Lanny

On 8/11/2020 at 5:47 PM, Jim_Alaska said:

minus 55-60 F below zero has to be experienced to believe. I lived it in Alaska for 37 years. Fortunately it does not last long. I'll take a few days of heat any time. I am in Northern California now and we have had temps at and above 100-F for the last two weeks. But winter and rain is coming.

At least here I can detect and mine year round. In Interior Alaska it is only between three and four months, you have to work fast.

Fast work, and long, long days as well in order to get it all done before the big freeze, and then it's dream of warmer places until the big thaw.

I can really relate Jim to your former Alaska experience, and I too enjoy the warm weather when we can get it.

All the best,

Lanny

Return to the Gold Fields.

It couldn't have been almost nine months since we'd hit the goldfields, but that's what it turned out to be. Yes, Co-Virus has made for one crazy year, with various places requesting outsiders not to travel due to health concerns and worries about hospital beds in small communities, so we respected those concerns.

Not long ago however, we got the green light to return, so we packed up the detectors (my wife and I), the gold pans, some grub and camping essentials, and headed off for the mountains.

It was an overcast day, with the threat of rain, and the closer we got to the mountains, the darker the clouds. The heavens opened briefly; it rained enough to use the windshield wipers, which turned out to be a great way to clean the bugs off the glass.

We went through the high mountain pass, and the rain stopped as we headed down the other side. The sun came out, the sky turned a welcome cobalt blue as a few puffy clouds floated across that clean ocean of air.

When we got to camp, I didn't know what condition I'd find our trailers in, but as it turned out, they were all tight and dry after our long absence, no insects or mice, no bears had broken any windows or flattened any tires, all was well. With the camp in great shape, and with the beautiful weather, it was shaping up to be a fine day.

We went to visit some friends that have a large mining concession (think of any of the large reality show mining operations you've watched on TV). After years of working with them, they call me their mining consultant. (I always get a laugh out of that.) They have me check the bedrock in their placer mining cuts with my detectors to see how effective their recovery methods are. However, we were told the previous week there wouldn't be any open bedrock to check, so we were planning on doing some general prospecting where there was a large gold rush in the 1860's.

We returned to camp that night after a great visit, but with no expectations of any gold chasing other than what I've described above.

Early the next morning, everything changed.

I looked at my messages, and there was one from the mine owner. He told us to get our butts out of camp quick and get to the mine site as soon as we could. He had some bedrock open, and he needed a test done to see if it would be worth using a new piece of equipment he'd recently bought.

My wife and I flew around camp gathering all of the items we'd need to check bedrock: pry-bars, sniping tools, buckets, gold pans, sucker bottles and metal detectors. We loaded up a lunch, as well as lots of liquids to stay hydrated in the summer sun.

We fired up the Cummins diesel, and we headed off for the seventy minute trip to the mine. We had to be careful on the road as the logging trucks have made quite a mess with several bad spots where the ground has turned to a soft mess that will drop the front of your truck deep and fast into a nose dive if you're not careful, so slow and careful driving got us through safely.

Summer here in the north is beautiful, with green growth everywhere, large forest animals in abundance, as well as a profusion of songbirds, hawks and eagles, with the whole scene punctuated with a riot of colourful wildflowers.

We got to gold camp, looked at their morning cleanup and saw a beautiful collection of nice nuggets, the largest two were both over an ounce and a half, with a 27 gram nugget being the next biggest. Lots of nuggets in the six to seven gram range, and a whole collection of meaty pickers as well.

We idled the diesel along the mining road down into the excavation, then parked in a deep ravine and unpacked our gear.

I set my wife up with the Gold Bug Pro which is an excellent detector for shallow gold on bedrock, and I set up my Equinox 800 with the small sniper coil.

I sent my wife to one end of the finished excavation, and I went to the other end.

A geologist was also there. He's retired now, but he'd just bought a shiny new Minelab 2300, and I helped him ground balance it and gave him a few solid detecting tips for how to work such a spot. However, he didn't have a super-magnet with him on a pick or a wand, and I knew that would be trouble as the bedrock was iron-hard, and there were bits of bucket and blade everywhere because of that.

He only detected for about half an hour, and then he quit as he'd had enough. The 2300 is supersensitive. Moreover, it doesn't have discrimination, so he was hearing every tiny sliver and piece of waste steel, and he had no way to remove them from his target zones.

My wife and I were detecting with discrimination, a necessity on the first sweeps of the bedrock due to the countless bits of steel, and not long after we started, my wife gave a shout and asked me to hurry up to her end of the cut.

She had two small nuggets she'd found with the Bug Pro, her first ever nuggets with that detector! I decided to poke around a bit in her area and soon I'd recovered seven small pieces in the half gram to gram range. My wife abandoned the detector and decided she'd do some panning as there were little gutters of dirt in the low spots where the excavator buckets could not scrape due to the hardness of the bedrock. From her first pan on, she had gold in every pan. It seemed impossible, but she just kept hitting the gold.

One of the miners came along then, grabbed a pan, and he joined her. He got the same results as she did. (He and several other mine workers had tried all of the bedrock up to where my wife was working with their pans, but they hadn't been able to find the gold.)

