tboykin

DD coil, increase SAT and lower sensitivity. You can also dig a few up, put them on top of the ground, and GB to the combination of dirt and hot rocks. The XGB should take care of the rest. As previously mentioned in some ground a PI is the only option.

Only once! Mostly I made good friends and ate great food. And got challenged to drink a very strong spirit made from fermented peppers.

Through faulting or erosion the dirt is exposed to air and water and rusts. It rusts due to high amounts of iron/pyrite (mineralization). If you dig deep enough in many of my spots you hit "real" bedrock. Where I found these two pieces the bedrock is serpentine. I've found that clay can be decomposing bedrock in some areas, and holds gold. Other places there is nothing in or below the clay layer.

Been there, seen it first hand... but from the miner's perspective. In a short amount of time they can move an entire mountain. It's complete chaos. Some garimpeiros are solo or operate in small teams with detectors. But most work for bigger outfits. Claims are protected with lethal force. I think it's possible foreign countries could be driving some of this illegal mining since the gold reserves in Brazil rival some in certain African countries. And once you get away from the cities the country is much less policed. I remember a few times on my trip down there where I felt "on my own" and in a foreign country that is not a good feeling!

I am curious to see if anyone has gotten the “I can’t use my built-in (“in-built” for you Bruces and Sheilas) speaker with this $6000 detector” fixed by sending it in for repair. As a former industry pro it would be extremely satisfying to be able to flip the tables and become the squeaky wheel customer. But my guess is it’s a design flaw with the circuit.

What I noticed was that it would start out solid, then after about 1 minute the threshold would start wobbling and spitting. Sometimes it would calm down for a stretch and then start up again. An hour is a lot of missed targets for me. For now I am stone-aging it with wired headphones. I would like to know if people have gotten this issue fixed by sending it in for repair but that is a different thread.

Yes I owned a GPZ for about a year. I sold it to a good friend. I miss the wireless speaker, and harness/stick setup. But the GPX is light enough most of the time to not need it. I lucked out when I got the GPZ and got into some bigger gold that helped pay it off faster! Its frustrating not being able to use the speaker on the GPX. I wish Minelab had tested it more but for now I’ll just use headphones.

Edited to fix, sorry! .8g (grams) I didn't weight the other one since I gave it to my buddy before I got home.

I took a quick day trip to an old hydraulic mine since the itch needed scratching. It was 22f (-5c) when I put my backpack on and started up the gut. Definitely a long Johns and layers day! First signal was a little .8g nugget about 5 inches down. I was focusing on little islands of red dirt the old timers missed. This nugget was sitting right on bedrock. The steep ground was frozen solid so it made climbing very hazardous. I had to cut steps into the hillside to make progress in some areas. And when it got above freezing in the afternoon the ice turned to slick mud. I ended up on my ass several times which I’m sure the animals enjoyed. Second nugget was shallow and encased in a sheet of frozen red dirt! I had to use my pick to break it into pieces to find the nugget like a piece of conglomerate. First time finding an ice nugget! This one was smaller and rougher. Found with the GPX6000 in Josephine County, Oregon.

Finally cleaned and weighed my nuggets from last year. A little over 1/4 ounce, not too bad for only going out a few times. GPX 6000 and EQ800.

Yes. Had plans for that along with some other things but I couldn’t convince White’s to pursue them. Hopefully someone will take up the reigns at Garrett! Or Minelab. Since it’s not patented it should be open for more development.

The thing is- to my knowledge XGB was not patented. Was it even trademarked? I would love to see this technique implemented in other detectors as well. One thing I ran into when I took over product dev was that the engineers were used to testing detectors in very controlled situations. Makes sense for controlling for variables. But the real world is uncontrolled. Swinging a detector over planted targets in familiar ground is not the same as sleeping with the detector in the bush while trying to bring home some natural gold. I too hope Garrett continues with some of the tech in the 24k, and I hope they also licensed the hybrid half sine tech as well.

It has to do with the way the XGB ground balance works. When we were designing it I paid special attention to variable ground since that’s where most detectors struggle. And also where a lot of specimen gold lives! So I came up with the idea of a ground balance that had a variable Q (similar to a parametric audio equalizer). The 24k tracks multiple ground points simultaneously and is able to open up the ground point to include a range of VDI’s instead of it being just one number. Luckily Jacob the engineer had some audio background like me and was able to make this happen. I made a special pit at White’s to test this that was a mixture of black sand (Low ground point) and red cinder (high). I should have taken some pics of me out there in the noon sun with a shovel playing ground chef. None of the other vlfs on the market worked in that pit! The engineers made me several dev units where I could tweak the ground balance speed and Q width. I took the machine to dozens of locations across the Western Hemisphere to make sure it was dialed in right. Might be interesting to develop that further and allow advanced users to do the same. Even though I was only working in the industry for 3 years I’m really glad this detector kept going after I got out. Couldnt save Whites but at least there are people out there finding gold with a detector that wouldn’t have gotten made without me pushing for it. Everybody else wanted to make more MX Sport variations. Since I’m not under NDA anymore let me know if you have any more questions.

