GB_Amateur

Apologies if I'm barking up the wrong tree, but given the responses others have gotten from Minelab USA, are you sure you dialed the correct number? Did the answering machine recording acknowledge you had reached Minelab?

Could you give a little more explanation? Those appear to be 3.7V batteries. Is the circuit board some kind of voltage regulator (switching regulator) that steps up the voltage? And the switching circuit doesn't introduce EMI?

I watched a couple seasons of Bering Sea Gold and couldn't take it anymore. I watched a lot more seasons of Gold Rush but eventually stopped doing that for the same reasons. The world has too many a__holes as it is and glorifying them on TV is worse than disgusting. Clearly the TV producers/etc. feel that conflict gets more viewers than informative, civil activities. A sad state if that's truly the case. Fortunately there still are treasure shows where the protagonists treat fellow humans with respect.

Or maybe gold? I don't mean to be insensitive to the plight of those in the path of Hurricane Dorian, but none of us can do anything about the weather (in the short term, anyway). I'm wondering what the expectation is for beach hunting after the hurricane hits the shore in the coming days. I realize its path and strength are uncertain, but the chances of it missing Florida completely seems to be small, and we all know there are many targets (modern and ancient) along the Atlantic coast.

Let me guess -- that other ring in the photo is tungsten-carbide. 😢 I think recently (however you want to define that) they've been putting full names in class rings. (Mine just has my initials, but it's merely sterling). Hope you find the lucky (formerly unlucky) owner. And if you can't I'm glad for you, too!

I assume you're referring to this national news story from the early 80's: https://www.apnews.com/c3028337e7d88ef7b80ac6deaf8dd9c4

The US Interstate Highway System is a net plus, but when it comes to sightseeing the slower US and state highways are much superior. When I'm on vacation with my wife I try and use the latter as much as I can. When I come out west to hunt for gold it's a lot harder to do that. For example, a trip to Nevada is 7 days round trip just driving (on the interstates) so a 2-week trip (including both weekends) is only 9 days in the wild. Colorado is much better in that regard (only 4 days round trip) but I need to figure out where I have a chance finding gold with a metal detector there. I agree with Lacky -- your post has given me incentive to take more pictures.

Great story, Gerry. But that was his side of it. I can see you were using a White's Golmaster 24k, but what settings, coil, etc.? Did you key in on a signal strength, conductivity range, gain setting,...? How accurate was the location he predicted? How long did it take to find? Did you get any other targets that looked good? Did he give any compensation (cash or otherwise -- I like to ask grateful recipients if they know of any properties I can search, such of those of older relatives -- i.e. permissions are more desired/valuable than simple cash, IMO). Obviously your business's reputation and personal satisfaction were rewards in themselves.

The article relates a story from 1877 near Osceola, NV. A drifter prospector (was there any other kind?) named Charles Keisel, working legally on a consortium (of which he was not a part) claim, found a nugget which when melted down contained "at least" $6000 in gold. Assuming $20/ozt that would be 300+ ounces. According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osceola,_Nevada there is still small scale mining in that area, but the town is now abandoned. Osceola is ESE of Ely, a couple miles from US-50 ("The Loneliest Road in America", coined by Life Magazine in 1986) and only ~20 miles from the Utah border.

Excellent conclusion. Two (old) lipstick tubes close to each other is a good indication of a clothesline, although not a guarantee. I've done well under clotheslines. Most of my old coin and relic finds have been from parks which were formed in the last 50 years but were homesteads prior to that. This includes one Mexican War button (mid 1840's), one Civil War button and a CW cartridge box plate. I've just recently been searching another park which had an 1892 built home torn down in 1969. Still haven't found the sweet spot on that one but I'm not discouraged.

Those folks aren't here. Brings to life the "needle in a haystack" analogy. Well done.

From the linked article: The chosen location for Detectival 2019 will be near to the Historic Medieval Market towns of Burford & Charlbury in Oxfordshire on the edge of the Beautiful Cotswolds. We have almost 1000 acres to search, 600 of which is brand new undetected land. The site is near to the historic Cotswolds villages of Langley, Fulbrook, Milton Under Wychwood, Ascott under wychwood, Leafield & Shipton Under Wychwood. That's in England, west of London and south of Birmingham.

Those magazine illustrators really were skillful at their task, getting us to fantasize over the possibilities. Just another lost art in today's internet/social-media/cellphone/selfie photo-dominated age. Here's a slightly later issue (vol. 3, #3) from 1971. Remind anyone of Northern Nevada desert (or Southern Nevada, Northern Arizona, SE California,....? And the back cover: From the accompanying article (written by the infamous Bill Mahan, founder of D-Tex): The total count was 202x silver dollars, 79x $20 gold pieces, 53x $10 gold pieces, 43x $5 gold pieces, 2x $2.50 gold pieces. Mint dates range from 1850-1881. The detector Charles had borrowed form his dad was an old 1966 model D-Tex Standard.... He barely had a signal. It was (later) found that the battery was down to less than 4 volts. It was purly accidental that he detected anything at all. Any detectorist's bucket lister includes a gold coin. How about a cache of 177? Imagine the world-wide media attention such a 6-7 figure find would garner today.