I went back to detecting the remainder of the bedrock away from my wife's lucky strike, but I could only find hot-rocks and countless slivers of steel, no gold whatsoever.

After three hours of careful scanning with the detectors, I went back to where my wife was working. The miner was still there panning as well. He wasn't quitting! They were still on the gold. There was a sticky, yellow clay that was holding the gold in small cracks in the bedrock, from the top of the cracks all the way to the bottom.

I took over the Gold Bug Pro and went to work. Steel, steel, gold. Steel, steel, gold. I soon had a nice rattle of nuggets in the bottle. My poor super-magnet kept growing a thick beard of steel shavings that I had to keep cleaning off, but once I'd quieted an area, I could hear the soft, sweet sounds of the gold underneath.

I hit a spot that had a broad sound, not the spiked signal of a single target. I've experienced this before as the detector is responding to a collection of flakes and small pickers all nestled together. So, I dug down into the V's in the bedrock where I hit those broad responses, and sure enough, when I panned the material, lots of small flakes and little pickers of sassy gold!!

We pulled out 13.7 grams, the miner panned out another 4 grams himself, so it was a fun day.

The next morning, the mine owner moved in a vacuum truck, a pressure washer, a 1.5 inch pump to create a slurry, and they went to work on that bedrock in all of those little gutters because of the test results we'd provided. We'd found the sweet spot for them, and they made a nice haul that they otherwise would have missed.

It was a great day, and we came home with some nice gold.

All the best,

Lanny

Nice video, thanks.

All the best,

Lanny

Sweet looking find. I've found them like that as well, cemented in a matrix.

As to your question about detecting nuggets, I've found far more on bedrock (or the pay-layer riding on the bedrock); however, there have been exceptions, and in the areas I hunt the most, that's been due to glacial action where there have been multiple deposition events, with some deposits carrying gold while others were not.

The nuggets not on bedrock were in distinct pay-layers above the bedrock.

Other exceptions have been where there were massive out-washes from a blown channel where large boulders tumbled out with the breakout, and the nuggets tucked in behind the boulders, and these deposits were nowhere near the bedrock.

As others have done, I've found nuggets loafing on hillsides, as well as salted in among avalanche debris that tore gold loose as it rocketed down the mountainside, and I've got some nice ones that were left on hardpan or a false bedrock far above the true underlying bedrock. (Glaciers do crazy things when they're packing gold around.)

However, the largest take has always been from bedrock, and that includes while dredging or metal detecting.

All the best, and congratulations on your finds,

Lanny

Lake Placers #2

To get back on track with my lake placers stories, we fired up our detectors and asked the miners where we could start hunting. They laughed, and they laughed--loudly! They told us to have at it, but we’d get nothing but grief. They'd seen too many people get skunked in that goldfield over the years while trying to even get their detectors to operate at all, or to have it “squeak” on some gold (as they put it). Anyone who’d ever tried to detect had always been shut down by their severe ground.

The reason for the failure of nugget shooters was the insanely hot bedrock. It ate detectors for lunch. (As they told us this, their comments were heavily dosed with colourful language. In fact there’s most likely a tapestry of profanity still floating over that lake!)

Knowing I had a premium PI with me, and that they’d likely never seen one in action, I thought of trying to explain the good points of the Minelab, but I stopped myself and went hunting gold instead.

In an earlier story in these placer tales, I mentioned the decomposed bedrock pockets peppering the big sheets. When I went to look at one closer, I found it was very wet. I wasn't sure how that would affect the detector, but I scanned a patch of it anyway, and right quick I got a nice mellow tone. One quick scoop and I had the target.

I quartered the sharp little chunks of bedrock out of the scoop and soon had a sassy, 1.5-gram nugget. That find got the claim owner's attention! They said, “Come over here with that machine.” They then walked me over to another similar area and told me to try that spot. So, I tried it and got a signal right away. However, this time I never found a nugget but only one maddening false signal after another. They soon tired of watching, and shaking their heads in a “we told you so way”, they started mining again. Their body language said that the first find was nothing but a fluke. To them, the rest of my time would be wasted digging, as their black graphite schist bedrock was, once again, too hot for detectors.

So, the miners left us to our detecting on the bedrock. Nonetheless, my mining buddy was frustrated with how useless his broken wrist was. It depressed him to be on virgin detecting ground while equipped with a machine that could handle the ground, but he could do almost nothing about it! Yes, he could swing the detector, but no digging, running the pick or sorting material in the scoop by himself.

So, we worked together, he worked the coil, and I did the rest. By working together, we could help each other have some fun.

We headed back to that loose bedrock where I’d found the gold. I’ve found through the years that if a trap worked well enough to grab and hold one piece of gold, some extra dedication on the same spot could produce another chunk as well.

To describe the spot a bit more, the excavator had left a crumbled rise of about two feet. I started detecting up and down that little hump. Pretty soon, right near the top, I got a nice signal! It was that telltale Minelab, low-high-low tone. Although not as strong as the first signal, it was nice and sweet. With the signal close to the surface, it made it easy to get the target in the scoop. A nice, bumpy one-gram nugget was in the scoop.

