Condor

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.

Oh yeah, the end of the nugget broke off, now I got 3 nuggets.

I got out early this morning in an area I found last year. I had high hopes that the 2300 had missed some deep gold. Very little trash last year, so I intended to dig everything. Unfortunately, the last rain storm really hit that area hard and stirred up a bunch of old can fragments. I concentrated on bedrock areas with a foot or less of overburden. I got a good signal and opened up a foot deep hole to bedrock. Interlocking rocks made it no easy chore. As I'm scooping out the loose rock this nugget is laying right in the bottom. Whew, I'm really pleased so I take a break in the shade. After I get all my gear ready to go again I sweep the dig hole, a booming signal comes through. Wow, this is gonna be awesome, not. It takes me another half hour to open up the hole to get more interlocked rocks out. I'm sweating buckets, but jazzed at the propect. I finally get the last rock out and start scooping out the gravel and this old tin can seam comes out. Total buzz kill. I pushed on for a 4 hr rountrip, nothing else but junk.

HY, Normal, Smoothing off. I think it's a brain/audio conditioning thing. The more I use it, the more the chattery background seems to fade. Mind you, I'm in some pretty mild ground, but when I hit more mineralized ground I have to slow way down.

We had a cold snap in sunny Yuma, 78 degrees at 0530. I went back out to the previously hammered gold drywash zone. I found the 2 bigger pieces 2ft apart on the shoulder of a worked out gulley. They were 8 to 10 inches deep under some drywash tailings, resting on a layer of hardpacked clay. I gridded the area with no more luck, although I had bootscrapped one spot a couple times. I decided to plug in my earphones and jack up the sensitivity to 16. I gave the area a good go no new targets, but I kept going back to the bootscrapped spot. With the threshold at 1 I was getting a faint stutter in one direction, but nothing on the backswing. I used my pick to pull down a couple inches of dirt. Ever so faint signal in one direction. I decided to settle this thing and dug up a foot square down about 4 to 5 inches. Finally, a repeatable signal. I got to the hardpack layer and after a couple tries got it in the scoop. Really tiny so I measured the depth. I measure 9.5 inches. Now I can't say that nugget was actually resting at that depth, but he was damn close. He weighs in at .1 gram. The total for all 3 nuggets was 1.1gram. I'm liking the Zed with the threshold at absolute minimum. The background is chattery, but a target breaks through with ease.

I ran the 2300 almost exclusively at 4. I also attached a booster and ran in ear studio style earphones. The AZ heat makes headphones a chore for me. The wireless function of the Zed is a pleasure.

I made it home to godforsaken Yuma AZ. Temps are downright awful. Low of 84, high 107. Fortunately, there are a couple hammered gold areas 30 min from my front door. I've been out for a couple hrs at sun up for the past few days. The ground is relatively mild so I run the Z hot, HY, ,Normal, Sens 12, minimum threshold. Clay domes and red bedrock send the machine into yowling and growling fits, but I'm getting impressive depth on tiny bits. The smallest is 2 grains, the largest 2.9 grams. The 2300 missed that bigger nugget last year. I saw my own dig spots not a foot from the bigger nug, but it was down a solid 12 inches. Can't wait for cooler weather and a chance to do some serious detecting.

I tried balancing over a small ironstone, pretty difficult to balance it out. That stuff is just too hot.

I thought we had a break in the weather down here in Southern CA so I took the 7k out to ironstone heaven. There is so much ironstone that Kaiser Steel once mined it nearby. I know of a small hillside placer that had produced a few dozen 1 gram and smaller nuggets. I used the 2300 in there last year for some decent finds. The problem is its a long, hot, dry walk. I was going to hike in and overnight it, but at the last minute decided a roundtrip with lighter pack was a better plan. I started out at first light with the 7k taken down and stowed in my pack with 4 liters of water. The hike was longer than I remembered, took me just shy of 2 hrs to get to the placer zone. I had already sweated through my shirt and drank one liter of water. Not a good start. I fired up the 7000 trying to concentrate on deeper gravels where the 2300 should have left some gold. Man, that 7000 can find ironstone real deep. I tried various settings to dumb it down, including General-Difficult with a lowered sensitivity. No go, too many golf ball sized chunks of ironstone down 6 to 10 inches. By noon I had enough of kicking and digging ironstone, even 1 nugget would have kept me going. By then I was down to 1.5 liter of water and it was heating up. I packed it up and plugged in my ipod with a decent audio book and hiked back out of there. I got to my truck about 2:30 and it was 105 degrees with 20mph winds. I hosed down with a 5 gallon jug of water, changed clothes and drove home. It was not a total loss, because I can now cross off my list a place to work the 7k. Looking forward to cooler temps and more time with the 7k.

