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Current summer temp forecast for the US. I love it when people spend more time in the water loosing their precious. Some of my better bling finds...

http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=258044

Lady is an attorney. I detect on her farm occasionally (350 acres). Said she lost ring day before yesterday and thought ring was lost when removing her gloves. Ring was lost supposedly in a goat barn. Yep she is a goat farmer too. One problem though she was feeding the goats feed and hay in this portion of goat barn where she thinks she lost. I swept the entire area (detectable) using Deus detector. No luck. May go back and take rhe Nokta Impact with smaller coil and try again. Remember the movie Gone in 60 seconds. Lol

I am using the Minelab Gold Monster 1000 here in Oahu. So far I have found 16 gold jewelry items. And yes, I do dig a lot of tin foil and many small pieces of other types of metal. Most of the time, I can operate in manual sensitivity level 9 or 10. In some areas, I do have to switch over to auto sensitivity + to be able to hunt. I do have high hopes for the Equinox 800 here.

Finds first for the TLDR people. As the finds in my current primary patch dwindle in numbers from being worked heavily the past two years, I'm scouting for a new primary patch to begin working. Using the criteria and method outlined in a previous post, I've located a very good location that is certain to hold gold, silver, and more. Today will be my first time boots on the ground at that location and I'll walk the reader through it along with my scouting method. Maybe it will help someone and provide insight or encouragement. Here is the sat. view 5 playgrounds, one skate park, basketball, tennis, two soccer fields, two softball fields, two shelters, one former 1890's to 1950's church location on site. Here are my paths while scouting. Deus in red, V3i in green. So, from the sat. images there are many hot-spots to strike, and I won't try to get them all as this is a long term prospect, and I only desire to determine 3 primary things today. 1. Pressure - hunting pressure from other detectorists. 2. Trash composition and density. 3. Presence - Is there jewelry where I expect it to be. Deus gets the top spot today as it's the ideal scouting unit. Light, fast, great tones to read the trash. From the parking lot I begin and move to the skate park since it's close and can hold silver and junk jewelry along with lots of coins. Foil seems to be the primary trash along the way, and around the skate feature the aluminum kicks in - light can slaw and tabs primarily. I can hear lots and lots of coins, zinc and copper cents mostly, but a healthy quantity of dimes as well. I select a few targets I know are quarters and pennies, then intentionally sample some of the larger better sounding trash before moving on. The primary traffic flow from one side of the park to another is divided by a slight drainage ditch with the easiest pass being on either end... and people naturally take the easiest route, so I do too. Pennies everywhere! Zinc mostly, healthy dose of copper, decent selection of dimes, quite a few quarters...light trash mostly foil and ferrous bits... but I keep on moving through without digging a single target. Not interested today. Moving to the goal at the primary soccer field I work my way over to the nearest corner, then down the sideline to mid-field before cutting over to the center. Then I work my way to the opposite goal before coming around the back net. From there, and because of its close proximity to the goal, I briefly enter the playground before hitting the nearest corner of the soccer field diagonally opposite from the first corner I hit. Quarters everywhere! I decide to spend some time here sampling, cherry picking the best sounds. Within 10 minutes I found the heart pendant necklace. Jewelry confirmed, nice. So I pause, crank up the notch to 93 and take all the quarters before moving on. Erasing the notch I notice an area of the playground is different. Something was removed and not replaced. I suspect one of the super dangerous merry-go-rounds that children today get no experience or joy from used to be there. Clad everywhere....move on. Swing-set looks vintage so I check that and the mostly abandoned softball backstop area nearby. The trash picks up and bottle caps start to appear below the coil. I dug a first (for this park) beavertail ring pull, nice...a sign there might be some silver coins lurking around here. I'm getting hot by now so start thinking of shade and where to find some. It's scarce, so good places to concentrate. I mentally discriminate everything but quarters. Lots of nice signals, lots of trash and rusty caps. So far this is the trashiest area and I'm impressed it's not worse. Out of water and thirsty, I head back to the parking lot where I started, taking any quarters I come across. There are so many coins around it's obvious to me this park has never been heavily worked over by much of anyone in a long time, if ever. This place is a clad mine. Exactly how my current patch started out! I switch out units for the V3i and head towards the nearby secondary soccer field goal. I work one small corner of the goal net taking everything in a 6 foot diameter...clad and tabs mostly. Then I work right down the field towards the only clump of trees between the two fields and casually work the area randomly, still cherry picking signals but expanding the range down below zinc cents a little plus taking all nickel range targets as I find them. Getting tired and hot I'm thinking of wrapping it up so I head out to the sideline and try to find the trash zone where people sit and spectate. There isn't much trash to detect so I decide to just pick a line inside the playing field and take everything not obviously trash out of the ground. As I reached the corner of the field the silver ring shows up. Someone threw the ball into play and lost a ring perhaps. Now we're talking! Satisfied with the mission I walked off and swung over the curb area near the parking lot to get a feel for the trash there, too. With light to moderate trash, tons of clad signals, two pieces of jewelry - I have all the intel I need to know that this park is going to produce a few gold items, eventually. I'm hesitant to give 5 stars so we'll rate it at a 4 plus star park, IMO. Next hunt the tedious process of clad layer removal begins, oh, joy. Thanks for your time. Good hunting.