As I continue my lake placers series, I’ll reveal the beautiful things hidden in those solid sheets of red-hot bedrock, and later I’ll let you in on what we found in the miners’ test piles as well.

All the best,

Lanny

Another great series of posts, truly enjoying the ride, helps beat the winter blues, and I'm learning helpful new information as well while I wait for the ground to thaw and the snow to leave from my gold fields.

Thanks for your time and dedication.

All the best,

Lanny

Lake Placers #1

(This story continues on after we heard the story of the giant nugget found on the rock pile just below the dam of the lake.)

So, after we’d jawed with the rock-pile owner some more, we decided we’d better head up the trail to check out the lake placers. The gold runs up both sides of the lake, so we picked a side and headed on up.

We weren’t in much of a hurry that day. My partner had a badly broken wrist, complete with a new cast plastered on just before we’d left home. So, we were taking it easy.

While we hiked along, we enjoyed one of those gorgeously long, northern summer days: the warm, calm ones perfect for bottling, only to be opened much later on a frosty, winter’s day. Moreover, as it was summer, the sunlight that far north would last well after eleven or so, and then a lengthy twilight would continue after that.

Enjoying that extended summer sun, we walked along the lake and saw the cutthroat, true ambush experts, rising in a feeding frenzy, hammering the various insects floating the surface of Nature’s fast food outlet. That healthy population of fish was likely why the locals had never un-dammed the creek at that place.

As we continued up the lakeshore, a breeze periodically stirred the surface of the water, yet calmed quickly, allowing the trout to continue their feeding.

Along the borders of the lake, the willows waited patiently for a new breeze to whisper up the shore the news of our coming.

At last we reached the claims we had permission to hunt. There was evidence everywhere of shallow surface mining that had exposed the bedrock in great sheets. That bedrock was mostly iron-hard, as the D-8 Cat that had just finished scraping was only able to cut into small sections of rotten bedrock. The rest of the bedrock was a hardened nightmare. Even the excavator had skipped and skidded across most of it as well. This had frustrated the placer miners as the area was known for its coarse gold.

To backtrack a bit, about a month earlier, I’d been on a gold-scouting expedition. I’d made the trip with an in-law of one of the miners. The bedrock spot I’ve just described was the first place he and I visited.

The placer miners, a couple of brothers, were then working on one of the lake claims, but when they saw us, they shut down to chew the fat. That’s the way of the remote north, any visitors or news from the outside is a welcome break. So, we yakked and caught them up on events.

As we talked, one of the brothers started to clean the header on the wash-plant's sluice. He lifted the screen off the box and scraped material into a pan.

All at once he stopped his scraping, reached into the header-box and tossed something straight at me. I was caught completely off guard by the toss, and the only thing that saved me was reflex.

Luckily, I caught what he chucked, and it was heavy! In my hand was an ugly black rock. And as I looked, I thought whatever that ugly was, it wasn’t gold, because who in their right mind would chuck a nugget to me while I was standing on a huge pile of cobbles, especially a stranger?

I told the brother that whatever he’d tossed me, it sure didn't look like gold. Pulling me up short, he told me it was a gold nugget. I was stunned.

He then took out a pocket-knife and very gently scratched away at one blackened corner. A gnarly black scale flaked off, and I was a believer! The glint of gold was unmistakeable. Furthermore, the nugget weighed in at over an ounce and a quarter, and it was solid gold, no quartz.

As to how they cleaned the black gold from that claim, they’d put it in a vinegar bath overnight. The next day, some slimy sludge was all that was left of the black coating. The resulting gold was a beautiful, buttery yellow.

In Lake Placers # 2, I’ll tell how we learned to hunt the nuggets on that claim.

All the best,

Lanny

Prospectors One and Two

Hello to all, just a quick little story from a past prospecting adventure.

Two budding prospectors visited the claim one sunny day. (Both show quite a bit of promise as they both have a knack for finding gold.) They were working a patch of fractured bedrock that had produced consistent flake-gold and pickers the previous summer. Moreover, they had spent time with me on previous trips at that spot, and they'd learned a few tricks about how to find the gold.

Well (I’ll refer to them as number one and number two), number one really went to town cleaning off the overburden on that bedrock: the cobbles, the clay, the boulders, the gravel; he went hard at it, working a couple of feet right down to the bedrock. It was a lot of sweaty work with chunky boulders jammed tight into bedrock pockets. After he'd removed all the bigger stuff, and had scraped the bedrock down, he ran his dirt through a little sluice. He had a nice catch of bright-yellow flake gold, with a few chunky pickers.

Not long after that, prospector number two came along with his detector, and he asked number one if he could detect the bedrock he'd just cleaned off. Number one said he had no problem with that, as he'd carefully cleared the cracks and scraped everything clean. He told number two to go ahead. So, number two ran his detector along the bedrock and got a nice signal that really screamed! It was a sassy nugget, right on the bedrock’s surface, covered in some muddy clay.

Well, number one really worked the bedrock hard after that. He cleared off another four feet of bedrock, really making the dirt and rocks fly! He took his time to make sure the bedrock was super clean, as well as removing any clinging clay. As he’d done before, he had a nice take of gold in his sluice-box. Prospector number two came along yet again with his detector and asked permission to check out the new workings. Number one, confident he hadn’t missed any gold, let him detect.