Goldbrick, Fred et al, I'm glad you all understand my perspective, my passion can override my sensitivity. I thoroughly enjoy the fellowship of this forum and the freedom to share mutually beneficial experiences, ideas and comments without the negativity that pervades other venues. Bravo Zulu to all who participate and those who quietly benefit.

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but I am a retired LEO and there is no such thing as a bond as a condition of employment. The government's employees don't need a bond because they have qualified immunity from suit. The only way to pierce the immunity is bring a constitutional tort. For federal employees the suit is called a "Bivens Action". I am intimately familiar with this process because another federal agent and I sued our government employer for a 4th amendment unreasonable search and seizure claim as is pertains to rigged random drug testing. We won, but lost. The federal judge concluded that the government had indeed violated our 4th amendment rights, but that our government supervisors were still entitled to qualified immunity because they could not be expected to know the intricacies of the 4th amendment. It's only the friggin Constitution after all. Lawsuits are expensive and time consuming. The government will nearly always indemnify its employees acting within the scope of their employment. They can be wrong and still be protected as long as their belief was reasonable. They have unlimited resources to wear you down. I'm not bitter, but no longer naive about the concept of justice. I agree that it pays to know your rights, the laws and local regs and have those at your disposal, but it can still go wrong with the discretionary powers of the law. Coming off too strong could cause you to fail the attitude test and lead to more problems with badge happy police. Sorry for the rant but after 30 odd years of law enforcement, 27 yrs as a fed, I am still riled by the injustice of the arbitrary and capricious powers of police.

I spent 5 days out at Sawtooth, N. NV desert practicing with the 7000. I lost a couple days to some summer electrical storm activity and a little rain. There was actually some big rain out towards Imlay, but the weather was tolerable at Sawtooth. Low 90's during the heat of the day and high 50's at night. I tried the Bogene silent threshold settings to combat the electrical activity, but still was a struggle. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the area to get over any serious gold, but I scored 5 tiddlers adding up to a whopping 1.7 grams. The smallest won't register even 1 grain on my scale. These came from obviously pounded areas judging by the dig holes. The ground was relatively quiet so I nearly maxed out the 7000 and moved at a snails pace. I settled on the Bogene setting for this crumb hunt, adjusting volume and target signal to a manageable level of morse code type background chatter, I think Nevada Chris uses a similar setting. The faintest target signal would just rise above or smooth out background chatter. It worked for me, but its all a matter of personal preference. Running the 7000 with that much power would not be my choice for a prospecting mode, but certainly proved itself on known gold producing ground. I kicked a lot of hotrocks and dug a bunch of tiny ferrous targets all part of the learning curve. Some frustrating target recovery efforts with that coil. Finding a sub-grain piece at about 2 inches improved my confidence in this beast for sure. As Steve H has pointed out, "if you're finding the little ones, the big ones will take care of themselves". On my last day I ran into a local prospector, Smokey who claims he taught Lunk everything he knows about detecting, not really but he spoke highly of Lunk. He has also met Steve H. and Reno Chris out there. He showed me some pictures of pounds of gold from the old days of the White's Goldmaster and untouched ground. At 76 he's still going strong with a passion for detecting. All in all, I enjoyed my trip. Decent weather, tolerable food and good health, can't ask for much more than that. I'm still learning this 7000, but I'm looking forward to some new low and slow opportunities.

You probably saw my tracks around that same spot from 2 weeks ago. I followed the logging road down and hiked a long way down to the creek. The creek was posted no prospecting every 100 ft.

My Dr suggested Zyrtec antihistamine. I took it everyday during a 2 week prospecting trip. I was exposed to a lot of poison oak, it was unavoidable. I still got the itchy bumps, but it never really broke out like before. In the past I've had to take non anabolic steroids to break up the reaction. Antihistamines worked for me.

Yeah, we went down to the main pit and I saw all the spots where you guys found gold, including the Lucky Lundy and Mrs. Lucky sweet spot. Looks like excellent rattlesnake country. Mike ran into one small one.