Good stuff. I think all the ones I've found are Type B. I assume the terminal dates of use are only approximate. My uncle (a home builder) not only reused wood from demolitions but also nails, having lived through the great depression when almost nothing of any usefulness was thrown away. I wish I had asked him if he ever (re)used square nails. Also, if he had somehow come upon a keg of virgin square nails I have a feeling he would have found a way to use them. I found revealing these two similar statements from the two articles: Cut nails are still made today, however, with the type B method. These are commonly used for fastening hardwood flooring and for various other specialty uses. Machinery was developed to produce cut nails in the 1900's, and they are still used in flooring and concrete applications, where holding power is paramount, and power nailing tools are standard. Machine made cut nails are also made for use in reproduction or hobbyist replica furniture, but they are so perfect and identical that it is usually easy to see that they are new. From the second excerpt, it appears that the square nails in current use can easily be distinguished from the antique varieties. I certainly hope that is the case.

Most square nails I find here in Indiana are severly rusted (globs of rust stuck to them) but recogizable. Sometimes, though, they are pristine other than their dark color. I suspect different nails have different treatments and also different alloy compositions. Interesting find.

Here's an experiment for every Equinox user. Auto noise cancel. Then do it again. Do you get the same channel?

Nice! Lot of detail on that pendant, and I wonder why the double loop attachment. To my eye this looks a little large (and probably too detailed) to be from a charm bracelet. Hope you're being careful with that pick. I take it the ground is really hard and rocky.

If we're (really) lucky there will be some reliable info at the Detectival event in 3 weeks:

Sounds like you're in the right spot! You didn't say if you've been searching the freshly opened area or the piles. You also didn't mention the age of your finds. IMO, it's the old finds that are more difficult to find in general so go for those, even if less plentiful. Consistent with Noah said about time being of the essence, I would concentrate on the cleared area and get to the piles later (if the latter is even possible). It will be interesting to see if there is anything in the ground after they clear the next 12 inches. It could go either way, depending upon the history of this location and the density of the ground. My suggestion (similar to Noah's) is to not waste any time. Sounds like a lot of area to cover and they aren't going to stop and wait for you to finish.

In retrospect ("hindsight is 20/20"), IMO they should have labeled the recovery speeds on the 600 simply {2,4,6}. But I suppose then someone would have wondered why there was no {1,3,5}. FWIW 90% of my hunting has been in the {5,6} region and only recently have I tried 4 (which has produced some good results). I don't think I've heard/read anyone running with recovery speed = 8 although I know it's been tested and likely some have given it a whirl in the field. When I run in Field 2 mode (where 7 is the default) I just turn it down to 6. But just like the gain/sensitivity (where I almost never go above 22), it's nice to know I have the capability of pushing to the extreme. Minelab kept that option in the recovery speed for the higher priced 800. One of those marketing decisions...

And no offense was taken. I could have started out with a disclaimer instead of waiting until the end. Often, though, it seems like beginning with a defensive statement taints the rest of the post. If people only read the beginning and then exit they miss that last part. In this case I trusted that wouldn't happen. From the 'early voting' 😁 it appears others agreed with the need to explicitly state the simplicity aspects of the detector as you did. So you provided a valuable service.

Thanks for the link, Mitchel. I went back and reread it (probably need to do that again) and, yes, once the new (May 2019) replies start talking about the X-coils the informative discussion gets derailed. Being the contrarian that I am, though, I'm reminded of Dave Johnson's article: http://www.fisherlab.com/hobby/davejohnson/SearchcoilfieldshapeApril2012.pdf where he warns: So to say what happens when you swing a target past the searchcoil of a simple motion discriminator requires computation of at least 26 variables. I doubt anyone has ever attempted to compute such a thing, although it’s theoretically possible. In any case, nobody will ever draw a picture of it. Kinda like quantum physics. You can get a pretty good idea of what's going on with a good verbal description, but to really understand it you need to get into the weeds (higher mathematics). Just like detecting. It's hard to swing a detector in the weeds, but sometimes that's where the really good targets are hidden. 😁

Realistically you don't need to search thousands of settings to find the optimum one. (I was really thinking about testing -- when you don't know what the site will be so you try and anticipate or even cover all possibilities.) In practice at a site you set one feature and then move on to the next, sequentially. (You could and maybe should backtrack in some cases, such as sensitivity and noise cancel as those two can be intertwined.) I thought of an analogy: Suppose your sight is limited (e.g. in a fog) and you are tasked with reaching the top of a mountain peak. You have a compass and an altimiter. Follow an N-S path until you max out the altimeter (when it's starts reversing you backtrack to its max). Then change to an E-W direction and do the same. If the mountain is simple (single peak, no valleys) you will find the top after these two steps. With a detector, each setting is analagous to the N-S / E-W path so you can have more than two (more than two independent dimensions). In reality, mountains aren't always so simple -- they have multiple peaks, saddles, valleys, etc. A metal detector isn't a simple mountain, either, but you can do pretty well most of the time if you assume it is.

Oops. That's a big one, something like a factor of 8 (correction, 3). Good catch. (Note: calculations have been corrected in original post to reflect this.) Is recovery speed adjustable in single frequency?