Prospector number two ran his detector over the bedrock and got a nice soft signal in a crevice. Number one was getting nervous. Prospector two got out his pick and broke off some perpendicular sheets of bedrock and scanned again: the signal was much louder. He cleaned the crevice out, popped the signal on the coil, along with a little water to remove the clay, and there was a buttery-yellow, pumpkin-seed-sized nugget! To say that number one was not a happy camper is gross understatement (things went flying, dark words exploded with vibrant colors, the wild animals fled, etc.). Nevertheless, prospector one was a good sport about it, and they both had some great stories to tell back in camp that night. (Prospector one invested in a metal detector soon after that.)

All the best,

Lanny

Thanks for all the pictures.

All the best,

Lanny

Beautiful find, and congratulations on going back with a different focus, which in this case, made all the difference.

Plus, I hope your return trips (with an increased focus) to the same area produce some more nice gold for you as well.

All the best,

Lanny

JP, thanks for the tips and explanations on 

1. Keeping the coil level
2. Maintaining a good “Range of Motion”

Always great to have the reminders plus the extra instruction to enhance my understanding of what's going on/what I need to pay attention to.

Nicely done, thanks for doing this, and all the best,

Lanny

Congratulations Steve on your forum's increasing popularity.

I believe it's a direct correlation to the man in charge due to his knowledge, attitude, and sincere approach in being friendly and helpful in all ways possible. Moreover Steve,  you do it while keeping an open mind to deliver honest evaluations of equipment brands based on your sincere,  personal evaluations, not brand-name hype or band-wagon promotions.

All the best,

Lanny

Thanks for the story and the pictures Mitchel, enjoyed reading your gold-hunting/meteorite tale enhanced by your photographs.

All the best,

Lanny

Really enjoyed reading your story, and enjoyed the included information on using the signal enhancer as well. 

Nice pictures too, ones that get me itching to get detecting when winter lets go in my neck of the woods.

Travelling around a bit right now, and I might get a chance to swing a coil with a nephew of mine in Arizona this month, which might help ease the winter blues somewhat.

All the best, and thanks again for your post,

Lanny

It's sad there's places with good gold that due to government red tape, the gold stays in the ground.

All the best to those of you that can still chase the gold in your neck of the woods,

Lanny

Thanks for posting the pictures and the explanations, nice to know you're just out having a good time at a spot that holds a lot of memories for you.

All the best,

Lanny

The Stretch Nugget

Now, this is a nugget story that’s a bit different from the average hunt. It took place in a steep canyon with a black slate bedrock rim. The top of the rim was about eighty feet above the cold, glacial river.

As for nugget hunting in that location, the pitch of the canyon walls is about sixty-five to seventy degrees. In contrast, trying to climb rock walls of forty-five degrees is risky, but when an even steeper slope is littered with loose, jagged bedrock slabs and cobbles, it’s worse. So, if I had to climb that 65-70-degree slope, it would be mighty sketchy.

A bit earlier in the day, I’d been detecting a bench above the rim and had found a pile of square nails, along with some rarer targets: big bore black powder rifle slugs with grease grooves; and round, rifled, black-powder pistol balls. But, no gold.

However, even without any gold, the day had been exciting. I’d been spooked twice by the loud snapping of twigs close behind me: the first time, two mule deer, and the second, a cow moose.

The day was hot and sunny. It was a glorious summer day with a gentle mountain breeze that let the pines and firs gossip lightly back and forth in the deep greens of the forest. Breaking the spell of calm, an angry squirrel scolded me for being too close to his tree.

Refocusing on my detecting, I took another look at the ground I was working. Stretching before me was a massive area of hand-stacks left by the Old-timer’s from the 1800’s. Piles of cobbles and boulders littered the bedrock in every direction. The bedrock itself was heavily fractured in places, but in others, it was smooth and iron hard.

Having already worked some of that fractured bedrock next to the lip of the canyon, I knew those traps held things very well, like the trash I’d found earlier. So, hoping to find some gold, I poked along the rim detecting some more. As I worked, I noticed areas where the old-timers had pushed overburden off the canyon edge, probably while setting up sluice runs. Suddenly, it struck me that stray gold might have either been pushed or washed over the edge as well.

However, I couldn’t detect my way down that steep slope to look for targets. That slope was a minefield of loose material and razor-edged slabs of black slate. So, I walked along the rim to where I knew an abandoned road would take me down to the river.

Hitting the river bottom, I strolled along inspecting the cliff face. I noticed high up a patch of river-run clinging to an out-thrust of bedrock, not far below the rim, directly below where I’d worked earlier.

Detecting my way upslope, I came up with the usual trash as I tried to get to the out-thrust. I constantly slipped and slid in that loose, steep material. At one point, after losing my footing, I reached out with my free hand as I rocketed downslope, only to get a quick gash in the meaty part of my palm.

However, I kept at it and cut some steps into the slump below the bedrock out-thrust, and at last I had a toehold. Taking advantage of it, I arced the detector around as far as I could from side to side. I hit a couple of targets, but they were junk: the head of a large square nail, and the tip of a smaller one.

