Condor

I dropped a duece there a couple years ago and put that trash on top before I covered it up. Must have smelled like cheap red wine and bean dip. I've learned my lesson especially with the 7k, loose float gravel "no bueno", got to have a bottom within digging distance.

I've been running Steve' s insanely hot settings non-stop for the past month. I got my first ferrite very recently and have done daily start-up ground balancing, but keep it under the 10 second rule per JP. My perception is the detector takes a few hrs to settle in. At start-up in the morning she's pretty jittery but settles down after some run time. Today I got into a field of strewn volcanics and it was a mess. Those hot settings really light up the volcanics and my only solution was to remove self from affected area. I ran into a guy running a GPX 4800 and he had also surrendered to the overload from the same volcanics. Conversely, I covered some nearby shallow gullies and tiny nuggets were lit up like surface trash. I got 7 nuggets that totaled 2.8 grams and everyone of them sounded off like a booming piece of trash. The deepest target I dug was maybe 8 inches but sounded like bullet frag on the surface. Today I chased one seam of red clay for a good long while, but when I switched to "difficult" it disappeared while still running a Sensitivity of 20. Granted, I'm running some fairly quiet ground in SW AZ, so I have the advantage of letting the detector settle down before it drives me crazy with its antics. I also have the advantage of detecting 3 or 4 hrs a day for at least 5 days a week, so we are mutually getting used to each other. I don't think you can go out for a weekend in variable ground and expect these settings to work for you. Your hearing and sanity will give out long before the detector settles in and your brain settles in to the nuances of this kind of detecting. I was detecting with a fellow 7K user a couple weeks ago and he was running Sens 10 and still finding sub-gram nuggets and covering twice the ground. It's working for me so I'm sticking with it. As Nevada Chris says "your mileage may vary".

I loved those Keen boots, but 3 pairs delaminated. Keen was very good about replacing them on a 1 yr warranty, my last ones made it 13 months, too late to replace. Call customer service, email them a picture of the problem, and a new pair in the mail.

Oh no, Rob is coordinating the angle of the sun, the horizon and the background terrain to pinpoint the spot. Seriously though, the usual birdshot and some shallow iron trash. I dug one deep nail and one deep broken point off an old pick.

I'm not that media coordinated, I have to switch to my phone to post the photo.

Me a couple Yuma boys, decided to conduct a genuine prospecting trip today. I had researched an area and looked for it last year, but gave up after a long and arduous trip through the mountains, beat my poor old truck to death. So this year I shared this info with someone who knows his way around a computer and the mapping software. We got some decent coordinates and decided to give it a try. We left the freeway at sunup and it was 28 degrees. I towed a friend's side by side ATV, not wanting to beat my truck up again. Our map was perfect, though the desert had other ideas about road conditions. Washouts and river bottom silt dust were the norm. We managed, though I had already inhaled my fair share to dust just getting to the spot. We were shooting dark, expecting to see some drywash tailings as a starting point. No luck on the tailings, only hardrock mine workings. We branched out in all directions. 45 minutes into the hunt I get a good signal in a small bedrock gully. A baby nugget comes up and I'm thinking this is the ultimate spot, no dig holes and already found gold. I push on for nearly an hr before I get another nugget, then find 3 in about 15 minutes. I cannot let my friends down, so I hike across the flats back to our parking spot. I find both of them close by and convince them to move down to the spot where there seems to be gold. We again branch off and I find 2 more babies in the process. We had decided that based on the miles of bad road and our distance from home that 3pm would be the cutoff. As 3pm approaches I'm heading for the vehicles just pushing my coil along "desert pavement" with all kinds of broken quartz underfoot. I'm 50 ft from my ATV and I get the ultimate signal. Quite possibly the best I have received with the ZED. A low, broad tone, obviously deep, and in an area where there should be no deep trash. I start digging and the tone keeps getting better and better. I turn my Sensitivity down to 5 to try and narrow down my digging point. Ed Sr is within earshot and I tell him I'm digging a big nugget, so he brings a better digging tool. We dig awhile and expand the hole to try and pinpoint. Ed Sr goes back to the Jeep and gets a military style shovel to dig. By then Ed Jr arrives and pitches in to help dig the hole. As we open up the hole, the "sweet spot" of the signal seems to have moved. Never a good sign here in the desert. That usually means deep nail or wire that has corroded and giving a halo type signal. Nevertheless, we're in seemingly virgin ground, so I remain cautiously optimistic and dig on. I turn the detector Sensitivity down to 1 and its overloading in the hole, frustrating our efforts to pinpoint. Ed Jr is down on his knees pulling all the overburden out from the hole and he gasps, "oh my god". The nugget came right out with the last move to widen the hole. Spectacular, though covered in caliche. So, Ed Jr will have to post the photo of the hole and my smiling face with the nugget from his camera. I'll post the cleaned nugget photos in a second post from my stupid phone. The big one comes in at 10.8 grams. After Gerry's big find I almost feel unworthy, NOT! For those winter shut-ins, by noon we were at 65 degrees and I was sweating in a short sleeved t-shirt.