Hi Guys! I've been back home in Indian Harbour since Tuesday night. We still don't have electricity, but we do have a generator, which runs the air conditioning enough to keep it almost tolerable in here. Florida LP says everyone on the east coast will be back online by Sunday. We'll keep our fingers crossed, because it is HOT here. So in case anyone is curious, I have been hunting for the past 2 days (duh). Four different beaches near Melbourne, and pretty much all the same conditions. First, the hurricane DID take some of that "renourishment" sand away. I'm pretty sure the sand was up to and level with the end of this boardwalk before Irma. (photo 1) No cuts to speak of, unless you count the cuts into the dune line. Just below these cuts were where I found crusty old coins. (photo 2 and 3) With the extra sand gone, it's just a gentle slope from the dune line all the way to the water now. Very few rocks showing at low tide. (photo 4) Before, there was the dune line, then a "hump" of added sand, then a fairly steep-ish grade down to the water line. Lots of the coquina rocks were showing at low tide. (photo 5, taken about 2 months ago) I'm not finding much except very corroded clad coins, which seem to have been buried for a very long time. The oldest was a 1958 nickel. You would think with a couple of feet of sand gone, there would be lots of targets. Nope. It's like Irma came in, scraped some sand off the top, threw the rest in a blender, then dumped it all back on the beach and smoothed it down nice and flat. The only good thing I've noticed is that most of the aluminum trash seems to be gone. I was using the Infinium all the way up to the (new) foot of the dunes yesterday. I'm thinking that any gold or silver was churned up and sank even lower when the waves were taking the sand away. Those cruddy tent stakes, which I don't dig, were buried DEEP in what I think used to the be towel line. Sadly, I saw quite a few turtle eggs which had been exposed, then eaten by the feathered rats. I'm going to try to go to a good touristy beach, maybe Cocoa, Sunday. I'll let y'all know if I find anything, if you're interested. Ammie

I recently bought a new T2 classic and have been trying to use it a couple of hours every day. Today I got a weak nickel signal, fairly consistent 54-55 at an indicated 7 inches. 2 inches down was this chain in a tightly wound together mass. It is marked 14k and broken in 2 pieces as you can see (have not done acid test). Untangled the mess and loosely dropped it on the ground to get a reading, a weak and fluctuating 35 and lower......YIKES. In all truth I would not have thought twice about that weak 35, going to have to reset my thinking. Liking the T2 but I can see it will take lots of hours to be as comfortable with it as I am with my Gold Bug

I've been working the Humboldt County Fair Grounds with my F75 for awhile and getting a daily ration of pocket change from the junk but no love finding a ring. Today I was reading about you using your F75 for nuggets and in particular digging a tailing pile and digging a 22 signal that was nice and consistent. I know all gold does not read 22 but I got a nice 22 signal that was solid and up comes this little ring! I was successful because I got out of the mindset of just digging coin signals and started digging solid signals even when they are in the foil or zink range. It was you comment on digging a 22 signal that stuck and clicked for me. Thanks so Much! Tim