Hacking more steps, I moved ever higher. Then, to help me reach the rest of the way to my chosen spot, I extended the detector shaft to the max to get my little mono coil as high above me as possible.

At the top of that stretched out swing, I got a scream that sounded a lot like iron close to the surface. But, to see what it really was, I hacked some new footholds and moved up a bit more.

Stretching carefully, I soon had the signal in my scoop (only several tablespoons of material were in it), the dirt taken from some crumbled bedrock hanging onto that out-thrust.

After a bit of shaking, quartering, and sifting, I had a sassy 2.25gram nugget in my hand. It was quite flat, yet curved and crinkled all along one edge (likely why it made such a racket). That piece of gold, my stretch nugget, was just the right shape to get itself flipped up and over the riffles of a sluice.

All the best,

Lanny

On 12/24/2018 at 11:46 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

This is all based on an assumption people make - that more frequencies are better. Are they? Why? Other than advertising, what makes anyone think that?

There is no reason to compare items at close frequencies. Comparing 10 khz and 12 khz is a waste of time and processing power. What you want to do is compare the targets and ground at a few widely differing frequencies. That way you see what happens that is different at say 4 khz and 32 kHz. That difference or lack of difference gives you extra data to work with. And as Minelab points out in the article about Multi-IQ the more interesting question is how few frequencies are needed to get useful information. And that seems to boil down to two or three.

"'How many simultaneous frequencies?' you may ask, wondering if this is a critical parameter. Minelab has been carrying out detailed investigations into this in recent years. Just as you can color in a map with many colors, the minimum number to differentiate between adjacent countries is only 4 – a tough problem for mathematicians to prove, over many years. Similar to the map problem, it’s perhaps not the maximum number of frequencies needed to achieve an optimum result, but the minimum number that is more interesting. When it comes to frequencies in a detector, to cover all target types, how the frequencies are combined AND processed is now more important, with the latest detectors, than how many frequencies, for achieving even better results."

 

My assumption always when dealing with frequencies and what is processed versus what is transmitted goes like this.....

Manufacturer claims multiple frequency operation, simultaneous or near instant sequential, I don't care.

They state a number of frequencies.

I then assume that out of the frequency range mentioned, that at least two or more frequencies are being received and compared at the processing level to justify the claim of multifrequency. Just exactly what frequencies are being processed and exactly how they are being compared.... I do not expect any company to tell me other than in vague terms.

That's it. That way I stay calm while others try and divine the magic. And with that I leave the subject to better minds than mine.

Truly great summation Steve, and thanks for your work and research to clarify my understanding of what's going on with Multi-Frequency detectors. Outstanding post!

All the best,

Lanny

On 12/24/2018 at 8:49 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

The why of it is simple - you are reading things into the careful gaps Minelab leaves in their advertising. I am not reading it the way you are, and so I am not offended because I do not feel I am being mislead. You are reading something else into it and feel unhappy because you feel you have been mislead somehow. It all boils down to debating perceptions of what you think the advertising means as compared to what is really going on under the hood. Since you don't 100% know what is going on under the hood, you just don't know.

All detectors are transmitting on at least one primary frequency and many harmonic frequencies. This can be determined with a scope and if you count harmonics it is just a matter of picking a number you want to advertise when it comes to transmitted frequencies. You have no idea how many are being processed unless you know the processing algorithms.

This back and forth with Minelab and the others has been going on for years. Garrett picked 96 frequencies for a Garrett Infinium ad as a direct poke at Minelab. How many people thought the machine was really transmitting and processing 96 frequencies based on the ad? It is all about transmitted because a PI detector does not receive and compare frequency information. Meaningless fluff, an industry insider joke.

Get your 96 frequency detector right here....

Garrett Infinium ad - 96 frequencies!

Carl Moreland weighed in with his frustration on another thread. White's even gave room over in the V3i manual, probably with Carl's input, to comment on the situation. From the White's V3i Owner's Manual, page 6:

"There is much confusion - some of it deliberate - over how many frequencies a detector actually uses, and whether multiple frequencies are truly better than a single frequency. What defines a multi-frequency detector? What do multiple frequencies really do for depth and discrimination?

A multi-frequency detector is defined as one that simultaneously—or, in automated sequence— transmits, receives, and processes more than one frequency. Some detectors have the ability to operate at one of several selectable frequencies, but they still are single frequency detectors because during operation they can only transmit and process a single frequency. The same is true of detectors that have a control to slightly vary their operating frequency to minimize interference; even though they have the ability to operate at many (slightly) different frequencies, they are fundamentally single frequency designs. Currently, all multi-frequency hobby detectors run their multiple frequencies simultaneously as opposed to sequentially; they are all characterized by having multiple processing channels in the receive circuitry. Therefore, a 2-frequency detector will have two processing channels. Spectra V3i has three independent processing channels; it is a true 3-frequency detector.

