after crushing. I re-scanned the hole, beauty there was still a very strong signal in the hole and a few smaller ones around the edges. So I kept on digging and after 2 full days busting the rock and removing over burden along the strike of the leader I ended up with 17oz after crushing. The next thing I did was project the anomaly on my gps and I started working the area near the anomaly. I picked up good alluvial and elluvial gold following it for nearly its whole length, which was over 5km in length. What put the gold there? It was the diorite intrusion. The diorite when it intruded the older sedimentry rock caused it to fracture in lines parallel to the intrusion, which allowed the gold bearing fluids to deposit the gold where it was.

Hell if I've got time to play a metal detecting game I'll just swing the real thing!

I have 47 different modes saved in my pc on the excange2 software. I simply download my required modes before my hunt. Example: If I'm in the gold fields I'll have my gold modes + my mineralized ground coin modes. If I'm treasure hunting in Europe I put in my specialist treasure and hammerd coin modes. If I'm in Aus hunting old coins I'll put those modes in. If im hunting the beach I put those modes in. Ect ect.......

The weight of both of them doesn't bother me! But the atx's poor performance in our mineralized ground and falsing is why I regard it as a pig of a detector. But fixing the connector dose improve the faulsing issue's by eliminating the main cause.

Love it! I will look at doing my own custom setup now for my gpx as I ride a bike everywhere in the gold fields and the shaft and coil sticking out of the top of my backpack is a death trap. Its got hung up and ripped me off the bike on many occasion's.

Pull the control box of the atx apart and look at where the coil lead plug that attaches to the circuit board there is a connector that connects the plug to the board. It is this connection to the board that causes the faulsing. De-solder the connector off the board and just solder the wires straight to the board, problem gone.,........... Most times! The coils also have an inherant problem of falsing as well but this was not rectafiable. The atx in my opinion is a pig of a machine if I was going to modd a detector I would probably try put a bigger coil on the sdc.

Most areas I work in have little to virtually no information to reaserch. The geo maps of the areas have virtually no info on them like faults, intrusions and different rock types. So I mark all of these features allong with any gold that I find on my GIS mapping software and make my own maps of the area and project the features by studying specialist satellite image's in relation to the information I have obtained by in the field mapping and our gold finds. This is alot of work but this is why we are so successful. There is always a reason that the gold is there and there's always an indicator! It is up to the smart patient prospector to first find the gold, then identify the indicator and project its directon and follow it to more GOLD!!!!

cool just wasn't sure if it worked as there had been no comment by people who successfully down loaded

Has anyone downloaded and tried my modes yet? If so how did you go? Did they download into the excange2 software ok?