I came up with this crazy idea to attempt finding gold in a public park chosen by another detectorist, MontAmmie, and do it within 24 hours total hunting time. MontAmmie chose a park called Northcreek Park in an affluent section of Ankeny, IA. I've done no research on the park yet, but I know it's relatively new. I'm familiar with the area, so I dressed to fit in so as to draw the least attention...dark blue polo style collared shirt, nice graphite grey pants, new running shoes, sunglasses...not my normal detecting attire at all. Seeing the housing all around the park and all the windows, I know I'm probably going to be under somebody's eye at all times and so I need to act accordingly, like it's my neighborhood park. Today I had a bit of time to scout the park but the timing was totally awkward. I arrived at 2:30, was swinging and walking by 2:35. Immediately I was on the radar of two younger mothers at the tot-lot. I wasn't sure if they were on the phone with the police but it felt strange when they kept starring and making calls. I expect to meet Ankeny's finest before this experiment is done. The really awkward part came when school let out at 3pm, or just before. Elementary students and more than a few parents were, by the dozens, filtering through in waves. Had quite a few odd looks and very few smiles with no wave-backs. This ought to be interesting as we go forward. The soil conditions today were extremely dry and hard. This is high, well draining land and we're still struggling at the tail end of a drought. Screwdriver only because of drought conditions and curious eyeballs. I wanted to take pictures, but that too seemed awkward. I'll pass while kids are around. So I avoided the tot-lot and shelter area by a wide margin, crossing a playing field to the rear and hunting mostly at the soccer field. I recovered 5 targets total in 45 minutes. Foil, foil drink seal, a zipper, two canslaw pieces. There was very little surface trash but I went out of my way to pick it up and making it obvious while knowing that people are watching. (I picked up more trash items than I recovered today) Perhaps that'll help keep the non-emergency calls to zero. I did some probing of targets below 2-3" with the screwdriver and without attempting recovery. Large hunk of metal and canslaw. Seems the whole area has been heavily graded. There are few shallow signals and greater quantities of deep signals. Scattered iron bits in places and vast areas with no signals whatsoever. I had a 10 minute stretch where I couldn't hear anything but ground noise. This is like farm field hunting, because that's likely all it was before being developed. The most common signals were in iron to foil range. I heard a few coins down there while near the soccer field, but too deep and dry for my small screwdriver. The areas by the bathrooms and trash cans were also remarkably clean with very few signals around them. Totally different from my normal park hunts. I stepped back into the parking lot at 3:15 concluding todays scout. Today I used the Deus to move fast and feel out the place. Next time I'll bring the 15x12 sef coil mounted on the V3i to move fast and clean up the top 4-5 inches. This combo is ideal for large portions of this park, perhaps all of it. I'll do a little research on the land's history before then too. MontAmmie thought there might be sledding hills making for a good lost jewelry location, and the sledding hills can be good areas, but the reality here is less than idelal in that the largest sledding hills at this location are about a 15 foot drop over 40 feet. Those are on the East/NE border of the park. There may not be any gold here at all, and my expectations are low, but I'll keep trying because it's early in the challenge and I still need to hunt at a more low-key time. I'll get some images up after the next visit.

Brandon Neice i.e. "Dr. Tones" discusses metal detecting for gold jewelry...

I was out and about with my F75 LTD Sunday morning and found this ring. I thought at first it was junk but closer inspection revealed that it is marked " Sterling Shank" with a jeweler's mark. I had never found a ring mark Sterling Shank before so I had to research it. The band is silver and the stone mounting is silver plated. Its not a continuous band either. Its cut out at the top and the stone mounting is dropped in the notch and soldered in place. That would explain the zinc VDI reading it gave me. Researching the jeweler's mark, This ring has the ,the 1947 Vargas mark on it. Somebody lost one of grandma's rings. Link to a site where you can research jeweler marks. http://illusionjewels.com/costumejewelrymarksv.html I'm calling it treasure. HH Mike

There are so many good targets that will sound and VID as in the Zinc penny range. This pretty pendant is marked 925 sterling but is plated with 10K gold. It is in such good condition that I could not redily tell the difference between it and 14k......While I would rather it had been 14K..... I am still happy with the find. 12-35 on the CTX. It's your choice...dig or not to dig? strick