I finally popped for the 7000 after having a pretty good year with the 2300. Mike G took me out to his family claim in one of CA. famous hydraulic pits for a bit of practice and familiarization. Within 10 minutes I found a tiny .25 gram flattened gold nug at impressive depth for something that small, perhaps 4 or 5 inches. I pushed pretty hard for the next 3 hrs finding one more similar sized nugget. What I hadn't counted on was the terrain. We were hunting a steep hillside with a lot of cobble piles, downed timber, deep gullies and iron trash. The 7000 is a beast in that kind of terrain. No amount of tricked up harness/bungee support will help when you're pushing that big coil up and down in all directions against gravity. As you may recall in one of Steve's original posts about reasons not to get the 7000, he cautioned that it is best suited for open, flat ground. I was wore out after a 6 hr trial. Me and the 7000 were soundly beaten by another friend of Mike's pushing a belt mounted Eureka Gold with small coil. Despite the small coil, he could actually cover more ground, under, through and around the obstacles with a nearly weightless machine and iron discrimination. A better tool for those conditions without a doubt. It took me several hrs to get my ears and brain accustomed to the chatter from the 7000. I ran it in the preferred settings, High Yield/Difficult, gain 9, Smoothing off, but it just seemed noisy. I personally never thought the 2300 was that noisy and I ran mine through an small amplifier to boost the volume. Its all in what you're used to and I can understand the GPX users rocky transition. I need a few days in some more suitable terrain to really get a good feel for this machine. I may have to run out to the sagebrush flats of N. NV. I've got some promising shallow bedrock desert washes back in AZ that I can't wait to try, once the weather gets a little more tolerable. Until then boys and girls, keep er low and slow.

Fine flood gold recovered and NRS kayak loaded

DeathRay, Some might argue that I'm less studly and more stupid for even getting involved in this kind of crap. The hike with that load took me 4.5 hours and a half gallon of water. I saw the anvil last year. Steve H. and I spent a short week down there at the spring and detected some of the old diggings. Steve lives a cleaner life so I doubt he was even winded coming up that trail. Steve and I saw a group of Do-Gooders round-trip the trail on a clean-up detail. One of the women Do-Gooders came down the trail in flip-flops. She was wearing a cotton smock dress and we nearly saw more than we wanted as she was getting water from the spring at our little camp by your anvil. My ordeal was even worse on my first trip up with gear on Thur. My truck was still parked at the Euchre Bar trailhead. I had a friend willing to come pick me up, but I couldn't get phone service, so I dropped my pack and hiked the railroad tracks back to the Euchre Bar parking lot to fetch my truck. I was one hot, tired and thirsty sombitch after that little addition to an already brutal hike. Not only is that trail 1000 ft per mile up, but the middle section follows an exposed rock ridge with no shade and loose rock just inviting you to make a misstep. I have become a firm believer in trekking poles and I'm certain they have saved years of wear and tear on my knees and hips. I'm spending the next few weeks in Sacramento and looking to do some detecting anytime anyplace. Anyone who wouldn't mind an extra for detecting give me a shout. I promise I won't whine in tough conditions.

