californiagold

Ill vouch for Racer 2 being a good Gold detector. it reminds me of a slightly less powerful brother of Goldracer.

omg Paul, I am so sorry and Pissed to hear about that. this county and the losers in it get worse all the time. I don't have a gpz, but if you get back in my area you can borrow my gpx 5000, anytime. if you still have my Pick, you have my permission to whack the bad guys up side the head if you find them. hit them a few times for me too. I hope they catch those thieves.

Tv, Congrads on your purchase of Racer2. sounds like you got a good deal. I mostly use the 10x5" dd coil for gold on Mak2. I find subgrain pieces with that coil easily. Although next time I go detecting at our small gold hill, I am going to finally get dirty , the little roond coil. it will probably be a bit stronger on subgrain gold. I generally detect in All metal mode. on Mak2 I run the sens. between 71-75. after 75 the threshold sound starts to get choppy. You might have to run sens. at lower level if the mineralization is too strong. but I doubt it. depends on if your using headphones to decide what level to adjust the threshold to. I usually run mine at 55-56. Also it depends on the location, but most places I run the isat adjustment with whatever setting keeps the threshold from blanking out. you can still easily find subgrain pieces at a higher isat if needed. The little Round coil might be the best choice for working small gold. Although as mentioned the 10" coil will also. I haven't used the disc modes much, but disc 2 seems to be the strongest sensitivity. I would start with the sensitivity at atleast 80 and work your way up in strength if you can. I like to run my Id filter at 0-5 range. it seems to hit harder and louder on tiny gold when it is lowered. Although it can increase ground noise if too low. you might experiment with the notch capabilities to knock off iron if you have too much junk to detect thru. Racer2 does have a beach mode which I haven't used, but probably would help in black sand rich areas if the other modes are too noisy. Also I can hit on the little subgrain gold in deep mode, but you have to swing extremely slow. I included a couple of pictures of a piece of gold that is subgrain weight and Racer2 can easily find. Good luck!

I have found faults because of varied vegetation many times. sometimes they jump out at you and are obvious and other times they are subtle. my favorite gold loving, growing vegetation is manzanita! if you don't find gold or the brush wont let you in, you can smash it, break it, whatever. it makes great therapy. next time im with Paul, I think ill take him thru some. I think someone told me long time ago about old timers finding water in deserts based on different plants which would seem common sense. good luck

sounds like you son is hooked now. but metal detecting is a wonderful sport. congrads on your finds together. father son outings are always the best. good luck on your future trips together.

steve, I made a few videos with the racer2 finding gold. but I wanted to share one short one of the tiny gold I was finding in one hole. so you can see how good it does on small gold even with a 10 x 5 coil thanks

tvandwho, if your getting a racer2 soon. if your going gold prospecting, i would also geta R26 10x5" coil for the racer2 as well. the standard 11 x 7' coil is good, but i feel the 10 x 5' coil is a good in between size to get some depth and sensitivity to small gold. and don't be afraid to use some isat adjustment in the the mineralized areas where the smooth threshold drops out. the isat will keep the threshold tuned and smooth. i haven't found with these detectors that you lose any noticeable depth while using isat. ive tried no isat on undug targets and max isat on faint signals and i never noticed any considerable loss. good luck

Thanks for all the comments. Steve, yes the racer2 would handle the bad mineralized spots alittle easier then gold racer. and the notch disc does a great job of clipping off the low end and high end hot rocks. though I haven't experienced with the disc a whole lot. I generally run in all metal. I do like the isat adjustment for threshold retuning. I haven't really had too much trouble with gold racer in what I figure to be high mineralization. not austrailia obviously but usually bad enough that ive had trouble there with previous detectors including gb 2.The Racer 2 with the 10 x 5" solid elip coil was quite the wonder. it does do a good job on small gold. Lipca. the coils are so shiny because I don't use those coils much. i usually use the 10x5 elliptical coils or sometimes the bigger 15x 13 coil for scouting for a new patch and covering ground quicker. the little 5" coils are good for tiny gold. but normally i can pretty much find it just as well with the 10 x 5 coils. so most of the 5' coils i have are new and never used. they come in handy for pictures though. but i am a clean freak though also, so after every detecting trip my detectors are cleaned and look like they just came from the showroom floor. good luck

Hello, Ive been away working 2 jobs 16 hours a day for last 3 1/2 months. With only a couple days off a month. And it has been some hard times for my personal live losing my best friend, another good friend and my Aunt. but forward I shall keep going. Anyway on my very few days off I went detecting with Nokta Fors plus, makro Gold Racer & makro Racer 2 to find some bits of gold. They are all great gold detectors and I will get back out again soon for more. hope everybodys new years is starting off great. Good luck!

Im sending my top detector agent Nurse Paul back to the scene of the gold to see what he can dig up. lol. hope he dont get lost.

Looks good, but wheres Steve? We want him in the show. when does this premier anyway,

Probably when im too old to walk they will have a detector that is the ultimate detector that everybody ever dreamed of and ill have to watch Todd Hoffmans children run them on a tv show.