Working for a living is getting in the way of fun. I'm in a gold ring slump. Last one was the day before Christmas. We managed to get to the desert finally after nearly two years of trying. Most stuff is from locally. A friend has three ranches he lets me hunt on. The gold is hard to find....I'm just happy just to get away for the day and try and find anything to be honest. The parks are good to me sometimes. Looking forward to beaches and tops of the Sierras this Summer.. And hooking up with some of you! Happy hunting fellas.. strick

Jewelry section needs more posts. I can do that. Nothing spectacular, but he coolest thing about this post is that the lead panned out for once. I was reading some vendor reviews for an event that recently took place, an arts and crafts show, when a participant mentioned sudden high winds and a storm caused some damage. Bemoaning their's and a few other's losses got me to thinking about checking it out. So after a bit of planning I set out to search over the area and see what was left behind . It was pretty clean ground, and after three different two hour nights with occasional clad and foil, I hit onto this 7 foot area with scattered jewelry. A watch, then earring, then ring. By the third score I was so excited! Surface finds right at the base of the grass for easy picking. Whoo hooo! Cha-ching! I went home on air. Was a hell of a good time. After cleaning them up in my early Father's day gift that my boys couldn't wait to tell me about , an ultrasonic cleaner.... every one is junk. Here is my face as that progressed. The gold drought continues... thanks for nothing you cheap, starving artists! I was so bummed I took almost 5 days off from detecting instead working around the house and just cleaning past finds I don't want to tumble as I sorted them out of the buckets. Put me in a detecting funk, but we're out now. New quarter has begun! The time is near... I can smell that gold! Come to papa! Stay motivated and keep swinging.

My first quarter 2017 result are zero, ziltch, nada for gold jewelry. Never been like this before once I got some stuff figured out. I got used to finding a piece every time out, or at least every other time out. This quarter has resulted in no gold at all. My most productive sites have dried up. And its not due to competition from other hunters as i still find plenty of coins and gold range trash. Just no gold. It is not being worn by the normal patrons at these sites like before. The high price of gold has changed everything. First, people sold off due to the price. Second, they changed their buying habits due to the price. Third, the economy is depressed resulting in a further reduction in buying habits. The game has changed and I am having to learn to change with it. What were once regular patches for me have dried completely up. I'm having to do a complete reset. I know what to do though. Re focus like a laser on the critical number one key process input: People. HH Mike

I am trying to focus on ring hunting in some of the parks around here, and I'm curious what recovery methods you all use. One of the older guys I hunt with only uses a screwdriver, another an old knife... I usually bring a hand digger and cut 3-sided plugs. Probes don't seem to be too popular, but when detecting nicely manicured parks what method do you use? Probe and pop? Cut a plug? I'm hoping to some across some other technique that might not be as common, but is equally effective and doesn't mess up the grass too much.

Hi Steve, in your posts you mentioned several times that you are using the Makro Gold Racer as a go-to detector for the jewelry detecting in parks, which surprised me quite a bit since I originally bought it as a micro-jewelry detector based on advice from Tom Dankowski. could you please share a few tips on how to best utilize the gold racer for that purpose? e.g. are you greatly reducing the sensitivity to ignore the smaller (aluminum) junk, what exactly you are looking for in the signal, do you ignore the no-number-just-audio signals, etc? I also have a CTX 3030 and was wondering how you'd compare the two for this particular purpose with the goal of digging the least amount of junk and using the screwdriver method of recovery. and last question - do you ever record yourself in process of detecting/recovering? It would be super helpful to see how its being done by someone like you - there is a Russian proverb that says "its better to see one time than to hear a hundred times". thanks in advance for your time, Sergey