The beauty of this forum is we get valuable information without the ridiculous sniping so prevalent in the old days of other forums. I've been following the JP posts since the original Finders forum and cringed at the abuse he took from armchair prospectors with a Minelab Axe to grind. Again, Bravo Zulu to JP for sticking it out and Steve for zealously keeping the forum clean and relevant.

I inadvertently left my machine on after shutting down the audio then laid the machine on my tailgate. Ouch, that must have throughly f'd the ground balance. Maybe that's why it's running so smooth. I'd better start all over.

I followed up by reading the JP original post on the Australian forum. Under 10 seconds even over the Ferrite. Repeat if necessary, but don't dump the accumulated data by holding quick track too long. Makes sense that this accumulated ground balance data is stabilizing or perhaps immunizing the machine to some extent.

As I recall JP mentioned something about a quick ground balance that doesn't dump your stored ground balance data. I wonder if that's possible over the Ferrite and get the same benefit.

I know that before the update, my machine would drift to a negative ground balance and every time I raised the coil I was getting threshold over shoot. That's gone away, but I still get banged hard if I make a sudden movement either up or down.

The cumulative effect of the GPZ ground balance storage Observation: I ran Steve's Hot settings, HY, Normal, Sens 20, Threshold 35, Smoothing Low for several days in a row and the machine seems to be running as stable as before I switched to the hot settings. The desert southwest ground is fairly mild, especially where I've been working lately, but I know when I first started running these settings my machine was noisy, growling and squealing unless I slowed my sweep speed way down to a crawl. Now, the machine seems to have really settled down and I can increase my sweep speed without a bunch of extra noise. I did the Minelab update but I never had the ferrite to do that particular ground balance procedure. Question: Is the machine storing the ground balance information such that it now recognizes this ground and has made enough internal adjustment to account for a noticeably quieter machine, or is it just my own brain and hearing have made the adjustment and I have imagined the improvement? I just received a Minelab ferrite,( thanks to Rob @ NuggetHunting.com), but now I'm afraid to re-ground balance and F up a good thing by clearing that stored data. What's a guy to do in this situation? By the way, I got a deep, faint tone today and experimented with the settings some. The results are probably moot since the target was a piece of wire down about 14 inches, but I got as good a tone if not better on this target with the General, Normal, 20 sens setting. When I backed the Sens down to 15, neither HY nor General picked up the signal. Switching Smoothing off, I got an awful lot of chatter and the signal was very hard to hear through the chatter.

Opps photo misfired

I went back out to the spot my benefactor showed me the other day and gave it a go with the "bad boy" settings. Since I did the Minelab update my ZED has been considerably more stable. As you can see in the photo I found 3 micro nuggets that even combined won't register 1 grain on my scale. The round ones gave solid, unmistakable target tones. I dropped the first one back into the rubble pile and thought uh oh, that's going to be a problem. It never lost a solid tone and I got it in one go. The biggest nugget is 1.2 gram and was down over a ft. Once I got the hole going I had to back the sensitivity down to 5 to pinpoint, then I got the big shovel to finish out the digging. Steve's settings will work here because the ground is relatively mild. Still, I doubt I could do a whole day of that intensity. Sorry for all you cold weather shut ins, it's 65 and sunny here in Yuma by the Sea.