The rest of my story was delayed as DeathRay can truly appreciate because I spent 2 days hiking my gear out of the river at Green Valley. The Green Valley trail is a nasty piece of work and each time I've hiked it over the years I swear I'll never do it again. This time I mean it. Yesterday I hiked out with a little over 70lbs of gear, I thought I was going to die. I had to keep reminding myself how good the cold beer in my truck was going to taste at the end of this ordeal. Back to the story. Day 3: I stayed in the steep canyon between Euchre Bar and Green Valley. I found another nice gravel beach with decent shade and a quiet pool. I found a fair amount of flood gold high up the bank. I took one of the small Angus Mackirk drop riffle sluices and rigged it with a 1750 GPH bilge pump and 12 volt L Ion battery. I glued in V mat in the front part of the sluice and that area caught most of the flood gold. The drop riffle sluices need a lot of water to run correctly and just not compatible with this super fine flood gold I was finding. I wish I could have run that material through the Gold Cube sluice. But, that would mean another 30 lbs of gear. Day 4: I pushed on through the steep narrow canyon and reached the upper end of Green Valley. The going got a lot harder because of the shallow water. I spent most of the day roping the kayak down through the rocky shallows. As I pointed out earlier, roping the kayak down was not that strenuous, it's following the kayak on foot through the shallows that's a killer. The river was too shallow to float/swim, and too deep to boulder hop. Those river rocks especially the serpentine were slicker than elf snot. I tumbled too many times to count but managed to stay relatively injury free. At the upper end of Green Valley I found someone's camp though he must have been out for supplies. He had an impressive 4 ft hole going on the front edge of a boulder bar. He was obviously way more dedicated to his prospecting that I was. He was moving 100 + lb boulders with a digging bar and full size shovel. All I had was my trusty short handled spade and my detecting pick. Day 5: I continued through Green Valley and the going got steadily worse. Daytime temps were kicking up and shaded landings were scarce. I reached hard decision time. There are no trails out of the river until Pickering Bar/Touro Mine area below Iowa Hill. I knew from past experience that I was looking at 2 or 3 days of tough slogging in this shallow water to reach Pickering Bar. At higher water a good kayaker can make it all the way to Mineral Bar campground in one day, but this low water makes progress slow and painful. I was a half mile past Green Valley and opted for the known quantity of getting out at Green Valley. I started warping that kayak back upstream. At midday I found a small shady spot and pulled out to rest. As I explored around I found a section of bedrock serpentine and poked around in some depressions. Each pan had 30 to 40 colors of superfine flood gold. I'll post a picture of the results of a half bucket of 1/2 inch screened material. I had no whisk broom to really clean out the bedrock so I probably left behind more gold than I recovered. A gold vac and the Gold Cube would have made some impressive recoveries in that area. I gave the area a good go and found nothing remotely resembling a picker, just tiny flood gold. I still had a ways to go upstream and pushed on when the sun was a little more forgivable. I reached the last downstream trail access at Green Valley just before dark. More later...

Part One Every year I embark on a new adventure, a personal challenge to prove 61 is not getting old. Normally, I have my rock solid 20 yr old son to help me with the heavy stuff. Not this year. I decided that with the low water in California gold country, I should try a float trip on the Wild and Scenic, North Fork of the American River. I've done this trip in the past, though rarely had much opportunity to gold prospect. I decided to make use of my NRS inflatable kayak. It weighs in at a little over 50 lbs and rolls into a manageable bundle that can be backpacked. 1st mistake was deciding to cart the whole load, kayak, camping gear and prospecting gear in one trip using a big pneumatic tire garden wagon. The trail at Euchre Bar is a very good trail running 6 to 8 percent downhill grade and generally wide enough for the wagon, however; there is the matter of gravity and the whole objects in motion tend to stay in motion mess. So the garden cart ran away with me and tumbled down the first switchback. Ouch, 3 trips down through the poison oak and grass burrs to fetch it all back up to the trail and re-pack. I ended up walking backwards down the trail holding the wagon back to keep it from running me over. In retrospect, I should have done 2 backpack trips down the trail and saved time and effort. I got it all down the trail, but my legs were so sore from hiking backwards holding back the wagon that I just camped where the trail ended at the river. One good thing with the kayak, it has a drop-stitch floor that inflates. It turns out to be a damn fine sleeping cot on any rough and uneven ground. Day 2: I got everything packed and started downstream. I immediately found that the water levels were about 10 inches too low to kayak the river. Every 100 yards to so I had to rope the kayak down rocky shallows. The kayak with camping and prospecting gear floated the shallow water well enough, but it just couldn't accommodate my 200 lb bulk. Roping it down was not a problem, but walking/wading those algae slick boulders was a hazard at every turn. I wore a pair of thin neoprene/lycra kayaking pants and cheap knee pads that saved me an endless number of barked shins. I was in no hurry so I stopped just after noon at the first decent sandbar in the canyon. The canyon was narrow and steep so all but direct midday sun was blocked. The weather was pleasant and the water temps quite tolerable. I got out my gold pan and shovel and sampled all the obvious spots on my little sand spit. A little flood gold, but nothing to shout about. More Later....