A Park Selection Primer for the aspiring Jewelry Detectorist – My Method Image: Urban prospecting for refined gold The jewelry detectorist is a different breed. They tend to like a challenge, a challenge to both their selves and their skills. The jewelry detectorist may also be creative, a bit stubborn, and generally think outside the box due to the elusive nature of their quarry. Certainly they have little fear of work. Compared to the average butterfly, the jewelry detectorist accepts more digging and more trash as part of the game and they often enjoy it. When a choice patch is discovered they will happily work the same park for many years by working smartly in layers. Some patches might even merit a more serious approach; dig it all to get it all – nails and up get it all! Nobody except avid historic relic hunters tend to get so extreme on a site. There is no doubt many other detectorists find jewelry, but to the jewelry detectorist that targets gold jewelry those other detectorist’s recoveries are quite often incidental in their searches and they tend to fall mostly into the large and/or high conductive range. One can verify this by (assuming the reports are truthful) looking at hundreds of annual “Best finds of the year” and “Wrap-up Annual Totals” type forum posts on any metal detecting forum – heavy on the silver; light on gold. An avid gold jewelry detectorist often targets only the low to upper middle conductivity and will find gold items regularly and lesser valued “trash” jewelry almost every trip to a patch in working progress. This primer is meant to address jewelry hunting in general and gold jewelry hunting specifically and how I’ve discovered to locate patches time and again. The intent is to help any detectorist find more gold jewelry by placing them into a “patch”. I liken it to one more piece to the Au puzzle. (Credit to Mr. Mike Hillis for inspiring me to write something hobby related and introducing to me through his writing, the term ‘patch’, which I’m adopting. Thank you.) Image 1: 14K designer wedding band recovered from a city park. Let’s get to it then. Assumption one – Generally the more quantity of jewelry a site holds the more gold that site also tends to hold. Assumption two – Gold can be found anywhere but it tends to be found more frequently in certain locations and conditions. Just like people gold is predictable, and just like people gold can surprise you. Assumption three – Adults lose the most and most valuable gold. Follow where they play, entertain, socialize. Follow the money. I also use a simple 5 stars or 5 point rating system on parks. Each factor that positively applies to a park equals one point. At 3 points a half point scheme kicks in and allows some wiggle room when filtering the best from the best. A half point is generally reserved for multiple features, special features, community events, etc. This rating system is meant to assist in field time management. In selecting a site in search of gold jewelry there are several factors that contribute to specific sites being better prospects for gold than others. These “better” parks possess several of the factors and features that positively contribute to increased loss thus increased productivity. The scope of this work will be limited in the main to those contributing factors that make one park better than another. Features within a park will be considered outside the scope of this work except when related. The four primary factors in summary: U.T.H.H. 1. Usage – All the various kinds of use currently allowed and permitted in a given park. 2. Topography – All the facts about the park’s property- size, type, elevation, grade, vegetation, layout, etc. 3. Habitat – The physical surroundings immediately adjacent to the park. This can include the perimeter of a park property. 4. History – all the past details of a park prior to establishment to present. This builds a park profile to assist in detection strategy. Usage - The current usage and allowed activities in any park is the primary consideration. The more opportunities a park has for strenuous physical exercise and/or athletic contact between groups of people the better. Parks that support large open fields favored for athletics often double as community event locations. Pay attention to your local event calendars to increase the chances of finding a prime site. A new use of parks I’m seeing more communities adopt is the summer outdoor viewing of a featured “Movie in the park” on Friday or Saturday nights complete with vendors. These events are perfect for losing stuff in the dark. Another common event in parks in my area are those community fundraising “After Five” events with live bands, alcohol, and lots of people overdressed and milling about. Often they are so packed people stand shoulder to shoulder rubbing and bumping even when not dancing. The more varied uses a park sees the better the prospects for gold. Topography -The type of terrain in a park is important. For turf hunting at least, gold tends to be found in the flats more than the hills. The land’s grade is important. Nobody is playing team sports in the hills. Large groups of people do not usually congregate in the hills either, and have less incentive to do so in the woods. Focus primarily on flat open terrain. One exception to this: hilly parks with trees and disc golf courses - gold could literally be anywhere on a disc golf course. Also, don’t get too hung up on total park size. While a large park is great for accommodating large crowds for events, many smaller parks are often better prospects when they contain a greater percentage of level open surface areas. In discussing city parks I consider small parks to be 10 acres or less. Parks around 60+ acres I consider large. Habitat – If a park were a living organism then the surrounding community is the natural habitat. In locations with few public parks the surrounding habitat becomes a more important aspect of site selection. There are certain surrounding features that positively impact a park. Any school or church that shares a property boundary with a park is notable. Any apartments, condos, or townhomes sharing a boundary with a park is notable. Single family homes sharing a property boundary are more common and are less notable than the other types of surrounding habitat except for county parks and rest-stop parks. Don’t discount the remote county parks completely though. Keep in mind the first two factors when evaluating them as a potential prospect. Other things we want to consider in our evaluation of