I think it's easy to forget that at the end of the day it's the journey that matters, not the size of your poke, the worth of your truck or your kid's prowess on the soccer field. This forum is dedicated to the friendly exchange of ideas about our hobby/pastime. Let's just remember that as we start a new year that the size of our poke is a personal achievement, but not at the expense of our humanity and good will to others. People might say, "Condor, have your lost your friggin mind and gone Buddhist, we're all about finding gold here". That's true, but today's experience reinforces personal beliefs whose priority may have been temporarily misplaced. I've been helped my many people on this forum, Steve H, Rob A, Nevada Chris, to name a few. There was never a toll for their friendship and assistance. Let's just remember to pass it on to others.

It is perhaps fortuitous that it is the Christmas Season when I am compelled to remind us of the nature of friendship and fellowship in the field. As it happens, today I was just starting my morning prospecting in a new area here in Yuma by the Sea. I could see another truck perhaps 1/4 mile across the canyon, but given the nature of topography in the desert mountains, you can't get there from here. Nevertheless, they drive down a steep 4x4 canyon and come over to say hello. We get to talking, fellow Zed travelers as it were, and the seasoned prospector invites me over to a spot he has found many ounces of gold in the past. I follow them and am acquainted with an area the size of a basketball court with dig holes everywhere. This fellow prospector suggests, that despite all the dig holes, the Zed will still find gold on this little plateau. We start detecting and to cut a long day short we find gold. It is only at lunchtime that I learn that his camping/prospecting partner is a total newby and is only along for the experience. As it turns out, he is a neighbor of my prospecting guide, who is fresh out of treatment for Stage 4 liver cancer. He is merely out for 3 days of camping and fresh air. So, a fellow prospector takes me in and shows me where to find gold, and is simultaneously showing a neighbor whose time on this earth is well nigh near, the wonders of desert sunsets and starlit nights. There is a lesson here my friends and you needn't be driven by bronze age fairy tales or supernatural surveillance to act honorably and ethically in this world. I spent a professional lifetime selling prison sentences to society's misfits who desperately needed them. It is catharic to find these beacons of moral and ethical courage on a little desolate ridge in the far reaches of the desert southwest. Pay it forward my friends, it costs very little in the end. Oh, and the gold.

I found this on top of a desert pavement mesa, down about 8 inches. A very low broad tone so I suspect there may be some more gold inside the rock. The visible piece is less than a gram. I detected the hell out of the whole area and not another target to be found. Where is that darn patch I hear so much about?

My phone crapped out, I'm barely computer literate enough to get the photos out, but I managed. I took a picture of the hole I dug, but the photo doesn't do justice to all the big rocks that I had dragged out behind me, but you get the idea. Rob, yes I have been back to that area and a years ago I found one big 1/2 oz slug, but otherwise a few half grammers, all with the SDC last year. This year nothing. This nugget came from the road in from the canal near the power lines. The so-called nugget patch that Bill told us about where the guy allegedly found 40oz looks like a moon crater now. Everybody and his dog has drywashed that zone.