This all sounds easy, so where is the confusion? It turns out that (currently) all multi-frequency detectors create a transmit signal that is composed of digital waveforms which are designed to produce peak energies at the desired frequencies. As a side-effect, these digital waveforms also produce undesired harmonic frequencies. Lots and lots of harmonic frequencies, 10’s or even 100’s of them. These harmonics have no useful energy and are not part of the signal processing. So while we can claim to transmit many, many frequencies, we cannot claim to process or use them. Therefore, we could easily claim the Spectra V3i transmits 17 frequencies, or 28, or 39, or 55—we could get plain silly with this. And such a claim would be true, technically speaking, but since all those extra frequencies are not actually used, it would be misleading to make such a claim. White’s chooses, instead, to claim the number of frequencies we are actually using and processing. It may not sound as impressive as a 55-frequency detector, but it’s honest and accurate.

Pulse Induction (PI) detectors also utilize a digital (pulse) transmit waveform, so they transmit a tremendous number of harmonic frequencies as well. So is it fair to include pulse induction as a multifrequency technique? Not really, because PI detectors process in the time domain, not the frequency domain. So even though they use broad-band signals, they are not frequency-based detectors at all. Calling them “multi-frequency” is simply another attempt to confuse the consumer.

Once we get beyond the marketing hype, the real question is: What does multi-frequency do for depth and discrimination? The truth is, any time a detector is simultaneously transmitting more than one frequency, the transmit energy must be divided amongst the frequencies. Therefore, a single frequency detector can usually squeeze out slightly more depth than a multi-frequency design at that certain frequency. But this is an advantage only at one frequency, which tends to favor only a narrow range of targets."

 

These are old debates going back to Minelab BBS and it’s 17 transmitted frequency claim. I reference it all in my discussion at Selectable Frequency And Multiple Frequency

Anyway, interesting subject for armchair engineers and armchair attorneys. Hopefully you all get it sorted out while I am out metal detecting! 

Loved this post Steve for how it explained the Multi-Frequency confusion, many, many thanks.

All the best,

Lanny

Be Careful What You Say

Some years back, my mining buddy and I were working our off a mountain side in a 4X4. We scraped bottom with the Dodge diesel a few times, that’s how deep the holes were in the road, but as we reached the river at last, we spotted a fat Black Bear hightailing it over a hump of brush and trees on the bank

To cross the river, we threw the truck into four-wheel drive and danced across the river; the river dance where the wheels slip, the truck bounces up, then jerks down, then squirts itself sideways off the bigger rocks in the river, over and over again.

Before I continue with this story, I’d like to flashback to a place I visited on this same river where there was a whack of exposed bedrock that was being reclaimed by the brush and forest.

During an earlier river crossing in the same area, a mining buddy of mine pulled his truck over when we reached the opposite bank, and when we got out, he told me to tag along as he hiked up to the previously mentioned bedrock. He strolled up a little gulch, took out a screwdriver and went to popping coarse gold right out of crevices in the bedrock! All he had was a screwdriver!! (On a return trip, I will detect that bedrock very, very carefully.)

To get back to my original story, having crossed the river, we crawled up a rough, winding logging road on our way tom some bedrock bench claims we had permission to hunt, claims that paralleled a little trout-filled lake. The lake was man-made where the Old-timer’s had dammed the creek at a pinch point so they could flume the water to various downstream sluicing operations. After the gold rush was over, the dam got left in place as it made a great little fishery.

Walking around a bit, we discovered that during the Great Depression many squatters camped beside the lake, and foundation pits are still visible, as well as some old plank-cabins.

In addition, we saw faint signs of cabins from the 1800’s, nothing but overgrown indentations in the ground. Sadly, I was too dumb to detect around them while I was there as I was in a rush to get chasing the gold. So, I've always wondered what artifacts or coins I could have found.

Just down the lake from the old cabin sites, there was a huge rock pile. As I walked over to eyeball that rock pile, one of the miners working the adjoining claim stepped out of the brush right in front of me! (Their outhouse was located inside that brush in a little clearing.)

He asked us what we were up to, and we told him we were heading to the lake claims to nugget shoot. Hearing that, he laughed. He didn’t think much of hunting for nuggets with metal detectors, having seen too many people get skunked. He told us the ground was far too hot for finding gold that way. But, I didn’t want to tip my hand about the super-technology I was packing that could handle such ground, so I let him keep talking.

Then, he told us a story about his rock pile. It was a dragline operation, many, many years past. The former owners had worked that dragline up the narrow canyon right through the stream bottom, all the while building a huge pile of river run and broken bedrock at the head of the works. The operation was successful, and they’d netted a lot of coarse gold.

He told us that some years back, a prospector had come along and begged permission to climb his rock pile to look for specimens. As dragline rock piles are home to some of the rarest and heaviest rocks torn from the bottom of old stream channels, he gave the prospector permission. The only condition, he had to return to show and tell about what rocks he was taking with him. The rock collector was free to keep anything he found.

Now just imagine the miner's surprise when around suppertime the rock hound showed up with a nugget! Furthermore, the claim owner’s jaw hit the ground because that nugget was huge! Grabbing it to take a look at it, the miner couldn’t believe what he was seeing, or the weight he was hefting. For, even though the nugget was only a ¼ to a 1/3^rd of an inch thick, it covered the back of his hand from the base of the knuckles to his wrist joint!! And, it was solid gold, no quartz. Why was such a nugget sitting on the rock pile? Well, being flat, the nugget had made skipped over the punch-plates and screens of the dragline’s gold recovery system.