surrounding habitat include adjacent streets, off-street parking, ease of pedestrian access, demographics, population density, and proximity of other parks, or park density. Find a park that rates highly in these aspects and one might more easily forgive a deficiency in factor one or two. History - It’s important to know as much history on a park as possible. The age, past use, past detecting pressure, current use, current detecting pressure and any historic images and maps all interest us in evaluating a park’s best potential to hold gold. Some history must be inferred, such as detecting pressure, but these days many county governments and city Park and Recreation departments list all the other facts online. In my area select parks are even provided good historical information with images and descriptions of past use. Don’t put too much weight on age of a park. The reason being is that it is possible when a park has the best of the first three factors that a 10, or even 5 year old park in the suburbs will produce more gold than a 60, or even a 100 year old park elsewhere. You gold-a think outside the box! Example Search: I have visited St. Louis for events but never been detecting there. I’ve never visited a park in St. Louis other than the Zoo. I randomly chose a city to illustrate a typical search and actually located a very promising park for anyone in the area. I’d be working it regularly if I lived within 5 miles and it was not prohibited. Image 2: Tilles Park, St. Louis potential area of interest Using Google maps I examine the city first with the map view for likely prospects. A typical search would be entered into the map search bar as: St. Louis school, or St. Louis church. These are not the only parks under consideration, but the locations of these indicators hold a promise of greater success. I generally start from the Downtown area and work outwards in pie segments looking for green shaded parks. Nearby large bodies of water always interest me so I’ll give those areas extra attention. Continuing outwards working in pie segments we note park density, park sizes, and adjacent streets and structures as the initial focus. Major roads that run along a park boundary are notable. Once a promising prospect is located I’ll switch to satellite view and zoom in, examining first images of the park itself looking for clues to the current use, and then the surrounding habitat, structures, and streets afterwards. Just this simple browsing of parks in Google Maps is a huge asset in quickly locating the best potential sites if you use a formula. With this single tool one can quickly cut out a lot of lesser quality parks with occasional random drops and hone in on the likely patches with regular or frequent drops. Image 3: Tilles Park, St. Louis aerial showing a two park comparison. Quickly my eye was drawn by the moderate size of the park, a major road, the dense single family homes, and preliminary usage estimates I infer from experience. I liked the size and especially the two larger streets adjoining the park, Hampton Ave. and Fyler Ave. The nearest park seems to be around a mile away which is close but not too close considering the density of housing. There is a lot of single-family homes between them. Zooming in a bit closer, the positive surrounding features I immediately notice (in addition to the housing densely packed on 3 sides) - two residential streets terminating at the park boundary. That’s a history flag! At this point I strongly suspect this park has some age and the land was used for something else in the relatively recent past. This park warrants a closer inspection and historical research but at this point I wouldn’t rate it any higher than a 3 at best. It has good potential but further research is needed. Image 4: Tilles Park, St. Louis showing an arieal in map view. The Parks department’s website gives an overview. Ordinance Year: 1957 Size: 29.00 Acres. It also lists basketball courts, racquetball Courts, tennis courts, 3 softball fields, one baseball field, a soccer field, a pavilion, a playground, and a skate hockey rink. Outstanding! Features in multiples and a few unique features earn one more point! We’re now a 4 star prospect and I’ve never been there. Image 5: Tilles Park, St. Louis topography map showing elevation Another site like Historic Aerials will assist with confirmation on topography ID and possible past uses. Unfortunately it only goes back to 1958 in St. Louis, but we still can glean information that can inform our actual hunting strategy. Image 6a and 6b: Tilles Park, St. Louis aerial showing park feature history A couple out buildings have been lost near the main structure prior to 1971 (red), and the pavilion had been established by 1958 (green).The park’s vegetation looks stark in 1958. Cycling through the available years trees don’t show up with any size until around the mid-1990. That’s about 40 years of wide-open park land, which means the whole park has good potential to be a nice patch. The walking paths have not been altered. Another important note is the streets have not been widened as of 1996, so plan to extend your coil all the way to the parking. So far I’d have to rate this particular park a solid 4 at this time. If further research reveals regular community events, and/or positive demographics in the surrounding habitat, and/or some historical significance then it might turn this particular park from a 4 into a 4+ and possibly a 5. Tilles Park is one public park I’d spend some serious time getting to know if I lived in St. Louis. It was good fortune in locating such a promising prospect so easily. It doesn’t always go that way. Some locations take hours and others have so few parks there are not any real options. You may have to settle for 2 and 3 star parks in your area, in which case my 3 star becomes your 5 star. Don’t let me box you in - think outside of it! I estimate thousands of parks have very nice undiscovered gold patches and 10,000 more will have at least one gold item lost in them. Locate those patches and you’ll regularly locate the gold. This information comes from my own personal experience and observations gained through thousands of hour’s field time. My methods are fluid and something I’ve developed along the way while working towards my own personal challenge to master this game. Please feel free to critique, make suggestions, add to, question, and challenge what I’ve presented here. This is the first time I’ve put it down in writing…and if you made it this far, thank you for your time. Best of hunting to you!

