Jp’s Gold Thread

[Jonathan Porter]

Continuing on with the detecting sessions, yesterday was initially a total failure except for my back up little bits patch on the way home. I spent most of the morning chasing big gold in nasty ground on a favourite old spot I keep going back to in-spite of my constantly reminding myself it’s played out. Score was an initial negative ”who’s the pig who did that“ , two tiny shotty pellets and a sore arm.

Wasn’t impressed to find some pig had been using a “Dingo” machine to illegally push my favourite spot.

So I had a choice to make, I was tired and dripping wet with sweat with the sun well up past midday, plenty of justification to just call it a day and chalk it up to experience or I could drop off at the talc patch below that old dry blow patch to see if I could ping a few tiddlers before calling it a day.

The last time I was here was about 18 months ago when I did a training session with a customer who was struggling with his new GPZ 7000 (he was having trouble getting his head around good coil control and ”Range of Motion” concepts). I pinged two little bits quite quickly here and after the training session left him to it in the hopes he would find more only to have him in the shop a short time after I returned to say there was no more gold there and could I put him onto another spot.

Literally 30 seconds into switching on I got a nice soft little signal on the edge of a diggers heap and so scored my first spec for the day. Note the darker looking gravels on the top of the digger piles in the background, the soils associated are reasonably benign but the coarse material is made up of highly mineralised country rock (Altered/metamorphosed sandstones), when they weather down the soils are very talc like and generally quiet to detect on, most probably made up from the surrounding country rock that is not so mineralised.

For the next two hours I had a ball chasing faint targets going over ground Frieda and I worked back in 1996. Below the diggings the soil cover allowed me to crank things up a bit sensitivity wise, not SteveH insanely hot but definitely elevated compared to my usual pattern of conservativeness. One target was very subtle and would not present well when I dipped the coil into the hole and would only sound off when I passed the coil over the top of the hole, this is typical of how much EMI disrupts target signals when the coil is tilted. Tilting the coil was allowing EMI into the audio and cancelling out the target signal till I got the hole down deep enough to get the coil right on the nugget. This is also an example where elevated Sensitivity can go against you.

Funnily enough the biggest target was the most attractive to the numerous flies floating around harassing me. 🤣 Not a fly Schist nugget by any means. 😬

Fly decided this one was too big to steal 🤪

I then started to target the more obvious deposit points and was rewarded with a deep piece below a tree, classic hiding spot for gold in forested country. I’d say the nugget has been there a lot longer than the tree so instead think the trees tend to grow in the right location relative to the nugget buried deep but who knows. The key point is a lot of gold is found downslope of trees for some reason, suggesting trees hold the ground together or even capture transported soils as they move downslope which is then conducive for more trees to grow there as the old one dies. These locations are prime for better technologies due to the extra depth and sensitivity relative to target size.

Then I remembered back in the day pinging a few bits in the track so on the final lap before calling it a quits I carefully went over the pastel coloured sections that looked similar to the soil/gravel mix that came out of the gold holes and sure enough got a deep one in the track. A nice way to top off a couple of hours instead of having a skunk.😜

So there you have it, a busted day turned into a few bits for the jar leaving a positive experience instead of a no gold experience. I always try to plan my excursions this way, targeting deeper ground or prospecting in the early part of the day then falling back on a known location at the end if things don’t pan out. A big part of detecting is the psychology, putting a few bits into your jar no matter how small is always better than going home empty handed. I have dozens of spots like this around the whole country were if I spend a little bit of time “crumbing” can always turn up a few rattle bits for the jar, although I do have to say over the years the crumbs are getting smaller and smaller.🤔

JP

Fuel money covered and a lot of fun to boot.

 

 

 

[Lunk]

Great arvo, JP!

[DigsAlot]

JP that was a great post. The way you shot the pics I could easily look at the ground around the hole and still see the hole and dirt you removed from the hole. Plus the info you provided matched the pics. Great!!!

[flakmagnet]

Anyone who has seen his DVD's know the level of photographic/video work JP is capable of. The man is a born photographer, videographer and editor…with an urge to educate and illustrate. And we are the beneficiaries. I am always mindful of the tons of clipped passages from his posts I have stored in my computer that educated me on my last five detectors. I know from experience what it took to shoot, edit and score his DVD's. We are a luckier than we may know.

[peterinaust]

This is great JP, thank you for putting in the time and effort. I have been meaning to get back down to Clermont for another go

I did a lesson with you a few years back on the Z. After that went on to Western Creek and got a nice 15g bit.

Anyhow thanks again for putting this thread up.

Cheers for now Peter.

[Walker]

Thanks JP for posting this thread. Man.... I have discovered a long time ago that those little ones are what ends up paying the bills. Bread and butter nuggets. The big ones tend to be the bonus. 

[Jonathan Porter]

Tuesday was a great motivator even though the gold was rather small and I didn’t find a whole lot it was still good fun, so I found myself pondering things over my first cup of coffee and decided the location warranted further attention and was a good opportunity to try out a few different ideas. The trying out of ideas in combination with the sensation the place wasn’t played it out is half the fun I feel.😎

First target, a deep one, kicked the euphoria off nicely especially as it was getting up in size and not just a light weight “picker”. This one was a good one to play around with Audio Smoothing and Sensitivity to see how they interact with each other on an undug target. I found myself coming back to Smoothing OFF and Sensitivity conservative. I also played around with High Yield Normal and even though the ground could handle HY Normal the target signal was seriously degraded by that mode so once again reverted back to Difficult. 