Well I'm mostly healed from knee surgeries and decided it was time to get back at it. Despite all the smoke in the air in siskiyou county from the gap fire, it was not too bad outside. I headed out to an area that is one of many areas that ill be detecting this winter. it is not a well documented gold area, but it has good coarse gold. Most of the diggings in the area are shallow, but there is some good deep ground for pi detector work. For today I brought along my trusty friend Makro Gold Racer with the new 5x7 eliptical coil. I ran it about the same as other coils. in all metal and some isat adjustment. The place is plagued with alot of small iron and the little coil did a great job of sniping good signals out of the junk. it is extremely sensitive to micro sized targets and fits nicely under the bushes and between the rocks. it has a really nice sensitive tip for pinpointing. . all in all the 5x7 eliptical performed very well and would be a great accessory to hunt especially in the iron areas. well I ended up finding 16 pcs and 2.5 dwt for the little coils debut. I cant wait to try it out some more.Good luck

Elder berries makes the best wine and brandy. ill be gathering mine up in a couple weeks. Just have to fight off a few bears.

This enhanced mode is audio boost while in all metal. it is handy to help locate those tiny faint signals and isolate them. but it does increase ground noise and hot rocks audio. at most gold locations it increases the ground and mineralization sounds too much and is mostly meant for sparingly use. it is similar to audio boost on older detectors. Also if I remember right; makro did an airtest video with their engineer. I think the first target in air test was a small bottle of fines. but like steve said the hand can cause target responses. maybe someone can post the makro airtest video. good luck

Beings geologists believe that 98 percent of the gold left in the world is fine gold, I assume they mean the specks all the way down to flour gold, or even smaller. The Gold Racer does an excellent job of finding tiny pieces of gold. I value its ability to find these tiny pieces for at some locations that is the nature of the gold. they dont look like much when it comes to size, but they are Real gold. sometimes it takes me 20-30 of them to make a pennyweight. Which can easily be done at some of these locations very quickly. A big part of my gold finds these days are of this size and alot are from places that people decided not to dig those tiny signals. Or their detector didnt hit very well on these because of many reasons. unless a person is in need of trying to find only the bigger gold for a fast paycheck or they are an allout trophy hunter, it can still be very profitable to detect these tiny pieces of gold. many times ive seen friends go home with nothing because they were trophy hunting, and I took home 1-2 dwt of tiny gold. I haven't been skunked in years on an all day outing because many times the tiny stuff saved my day and because of my persistence to keep digging all good signals big or small no matter how many bb's that I had to dig aswell. If one notices on these forums, there is 1000's of members, but not alot of people out of the many find any gold. it is not an easy thing to do. so as for that, I'll take any gold that I can get. But to each his own, Good luck

Nice piece of gold Steve. I must have missed one.

Pretty disgusting that all this happens to our beautiful forest. the garbage, chemicals, etc. and they get mad at Loggers and Miners? I thought trinity and Mendocino countys were the worst. but I think it is about any forested area in the U.S. that has a good growing season , free sunshine, free water. ill have to keep my eyes open next time im hunting out of Portola.

I like to go see the owners in person. its easier to say no on the phone. they dont know anything about you. if you go in person, they can see you are a good person not some tweaker or serial killer. Believe it or not, 8 out of 10 usually say yes. I also usually only ask to try for 1 day or a few hours. then after that I can discuss with them about more time. I would never ask to bring a bunch of people beyond your partner if you have a regular partner for prospecting. I usually tell them that thru research that I believe gold could be found on their property. Which is true. and I always offer them a split of the finds with whatever percentage that they think is fair. to this day, I only had one owner that we did a split with. the rest didnt care. as a detectorist I also assure them that we dig little holes to recover the targets, but immediately refill the hole and dress up the immediate impacted area to look as natural as possible. we do live in an environmental world nowdays, especially in California. I also offer the landowner the chance to go with us and supply them a detector for the trip, but most arent interested. If you know about a property that you want to get in on. if you cant find the owners name or contact, just get the parcel number and go by the county court house and give them the parcel number. they can atleast get you the address of the land owner. then go do your thing and see if you can get permission. Nowdays private props pretty much have the best near virgin areas to find good stuff. so getting in on these places with permission is the way to go these days. If that dont work; tell them you know Steve H. and that should get the leverage you need.haha

Nice finds strick. still amazes me how many people loose their rings. all that gold just thought it was getting back to its natural habitat in the ground. you showed them. congrads

I did want to add that while gold racer overloaded with the cover on. I took it off and just placed several other covers from other Nokmak coils over the small coil and they didnt overload. I put the original back on and back to overloading. Since a few removals, it is now normal though.

My Gold racer coil had the overload with cover on, then not with it off, only a few times. Now it has never done it again. Had the same happen years ago with 2 gb pro coils. they stopped overloading with cover on after a few removals. I was leaning toward static buildup on plastic coil cover. Im not sure if that would make it overload. maybe Steve can elaborate some more on this very peculiar phenomenon. Very twilight zone though.

There isnt a camera man around that could keep up with the goldhounds! They would be the best canidates for this tv job, but im sure the show wouldnt pay them enough, and they wouldnt want all their secret locations plastered all over the tv. Best of luck! Dale, Tremain, Dave, Sandra

Thanks steve!.

Tom bohmker up in oregon wrote a couple books about pocket gold. One was "the elusive pocket gold of s w. oregon and "finding pocket gold in California's klamath mountains. I believe those titles are right. I also seen on a canadian gold forum ( cant remember the name) so good post about the geology of them. And also the Australian forums have some good post about them. although I think they call them reefs. alot of prospectors find gold that is from a pocket and have no idea it did. Whether it is on a hillside or in a stream. most of the gold that I collect is from pocket deposits. they are a very interesting subject good luck