I’ve been getting my mind ready for 2017 by re-reading my jewelry hunting textbooks: ‘DFX Gold Methods, Site Reading for Gold and Silver, and the newest one - The Gold Jewelry Hunter’s Handbook. All three of these are written by Clive James Clynick and I personally consider them to be required reading for the dedicated jewelry hunter. So much so that I try to read each of them at least a couple times a year, every year. They contain information for both land and beach hunting but of course I focus on the land hunting part. Of course some of the information is redundant among the three books but there are little gems here and there that make them each worth owning. The information contained in anyone of these three books will guarantee gold in your pouch. I combined the information on page 8 with information on page 18 of the DFX Gold Methods and found this 10K gold ring the first minute on location. When I get into a slump simply re-reading anyone one of them motivate me and put gold back in my pouch. I also periodically re-read Bob Brockett’s, “Taking a Closer Look At Metal Detector Discrimination to help remind me what I’m doing with my discrimination and notch settings. He goes into great detail with pictures and descriptions about what type of objects fall inside discrimination ranges. A great help for making intelligent discrimination decisions. There is one more that I read at least once a year or so, Larry Sallee’s, “The Complete Unabridged Zip Zip”. Most likely not everyone has ground minerals like mine and can probably get along without this one in their library, but my ground signal can mask a small gold response if I set my sensitivity settings too high. Larry reminds me to tune my detectors to get the best audio response possible on my desired target and on how important coil control is on maintaining that best audio response. On some sites I will put a BB on the ground to tune my detector after l discovered that too high a gain setting on my detectors will actually cause the BB signal to break up or disappear. You would be surprised at how much is masked by the ground signal when your sensitivity is set too high in high mineral ground. HH Mike