You can see the old timers shaker pile in the foreground, the two deep ones from the last session were further back towards the drainage.

Interestingly on half ounce nuggets High Yield and General Difficult produce a much better target signal in just about any ground compared to Normal, this was also true for the GPX 5000 as well as Steve Herschbach will attest when we tested an un-dug half ounce piece in WA years ago. This is commonly known as a “hole” in the timings and is the price we pay for being able to balance out ground signal and also just the nature of how the two channels work in relation to each other. For some reason half ounce sluggy gold tends to present MUCH better to the Smooth class of timings. This means it pays to go over your deeper ground even if the soil conditions do not require Difficult in case there is a sluggy piece still hiding there.

The West Australian Adventure part 4    The West Australian Adventure part 5 

I learned a lot with this little nugget and also reaffirmed my ideas around sensitivity and Audio Smoothing OFF.

Onwards and upwards the next signal 15 minutes later put an instant smile on my dial, that lovely low high with a touch of complicated signal was the next cab off the rank, once again I had a play with a few ideas and concepts including a bit of coil interchanging and settings tweaking. Some nuggets produce a really weird ‘tail out’ response that seems to put the centre of the target at a completely different location to where you know in your heart it really is. I put this down to the complexity of the signal and how it interacts with the High/Low and Low/High channels. You can hear the pitch change on the lead in but the strongest volume change seems to be delayed away from the epicentre a little like using as poor quality blue tooth set that has a crappy amount of delay. I find these sorts of targets fascinating. This one put the strongest part of the signal a full coil width to the left on the tail out and even though I knew this was happening I still started digging well to the side of the actual target position.

It’s kind of like having your mouth numbed after a dentist visit and trying to drink water while the needle is still in effect, your mind knows how to control the muscles to perform the task but there is no sensory input to tell you what is actually going on ending in you dribbling down your chin, trying to whistle creates the same “stroke like” effect.🤪 I visualise it being akin to sliding two magnets past each other with the same poles, they tend to slip away when you get them close and no amount of input from you can get them to not resist each other, the target signal seems to do the same thing, slipping past and peaking in the wrong place on the tail out without you being able to control it, even though you know in your heart of hearts it’s WRONG.😬 I listen for the ‘magnetic repel signal’ a lot when looking for gold, that slippery warble signal is a sure sign there’s a piece of gold laying down deep messing with the surface tension of the Rx, especially with the GPZ and SuperD coils. 

Plucky little solid 2 gram piece, quite deep for its size, took a few different pictures at different angles for comparison. Your can clearly see where I started to clear to the left but ended up getting the nugget way over to the right. Width of cleared ground indicates the ”range of motion” required to get the target to manifest properly.

Next signal was a tiny little pip of a thing that barely broke the threshold, but it was repeatable. Always pay attention to repeatable signals because sometimes edge of detection targets can be just a murmur that does not go away. Careful scraping of the surface layer brightened the signal a lot and subsequent digging and then oohing and arghing had me smiling at the depth of this little tacker, definitely not throwing it back even though my pocket book barely bumped when it landed. 

Note the blood red country rock layer, this is the fluidised material that the gold is shedding out of, with the talc like upper layer weathering out of more benign sandstone country rock further upslope. The old boys dug down into this when mining it so it ends up in the surface gravels on the shaker piles. The country rock (a very coarse grained, schist like interleaved highly weathered shear zone) is extremely noisy and mineralised so obviously has a very high iron content due to all the alteration and weathering. In the shallow sections the GPZ warbles away, the audio tweaking constantly from all the highly magnetic materials, one of the reasons why I use Audio Smoothing OFF so I can hear this behaviour, a sure sign of gold mineralisation being present.

The rest of the session I just worked all the likely locals in a 100 metre arc and was disgusted to discover the pig with the machine had been pushing in the old timers dry blow piles. I took great pleasure in pinging a really deep piece in their push. That’s two of my gold spots receiving unwanted attention now, so I am starting to wonder how wide spread this sort of activity actually is. All of it is illegal and potentially ruinous for our General Permission areas, I hope the fleas of a thousand camels set up permanent camp in their undershorts!!😡

All in all it was a great morning and a lot of fun, finding gold always is. And more importantly I learned something and was able to strengthen up my personal approach to techniques and settings etc, these things help immensely with your confidence levels, all of us need reassurance even the more experienced guys.🤫 Having faith in your gear and confidence in what your doing then having that validated by a positive experience is 90% of successful metal detecting.😇

JP

Gold found for the session

[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

[flakmagnet]

36 minutes ago, Jonathan Porter said:

I also played around with High Yield Normal and even though the ground could handle HY Normal the target signal was seriously degraded by that mode so once again reverted back to Difficult. 

JP so do you recommend using HY/Difficult even if the ground can handle HY/Normal?

thanks...

[Jonathan Porter]

29 minutes ago, flakmagnet said:

JP so do you recommend using HY/Difficult even if the ground can handle HY/Normal?

thanks...

Not really, the ground conditions determine the approach but you need to be aware some targets respond better in certain modes regardless of ground. Normal is by far the deepest punching mode on the GPZ if the conditions allow. My approach would be to go over certain sections that are productive again to cover off on any targets that might have been missed due to the target signature falling into a dead zone.

JP

PS as an aside the volume of Normal sounds a lot higher than the difficult modes, so if you are primarily using Normal then it will pay to lift the Target Volume a few points to compensate so things sound more natural to the ear. Going from one to the other can be confusing especially Normal to Difficult making you feel half deaf.