Gold Hound

Ditto here Featherdfishead, is very refreshing to know there are others who appreciate animals in the wild, something I feel all in this crazy fast moving world should stop and do for a bit. Even our flora, we have a insignificant twisted small bush-tree that just on the wet its white small flowers fill the air with a subtle fragrant scent we call it bush frangipani because that is what the scent is like, that is just an example. Mother Nature is amazing , makes our gold too, every nugget different.

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.

YOU DUDES ARE CREEPIN' ME OUT!!! I QUIT!!!!

For sale. $30,000 worth of detecting gear, 1 old beat up Jeep, 1 old beat up dog. $150 or will trade for ukulele lessons.

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!

Me too, I just leave them alone. Had an acquaintance attack a taipan with a long handle shovel bit him on the hand, they are that quick, hardly got into vehicle when he started bleeding from the eyes than died.

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.

i kinda like the sound of that satphone.....

 

I will do a little research on it..

 

Thx Norvic

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.

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.

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.

Thanks again for all the great feedback. Unfortunately, my scenario is probably not a great one, but I think that I have some better idea of how to attack things now.

 

I want something light and easy to navigate with as a first pass, knowing that I am going to be in high-trash areas as a starting point. Once I locate a promising area, I can then switch over to a higher-power detector like the GPZ and work the area more thoroughly. 

 

I will also spend time in low-trash areas with the GPZ and cover more ground quickly. 

 

The other challenge I have, compared to desert areas, is the land is harder to read vs. the western desert areas. What I mean by this is that the ground is covered with heavy vegetation or years of leaf matter, so the changes in the soil are not as obvious. There are other signs, but not as clear as what I am used to out west. Anyway, this is getting a little off topic, but it would be interesting to see thoughts from folks on terrain like this and how you approach hunting these areas. Hence my focus on starting in the immediate areas of the mines, it should at least be reasonable to think that there will be some close to the older mining areas. 

 

I will let you know how the MXT does in the area as a starting point.

 

Best,

Hound

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.

I'm trying to understand the relationship between gold and diorite. I probably seen it a million times, but I thought it was just granite.

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.

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

I have it now on my 3030 waiting for a gold trip.  I could only load 5 of the programs because I want to keep my beach, relic and coin programs.  

 

When you use the 3030 for something other than gold, what programs do you use then?

 

Mitchel

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.......

I thought the ATX at 6.9 lbs was a real pig until I got my 7.3 lb GPZ. Now I know what a real pig is! GPZ is now Big Piggy and ATX Little Piggy. Or maybe the GPZ should better be called Boss Hog! They both like to root in the dirt.

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.

Hello Dean,

Welcome to the forum!

I of of course a fan of the ATX. I agree with Sandy - I think the falsing is inherent in the coil due to the short delay time being invoked to increased sensitivity to small gold. The problem can be addressed through design - I know a lot of effort is expended by Minelab to get coils running quiet.

Part of the issue is running the machine maxed out. I run at the highest sensitivity setting on the machine. Lowering it reduces falsing but reduces sensitivity. So you can choose to alleviate the issue somewhat by running cooler.

Coil scuff covers also help by acting as a buffer to knocks and sharp hits. It is worse on loose rocks and rubble and not bad at all if a bit of grass or weeds acts as a buffer. I find the ATX runs perfectly in grasslands.

Myself I have basically just learned to handle the machine in such a way to reduce the issue, which means just going really slow and taking it easy in the rocks. Not a bad habit to conform to anyway.

When I finish this modification I swear I am never heading down that road again. It is its own sort of fun but really I just want to go detecting. There probably are people who would do mods like this for a fee. I am sure Paul will chime in with ideas.

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?

We spend 90% of our time pushing into unexplored area's.

And the rest cleaning likley old area's whith new technology when it comes out.

Steve my biggest 2 piece's both large specimen's you could have detected with any detector!

My biggest piece I picked up from 1.5m away sideways to the coil!

But the tiny specs that lead to their discovery would not have been found with any detector with lower performance than a gpx4500.

Gold is heavy and big gold (over 10oz) takes a massive amount of energy to move even a short distance from its source.

Ecept if it comes from a steep hill then the weight + gravity move it very quickly down to the first trap, which is usually the bottom of the hill.

Then it moves very slowly once more, usually it just stays in the first decent trap.

We have proved this over and over again.

And as such we target these particular area's.