I loved the Bogene setting on my old 4000 at Moore Creek, AK. The main reason was the sheer volume of hot rocks and auditory overload from running it for long days. I lowered the threshold to one or two notches below audible and maxed out the sensitivity which cut out about half of the hot rock sounds. What I listened for then was anything that brought the threshold up and relatively steady. The Moore Creek "hotrocks" were more often "cold rocks" which caused the classic Boing sound after you passed the rock. With no threshold you got a huge Boing which could not be repeated in the other direction. If you went over them with an audible threshold, and swung the coil slow enough, you got a null then Boing sound. Gold for the most part caused a soft rising meew signal in both directions. To be fair, we were pushing big coils and looking for the big gold, quarter oz and larger. I found a 4.9 oz specimen nugget down about 18" that offered the ever so faint mew sound. It was surrounded by hotrocks and I doubt I would have distinguished it from the hotrocks with an audible threshold. I bet Steve wishes he could revisit his old Moore Creek property with the 7000. I'm still waiting on my backordered 7000. Chompin at the bit as it were.

We'll make a few assumptions. Hot ground in the US is generally not the same as hot ground in AU. So we're here in USA, no particular EMI and you're purring along in your favorite ZED settings. You come to some hot ground, let's say red clay with a smattering of hot rocks or more likely "cold rocks" that is the rocks that tend to make the threshold go null then wang the audio when the threshold tries to catch up. The ground is causing your machine to get all twitchy and you can no longer hear the subtle threshold changes for faint targets. In this situation, which one adjustment would you reach for first? Lower the gain/sensitivity, raise the smoothing, switch timings etc..?

I need some ideas on getting a fair price for gold jewelry. My sister and I inherited gold and diamond jewelry that appraises between 30 and 40k. The local jeweler who actually crafted many of the pieces is offering sub-wholesale 11k, according to him most of the gold will be scraped, diamonds reset in new jewelry or used for repairs. Many of the gold chains are in pristine shape so I doubt he'll actually scrap them. I'm not keen on screwing around with a bunch of "tire kickers" and scammers on Ebay. What kind of options are out there?

The sheer stupidity and overblown egos continue to amaze me. Every time Minelab comes out with a new machine, the same tired blathering of armchair prospectors find their audience. "Minelab are money grubbing whores, JP and the product testers who share their knowledge and experience are on the Minelab tit, my other detector can do all that and more, blah blah blah." Heard it all before. JP takes so much of this crap, and all of us benefit from his willingness to step into the fray and provide hands on knowledge and experience. I remember the old Finders Forum, good lord you would have thought that JP was the anti-christ. There is a reason that Minelab relies on JP to do the beta testing. He's out there day in and day out, every year. While it is unlikely that JP gets a commission on detector sales, he well deserves one. Not many people can say they have earned a living, kept a family clothed and educated, all from gold prospecting. He's also helped me and hundreds of others with his timely advice and guidance. We need a category of "JP says..." so that we can skip to the important stuff and bypass the thoughtless drivel. To all the GPZ haters. "DON'T BUY IT" and tell your story walking down the road. Steve has done a great job at keeping this forum on the track of a thoughtful and meaningful exchange of ideas. People should be free to express criticism and opinion, but do it nicely. As Pink Floyd says: "I mean good manners don't cost nothin do they, eh" (Us and Them)

Most definitely Detectorist and familiarity with the machine. I owned a GPX for 2 years, putting in maybe 80 hrs and considered myself proficient. As it turns out, not by a long shot. I went to Moore Creek where I could detect 10 to 12 hrs a day, every day. I had the time and opportunity to experiment. If I could get a repeatable tone, I tried different settings, different sweep speeds etc. I learned more as a detectorist and about my detector in that first week than I had learned in the previous 2 years. I learned more about low and slow, listening for the faintest threshold change. Steve was there when I left a double blip tone in the ground because it sounded like a nail. Fortunately I went back because I got a similar tone that was gold. Low and behold, a quarter ounce nugget that had the classic double blip deep rising tone that is generally a big old rusted nail. No offense to the stalwarts that detected Moore Creek, but the best machine and coil combos money could buy, still did not guarantee results. Plenty of gold was found in holes that other people abandoned. The weekly tote board results generally had 2 or 3 people finding more than 75 percent of the gold. I saw many people with state of the art machines detect for a full week and not find gold. My point is to reiterate what Steve and others are saying. A $10,000 machine in the hands of a hobbyist probably won't beat a dedicated prospector with his tried and true, beat up ole trusty steed. I sold my GPX and worn out a coil cover on my 2300 for decent results, and now trying to justify the jump to 7000. Maybe you guys want to crowd fund me on the purchase and live vicariously for the results. I'm just saying, one of us would be really happy with the deal, everybody else, not so much.