The miner went on to tell us what a tough day it was to follow the “You can keep whatever you find” promise, but he kept his word indeed.

The next couple of stories to follow talk about working the lake-shore bench placers, but those stories are for another day.

All the best,

Lanny

On 2/21/2020 at 3:27 PM, kiwijw said:

Well, well, well.....for those of you who have walked away from a ground mineralization type signal or an iffy sounding signal.....here is proof of what it just might be. Goes to show, you just never know what ANY signal is until it is in your hand. I don't care what anybody has to say about how they reckon they tell a crap signal from gold. There is no way to be 100% sure until it is in your pinkies.  

Good for you Chris.👋 You were rewarded for deciding to dig it anyway.

I have found a similar thing but it didn't "live" to the extent that yours did. It was in ground I had thrashed over the years with my GP 3000 & 4500 & all the multitude of coils for every scenario possible. This was before the Zed & X coils. I was running my stock 4500 with a new Coiltek 11" Elite mono. It was getting late in the day & I "thought" I got a very faint signal. You know the ones? More a hunch that it was a signal....or something. But there was something that pulled me up. A few scrapes & I was into hard rock. Signal was now more of a faint but positive signal. Smashing into the hard rock & getting deeper the signal kept improving. Not knowing if it was gold or not I wasn't getting over excited. It wasn't long before it would be dark & that would be in about an hours time. Only having my pick, which I was feeling sorry for, as I was down in to quite a hole now in the solid rock. I have a friend who lived not too far away & Mrs JW said she could go & see if he was home & get something a bit more heavy duty to deal with this. Turned out he wasn't home. By the time she got back it was almost dark & I had the signal now a lot more positive & I was now excited as it could be nothing else down in this rock now than gold. I was peeling out dirty quartz. I had no choice but to back fill the hole. It was a sunday night & I would have to wait a whole week before I could get back with cold chisel & hammer.

Any way....long story short.

Thats not showing what the GB 2 got from the dig out material.

This has always been my thought about what I found as it soon "pinched" out. But the fact it was coming out of solid rock & not decomposed bedrock or talus as Steve has touched on. Leads me to think it was a small load vein pocket or remnants of & not a lose specimen that had shattered or broken up. It really got me going & I thought I was going to have to approach the farmer & let him in on it & use his excavator. It didn't come to that in the end. I do repay the farmer in whisky & beer when I have a good find, of which he refuses to take but I always insist. We get on well. 😄

Awesome find for you Chris. Congrats.👍

Best of luck out there

JW 🤠 

 

JW, great story, and I loved the pictures you posted with it as well.

Thanks for the share, and all the best,

Lanny 

Chris, thanks for that great story of discovery, and thanks for the pictures too. 

What an incredible find; what a great year.

Nicely done, and all the best,

Lanny

Phase Tech, I still have my old Minelab 2100 as well. It was the first detector I could take to an area that had super hot bedrock , bedrock that simply shut down other detectors, and it allowed me to find the nuggets trapped in that bedrock. Admittedly, the bedrock was so hot that at times I could only run it on one side/set one balance, but man, did it find the nuggets.

Enjoyed your post.

All the best,

Lanny

Clay and Detecting For Gold

Well, here's the follow-up story to the last nugget find, the one found in the hydraulic wash, but this hunt presented a different challenge.

After finding the two gram nugget, and pumped by it, I decided to head for the level ground of the abandoned placer pit below the bedrock rise.

It was the late afternoon of a beautiful day. A cobalt bowl of blue sky roofed the mountains to my right and left. The air was still warm, and tiny butterflies sipped water from a fresh-water seep where vibrant green moss clung to life.

For those that have hunted abandoned placer operations, the challenges are familiar. Abandoned placer mines are mines indeed, mines that produce metal shavings, and each and every one of them sound off in the headphones.

For those that don’t know about placer cuts, they’re often large excavations into old, buried channels. To open a placer operation, where I hunt, the miners excavate down from ten to eighty feet into boulder clay or glacial castoff. For the uniformed, boulder clay was left behind by glaciers during the last ice age, all of it peppered with beefy boulders.

So, to mine the buried placer, the boulder clay/glacial castoff must be stripped. But while working with clay, it’s obnoxious, sticky, and it gets everywhere. It clings to everything, smears on everything, and if its wet, it will pull your boots off!

Nonetheless, the pit I’d chosen to hunt had been hammered hard by nugget shooters, yet a department store full of metal bits remained on its bedrock. As mute witness to this fact, my super-magnet looked like a hedgehog on steroids from checking my dig holes.

Nevertheless, I worked my way to a brownish-yellow formation of clay. Nothing but trash.

Detecting the small, clay area, I swung over a screamer of a signal. This in spite of the area having been heavily detected. The recovery however was a buts; it was a deep, square nail.

Pounding the area some more, I heard a slight break, a tiny bump in the threshold. I just about didn’t investigate, as the EMI in that area generated a lot of false signals (the newer detectors now are better at silencing EMI, but not back then). However, I carved off several inches of clay and swung once more. A sweet, repeatable signal, soft, yet distinct.