Sorry I didn't get to the second day of my experience with the super hot settings. I got busy helping an out of state hunter trying to fill a Desert Bighorn Sheep tag. We filled, not a trophy but some hard hunting involved. Nevertheless, here's the rest of the story. On day 2, I was heading for an area I explored about 10 years ago with Rob Allison and Bill Southern. The road was rough and rocky so I pulled up short and decided to explore some gullies nearer the road. My main goal was just to keep trying out the settings and maybe get over some gold. I prospected for nearly an hour and was getting pretty frustrated with kicking a lot of hot rocks. The area was littered with volcanic rocks and the new settings were really lighting them up. I turned to make a loop back to the truck and pushed up a steep gully. I got a loud tone that really sounded like a nail, but since I was experimenting I thought I better dig the target. A very shallow nugget less than .2 gram popped out. I thought maybe this will work out after all. I continued down the ridge to a small wash with a few drywash tailings. I pushed up that a short distance and got a solid low tone. Low tones out here are usually bullets, but again I dug it up. 6 inches down a really solid half gram nugget came up. The shape, density and super hot settings made this small nugget sound off with a low tone. I continued up the wash and 20 ft away I got an iffy signal. I had already dug so many hot rocks that I was not much convinced but I started digging. After pulling off about 6 inches of rocks and soil the tone cleared up but the hole was choked with interlocked rocks. I kept thinking any one of those rocks was the culprit but kept digging. I punched down between 15 and 18 inches to the clay layer checking every rock I pulled out. The tone kept getting louder and louder in the hole. Because I was so deep the hole was too narrow to try and pinpoint so I just kept expanding the hole. At one point I was about to go back to my truck and get the big pick and shovel I had spent so much time on my hands and knees digging and prying rocks, but I kept going. Now the signal was booming, so I turned the sensitivity all the way down to 1. I'm thinking I must have missed a piece of trash in the sidewall, but kept digging. One more big rock and the target was in the loose dirt in the hole. I started scooping and waving over the coil and boom. Out she came, 11 grams of golden beauty. My biggest this year. Here's my take on Steve's Insanely Hot settings. They're great if you are in a known gold producing zone and have the luxury of moving really slow. They will drive you crazy with noise if you're in the gold prospecting mode and need to cover a lot of ground or if you're in very mineralized ground. It takes a pretty good while to adjust your hearing to ignore noise that isn't a target tone. The machine is going to meow and growl every time you raise or lower the coil as the ground balance and threshold try to catch up. It seems to me that after about a half hour the machine smooths out a little or maybe its just my brain smoothing out. The 7k is super sensitive to ferrous targets so you'll be chasing some very tiny pieces of old cans and the shavings off heavy equipment tracks and blades. I'm to the point that if the target moves with a boot scrape I don't bother. I may be leaving gold behind, but my knees and back don't appreciate the ups and downs to dig trash. I'll post the photos after my phone charges. Bravo Zulu to Steve's shared settings, they certainly have a place in the prospecting quiver.

A smooth threshold with the 7k is more like a state of mind. It's a noisy machine and you develop a tolerance for the noise. The key is to fiddle with the threshold tone and find something less annoying. I opted for a more bass general tone that still leaves a noticeable rising pitch over a target. Don't forget to lower the signal limiter. You'll blow your ears out over the first big trash target. I adjusted to the JP threshold setting of 35. It still takes continuous use to adjust brain, hearing and coil control to get comfortable.

Here in sunny Yuma by the Sea I've been having reasonable success on sub gram nuggets running the 7k in HY Normal with sens at 16 with a nearly silent threshold. I don't have the same noise tolerance as Steve H. But, after seeing JP weigh in and Lunk reiterating comments on Steve's Insanely Hot settings I thought I'd better give er a go. I was feeling poorly so I decided to make it real easy on myself just to try the settings. I drove out 30 minutes from home to an old placer operation that has been absolutely hammered over the past 10 yrs. I picked out a dozer push and fiddled with the settings described by JP. 5 minutes into it I hit a sweet tone. About 6 inches down in hardened caliche out pops a half grammer. I tried to ignore all sharp surface targets since the 7k loves that steel shed from the dozer. Half hr another really soft smooth signal. Micro gram nugget. So ended day one of the test. 2 hrs 2 micro nuggets. It gets real good on day 2. Details to follow.

The Zed calls it sensitivity, I think default is 9.

Lucky, Ya but, the other day I hit an area that had the gold bearing gravel overlaying a bed of red clay. That poor Zed was howling and growling so much I could scarcely get the coil down. Had to settle for General, Difficult and still suffered. The auto ground balance gave me a negative ground balance so that anytime I raised the coil it added to the unbearable noise. I gave up in short order and moved back to more forgiving terrain. It has its limitations, but I'm having a great time knocking down the dinks.

My smart phone having trouble loading the photo.

I know Lunk covered this last spring, but I want to reiterate. This morning I got the classic faint mew tone, repeatable in both directions. This is the kind of tone we live for, I knew it was gold because I was out of the trash zone and it was obviously not a surface target. I was running HY, Normal, smoothing off, gain 12. I decided to play with the settings a little. First I switched to HY, Difficult, same sensitivity. The target was barely audible and I doubt that if I was in regular prospecting mode it would have been sufficient to stop me. I already knew it was there, so I had too much advanced knowledge. Then I switched to General,Normal, same sensitivity. The target was still very clear. I toggled back and forth, clearly the Difficult setting faded the target. Low Smoothing had little effect, but I was in very quiet ground. My conclusion, at least for this quiet ground in Sunny Yuma, use Difficult as a last resort. The nugget was about 5 inches deep.