I've been looking at offices for my expanding business. A little out of my price range but maybe I could rent my old office. It does make me sad - I had a lot of great memories there! https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/1011-Pleasant-Valley-Rd-Sweet-Home-OR/24629050/

I wear regular clothes with GoreTex pants and coat on top. Have prospected in pouring rain all day at less than 40 degrees. No gloves, they just get wet and keep my fingers from feeling around in the dirt. Layers are good because when you get wet (and you will get wet, either from rain or sweat) your body heats the inner layer. Same principle as a wet suit. Keep moving and you will be fine. Glad to see another adventurer who is willing to brave the elements!

I’ve heard of nuggets being found up the East Fork of the San Gabriel. Some research will tell you specific areas to target. Doing research is half the fun, so I won’t give you any more info than that. Lots of good history close to town and I used to love exploring the old mines when I lived there.

Some of you blokes might need to lay off the tinnies while you wait for delivery.

Sounds like your smaller truck has a switched 12v that turns off with the ignition. My last trip to NNV I brought a solar panel and battery bank. It kept both the GPX and EQ800 charged, plus my phone. Still took about 6-8 hrs to charge but at least it left my truck and camper batteries alone. I would recommend this since it leaves less chance of draining a weak vehicle battery. Nothing worse than a no start situation when you are the only person in a 50 mile radius. At a popular spot like Rye Patch this will be less of an issue though! One other thing to consider is starting batteries don't like being drained down. Deep cycle batteries are fine with it. So if you end up with dual battery system or decide to bring a second battery, a deep cycle is the way to go.

Some trips I go specifically to find gold. Others I go to share an experience with other people. Since switching to Minelabs - and more importantly, learning more - I find gold 9 trips out of 10. The way I look at it is if my hobby is somewhat self-sustaining financially it’s already better than most other hobbies. How many thousands did I spend on boats, lost tackle, and gas on my fishing hobby? Definitely a lot more than freezer full of fish. I’m past the point of being excited over finding crumbs of gold. They are a consolation prize at best, and proof that the ground is worth detecting. When I find something I can feel the weight of and pays for my gas I am pretty stoked. I’ve been lucky to bring home a few bigger pieces and those really get my heart going. One thing I’ve been spending more time chasing is good memories. And sharing those with other people is sometimes worth more than the gold we find.

Gorgeous. How far do you think the big one traveled from the vein?

I’ve run into this since I am probably a little rough with pushing the coil into bushes and scraping the ground. On really steep hillsides I will actually twist the coil on purpose to get a more comfortable swing off to one side of my body. I mostly have been detecting wooded hillsides for pocket gold so it probably won’t be an issue in the desert or flatlands. It’s a minor annoyance along with the little rubber headphone cover popping off and the EMI sensitivity. Especially considering how easy the GPX makes it to find gold compared to other machines I’ve used.

I spent about ten hours total detecting with my GPX6000 in Southern Oregon. Got three small bits for 1.2 grams total. Sensitivity is great, ground balance is a little finicky with the mono coil, but holy balls the EMI was bad. The way they hooked up the speaker made it so I had to use headphones. Maybe the amp is too close to the sensitive stuff, but as soon as I switched to the speaker the machine started going off. Lucky for me it was only 101 degrees so I just wore the nice black headphones. The chunkier .7g piece was at least six inches down! The GPX did sound off on some of the andesite and hotter serpentine but the ground is murder for most machines so I am fairly happy. It’s a keeper as long as they can fix the speaker issue. “Just don’t use it” is not going to work for me in bear country. But the second day the EMI was not as bad when I checked the speaker.

I could not use my GPX yesterday with the speaker due to noise. To test this I sat down, and let the detector hum without any movement for about a minute. Then I switched to the supplied Bluetooth headphones. The pitch variation was worse with the speaker. At about 101F it was too hot for headphones but I was left with no choice. I repeated this test today earlier in the day and the speaker seemed to effect the threshold less. My guess is that the amplifier and speaker windings are inducing noise somehow. I will write Minelab about this issue since after spending six thousand dollars I would really like to use the speaker. However since today I could not replicate the issue, it may only happen during bouts of bad EMI or maybe the component just needed some time to bed into the pcb. If the issue persists I will send it in for repair or request a solution. I am very surprised Minelab released this detector with the issue since I’ve seen others report the same thing.

The EQ800 is the best option for the area you described. It can somewhat discriminate iron, which PI machines cannot. However it may be that gold is too fine or disseminated to pickup on a detector. In this case I would use the detector as more of a mineralization detector, and listen for ground responses on unprocessed ore. It may turn out that these samples can be crushed to reveal fine gold within. It takes a lot of research to find sites with big enough gold to detect, sparse enough trash to detect it, and also have it shallow enough to not require scraping with a dozer. But many hard rock mines had fine enough gold that it would be difficult to find with even the most sensitive detector.

The magnets I use on my picks are rated in the hundreds of pounds of pull force. They can pull nails out of the ground as long as they aren't deeper than 1-2". I think the 13lb force would be enough to stick on your fridge and that's about it.