Scraping off several more inches of clay, the signal definitely grew. I dug around the signal and popped out a chunk of clay that held a signal. Checking the hole, there was still a signal there as well. I placed the chunk aside and kept digging. The sound got louder, but turned harsh, and I recovered a bent, rusted square nail.

Returning to the lump of clay, I scanned across the coil then started breaking off pieces, passing them under the coil until I isolated the signal. Sifting and sorting, I dropped bits onto the coil, and, "Whap!", the same happy sound for the second time that day.

It was nonferrous; the magnet had proven that in the early sorting. So, probing the dirt on the coil, one object finally growled back. I cleaned the clay off and had myself a sassy gram-and-a-half piece of gold, almost square in shape. I rattled it around in the bottle with its two-gram partner, and they gave off a lovely, golden rumble.

Clay is nasty stuff to work, but sometimes it holds the gold for that reason.

All the best,

Lanny

Don’t Give Up; Chase Those Signals

T'was the summer of '05. The day was cloudy. The gold had been elusive.

To provide some background, we make our summer camp in the Boreal Forests of British Columbia, Canada's most western province. Its mountains dive steeply into the Pacific Ocean, and a chain of outer islands continue the province's seaward extension. B.C. is a magnificent province (we have provinces instead of states here in Canada), with all kinds of mountains, rivers, lakes and breath-taking, endless forests. Moreover, vast tracts of genuine wilderness remain. Nevertheless, while chasing the gold, I've seen lots of wilderness in the United States and in my home province of Alberta too. To elaborate, Alberta’s eastern neighbor is British Columbia, and the two provinces share the Rocky Mountains. Yet, the province that dips its toes in the ocean has the lion's share of the gold.

Now, onward with my gold tale.

I headed off to hunt a challenging spot, one pocked with dig marks. My chosen place had a bedrock base which was the foundation of an old hydraulic operation, and nugget shooters had recently worked over the bedrock. However, there were still crevices filled with rock-hard gumbo clay, and stones.

So, taking this as a good sign of some undisturbed material, I fired up the detector and worked the exposed bedrock only to find of bits of steel, lead bullets from the 1800's, as well as modern shotgun pellets, old square nails, etc.

I went and worked the previously mentioned crevices but found only more of the same, until I found a door hinge wedged into the bedrock under 15 feet of boulder clay! How it got there remains a puzzle I couldn’t decode. Perhaps it was driven into the bedrock by the Old-timers for some reason, only to be buried by the later hydraulic operation.

I continued detecting lower down in the strata and got into some very interesting bedrock formations, but no gold. (That happens quite frequently.) I even pounded the ground with my detector where my buddy found a nice nugget in some sharply rising bedrock, but, no luck.

Hours passed. The sun was out, beating a relentless tattoo on my head and shoulders. I was hot, tired, and getting jaded! However, I saw some broken bedrock where someone had raked down and up-welling of bedrock with the teeth of an excavator bucket. I detected it only to be rewarded with the usual trash. I reached above the excavation cut far over the bedrock to a place where some over-wash from the hydraulic operation merged with the bedrock.

I got a signal.

Nevertheless, it sounded like the end of a square nail (for those that don't know, square nail tips sound sweet, like nuggets). Moreover, as it was high and hard to reach, and as I had to overstretch to get my arm to the target, I almost didn't dig it. Not the best plan sometimes.

Clearly, not digging a target is nugget hunting blasphemy, but still, I’m guilty at times. To clarify, while depressed by digging nothing but trash all day, new targets simply seem to be more of the same. So, why bother, right? This is especially true when I’m hot, tired, or have overexerted myself.

Nevertheless, I resisted the urge to quit and dug the target. I dislodged it. It moved down the hill, yet I was in a sketchy fix as I barely clung to the wall by the tips of my toes. Ignoring my predicament, I reached up with my super-magnet and pushed that dirt around, fully expecting to see the tip of a square nail on the magnet.

No nail.

Ruling out ferrous always makes things interesting, but I didn't allow myself to get too pumped, having dug a lot of lead that day as well. Yet, somewhat juiced, I reached up with my plastic scoop, but missed the target. Next, I skidded down the broken bedrock, barking one of my already tender shins, prompting a tapestry of curses that must still be woven in that vast, blue northern sky.

Remaining determined, I climbed yet again, and this time captured the signal. I worked my way down to a level spot to sift and sort the signal in the scoop. I then trickled material onto the coil and, WHAP! I heard that electronic, metallic growl.

Everyone knows lead makes the same sound, but some sixth sense prompted me this was not lead. (Ever had that sensation?) I trickled material onto the coil and poked the bits and pieces around until an agitated growl responded.

I picked the target up. The weight was sure right. Yet, it was clay-covered, looking unremarkable. I used the only liquid I had, a shot of saliva, to remove the stubborn clay. There it was, a sassy nugget. Long, in the shape of the sole of a shoe, quite flattened, but almost two grams of golden goodness. Not the biggest nugget I've found, but one I found because I didn’t give up.

All the best,

Lanny