Your very own jewelry store. What is cool about this gold ring is not that I found it with a lowly entry level metal detector. What is really cool about THIS gold ring is that I found it where I expected to find it. It is my second gold ring find from this exact location and is my third ring find from the general area. My first ring find at this site was found with a Tesoro Golden uMax while I was proving and validating a ‘loss characteristic’. I had found a ring at a park and had identified it with a particular ‘loss characteristic’ or in other words, “the reason I found it where I found it”. I had subsequently verified this particular ‘loss characteristic’ by looking for and hunting another location that mimicked the first site. The second site produced a nice ladies silver ring. So with this knowledge twice validated under my belt I put my Aerial Map CD in my computer and started making a list of other locations that looked like they could provide the opportunities for this particular ‘loss characteristic’. One of those sites I had identified from my aerial map investigation was this particular site. My first ring find with the Golden uMax at this site thrice validated this particular “reason I found what I found where I found it” , i.e. a loss characteristic, and not just a lost characteristic, but a VALIDATED loss characteristic. At another site I had identified from my map review for this particular ‘loss characteristic’ produced this nice gold ring. Unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind to look for the stone I knocked out with my screwdriver when recovering it. The take away: A "validated loss characteristic" is like owning your very own jewelry store. HH Mike

It has been said that the Gold Racer is probably not your best choice for hunting sites with lots of iron trash, Probably true, especially when hunting cellar holes and such, but detectors that do better give up sensitivity to small gold like micro jewelry which is what I like to hunt these days. I have begun a concentrated learning process on the idea of target masking and applying it to the use of the Makro Gold Racer. The idea is to read what can be found, then apply, then read some more, rinse and repeat. So far, these techniques have proven useful. Gleaned from posts here and other places, they are fundamental ideas that come up a lot wherever the topic is discussed. Use a smaller coil. For this the 4X7 elliptical was purchased Increase recovery speed. Using iSAT of 9 seems to work best here Decrease Gain. I have been doing this with good result, but still keep it pushed as high as the specific site will allow. More iron=less Gain thinking. Slow sweep speed. Though the owner's manual recommends a faster sweep, slightly above a crawl is working well. Hunt in All Metal Mode Dig iffy signals The idea of working on this particular idea was originally started simply as a way to work some really trashy sites visited recently, but the idea has much greater application, as was found today. The study of target masking shows why loud and clear. The presence of junk influences the sound and TID of good targets if they can be heard at all. All Metal Mode sees everything and lets you sort out the iffy yourself, which can be very tedious and slow, but it will work. More good targets can be recovered even from relatively clean sites. Plus you will get a lot of exercise. So this is the idea in mind, and the current set of techniques to make use of it, and this morning was applied to a volleyball court hunted before with stock coil and normal sweep speed. Three stud earrings were recovered, all iffy signals. One garnet, two cubic zirconias. I do not think any of them were even real gold, which may contribute to the iffiness, but these were targets of the size and shape I want and would not have been dug before. It appears useful to not be overly reliant on the screen id, and pay more attention to the tone. Having issues with this small coil now again too, a large number of false overload signals were found today. Removing the coil cover and replacing it did not help this time, lowering the gain did, though I pushed it back up whenever I got the chance. No metal at all could be found in these various hot spots. The ground is saturated from recent rains, but the phenomena did not seem to correlate with low spots and the ground has had a couple days to dry out.. This replacement coil does seem to relieve the constant overload problem I had with the first one, and usually does not do this, but I am kind of wishing I had gotten the small round dd. Who knows. Any who have suggestions and ideas concerning target masking as a concept or technique to get around it, please chime in. Learning to unmask with a Gold Racer could be a great tool. What I know so far for what is worth.

It would be a great title to a hand book on hunting urban parks. Feel free to use it you authors out there. The CTX 3030 is a very powerful gold machine (heard that before?) Extreme depth is not required ... Just dig those low tones but like hunting nuggets you will dig lots of trash. Two sterling silver rings and two gold...one 10K and the other 14k with small diamonds this weekend just a few hours at two local parks. Good hunting to you all. Hoping to hit the real gold fields soon but until then I'll take what I can get. strick

Hello Prospectors, Some of you may have seen my rants of late and the general direction of interest, hunting small gold jewelry. Compared to other forms of metal detecting in general, and gold hunting in particular, there is less written about this but some as you no doubt know. A very small niche and not a lot of enthusiasts, no doubt due to the amount of foil one would encounter and the low value of some of the targets. Nonetheless, pressing ahead I am looking for your advice on what might make a good value in detectors for this. It occurs to me that with the advent of the Makro Gold Racer and others that there might be some real bargains in used gold detectors where people are upgrading to the newer top of the line models. Your thoughts? SLG

A topic spoken of at length here and other places, please forgive me bringing it up yet again. I am looking for bang for the buck in Super Hot VLF as described in Steve's nugget detector picks. From that list the ones that look to fill out my range of metal detectors are those operating above 20kHz. Specifically, White's GMZ and GMT, Fisher GoldBug 2, and the new Makro Gold Racer. Any of these will surely work for what I want. I wondered if other options exist that might not have come to mind or what my least cost option might be to just try this idea well enough to make it worth a more substantial investment. I have been scouring the internet looking for information on this type of detector, but there is so much marketing that the number of pages to wade through just to find good opinions has been quite a chore and the people hunting the very small things away from goldfield are not numerous. So many worry over the question of depth that sensitivity to small is less of a concern, but for me the reverse it true. That makes it swimming upstream and I could use some advice. From what I can find, I do not see a better option than the Makro Gold Racer. Even used nugget machines on eBay are not really beating the price of a new Gold Racer. As a thing to try, I do not want to spend that much money right now. Is there a low cost option to just try the concept?