A Question About GPZ Audio Response

[jasong]

At this point in time I think we are decades in to understanding the "dig it all" mantra, and in my opinion there isnt much left to discuss since it's a simple concept that everyone already agrees on. So it kind of surprises me to see how many serious detectorists are content at leaving it there. The more interesting thing to me is when not to dig it all. If anyone thinks there is never a time to pass over targets then I guarantee you are missing more gold by being stuck in old ways than by realizing you can produce more by knowing there is a time to pass some targets up.

Consider some basic math, a philosophy which i used dredging and carried over to detecting. Let's say we accept 20% losses because I alter the sluice so it doesnt clog so much and I can run material faster over it (by removing the hungarians as an example) in return for doubling the material I run. In dredging that means I get 8 grams for running the same material instead of 10 grams. But I've doubled my material I run so I actually get 16 grams instead of 10 grams at the end of the day.

Same with detecting. Covering more ground is like running more material dredging. I accept say 20% loss of nuggets I miss in return for operating in a way that let's me cover 2x more land. That's actually an underestimate, I probably cover 3 to 10x as much land as a lot of the dig it all people I see detecting cover in a day. An average day detecting on my GPS is 2 to 7 miles walking, usually 4 miles a day is pretty normal.

If I am comfortable getting 80% of the gold in half or less if the time and then moving on and finding a new area, not only do I find more gold than if I stayed and dug every target in the end, but I end up with far more known producing areas discovered at the end of the season. And I go back to these areas at the end of the day if I've been skunked exploring and then THAT'S the time to grid and dig em all, and I end up with a lot of these areas in my back pocket to rely on whereas someone who stayed and just dug everything now has nothing left and no new discoveries either, starting from scratch every time. My way always keeps you in the gold and producing. Not just good for the pocketbook, but for the mental condition as well where going on skunk runs can be demotivating.

All that aside, having done this for years, I've discovered that even when I'm being highly selective I'm still only missing about 10% of the overall gold I end up finding when I do finally go back and clean up every single trash target. Yet I easily produce 2, 3 maybe even as much as 10x more gold per trip than I would if I simply stayed and dug everything until it was gone.

This is how you make detecting pay for itself if you aren't retired or depend at least some on the income you make finding gold. What isnt communicated properly when green horns read forums and threads like these is that a lot of the dig everything guys in the US who make fabulous finds are in fact just in tiny areas of private land or leased land which no one has access to, or claims which have been in the family for decades or longer, with heavy equipment at work. These people can afford to dig everything because they dont need to explore as much as the newer guys do. And a lot of other guys are shown places to go and dont have to put the work in to find them or go on 3 week long skunks and question why they ever bought a detector to begin with after digging 600 pieces of tin. 

Having recently spent a large amount of time cleaning out old "80%" areas I left behind for later, I've discovered that actually I got closer to 90 or 95% by selectively digging, and that's well within what I consider acceptable. 

A lot of age old mantras are repeated for a reason, because they are correct. But the trick is understanding when they aren't. For instance, there are perfectly good times you dont want to keep your coil perfectly flat even though coil control on the forums would make you think there is a school marm waiting at every patch to rap your knuckles if you dont.

Any different response you can get from a detector is potentially useful information. Data needs to be correlated and interpreted to your specific conditions, and tested and compared to see if it's a bad habit or potentially useful information. This is why I cant get behind this school of thought that seems to be getting common around forums that testing, measuring and comparing is not worth the time. This stuff has all been the key to my success as a person that started without anyone to help or show me where to go. And I know most random people starting out are finding themselves in the exact same boat as I was in, so if you are one of those new guys I'm letting you know that there are other ways to do this stuff, some of which are probably better for the conditions we find ourselves in today, and especially if you dont have a friend or buddy to put you on already productive ground.

[flakmagnet]

Jason, I have always appreciated the way you approach your detecting, dredging and prospecting...ever since you were on another forum. I agree with most of what you say which is part of why I asked the question in the first place. I hear some amazing sounds from the GPZ...(not so much from the GPX), and that got my curiosity going to research it a little..which is how I came across that MineLab quote. I don't think it was a misquote by ML either. 

The place I have been detecting is the closest to where I live (it's still a 285 mile round trip), and is loaded with shrapnel from a large number of AR-15 enthusiasts who, over the last five years, have decided that this detecting area is a fabulous shooting range - I don't think they have any idea there is also gold in the hillsides. The amount of weird metal particles strewn around is beyond awesome. As a result, I have been paying extremely careful attention to the varieties of sound the Zed produces. 

[Jonathan Porter]

The way a signal sounds can have a lot to do with were the GB position ends up relative to the ground your working and the Gold mode and Ground Mode you are working in. A signal response in High Yield Difficult can sound a lot different in High Yield normal or any of the General modes.

Generally smaller targets go High/Low in High Yield and bigger more solid bits go Low/High. Shallow Steel objects will often go Low/High but will be a tight signal response due to distance from the coil. This all changes around somewhat if the timings are changed. Quiet often you can also receive a confused signal or as a friend of mine likes to describe them, a turkey gobble signal (maybe even Waltzing Matilda ? ), this is where both channels respond equally and try to cancel each other out a little like noise cancelling does.

JP

[flakmagnet]

Thank you JP, it makes sense as your posts usually do. But, in the future, I will be listening hard for the Waltzing Matilda sound because whatever makes that sound is gonna be ground-breaking. 

Thanks for all the replies, it's why I dare to come here with my questions, even the dumb ones. And just to be clear for any newcomers reading this, I have been detecting for over twenty-five years. I am curious and asking questions is vital to learning.

[jasong]

Sorry Flak I think I inadvertently implied you were a new guy. My second response was just addressed to the ether - anyone in general interested in reading or discussing it as I think it's an interesting topic. I know you've been swinging a coil since before I even knew what one was. ? I think your questions are good questions. And detecting in a field of AR bullets, casings, and fragments can definitely make one start asking a lot of questions, man been there.

 

[flakmagnet]

Hi again Jason...no, I didn't think you were implying anything. I have talked to you and seen your YouTube's where you specifically address newcomers trying to help them with what you have experienced first-hand the hard way and knew you were putting your findings out there for them. I admire your willingness to help.

[afreakofnature]

Jasong - Got a link to your youtube channel?  I am interested in learning and hearing more about your 80% techniques and methods used.  I am usually the pick a spot and grid guy so I find your method interesting and sound.  Definitely would like to know more.

[jasong]

AFON: I haven't addressed the 80% thing directly on my channel (USMiner), it was just some numbers I was randomly using or guessing at roughly to demonstrate a different way of looking at prospecting, and that there are cases where it pays to not dig it all. I'll grid and dig everything just like everyone else when the situation calls for it though. 

The way I look at it is kinda like the progression a lot of us went through when we first started running a sluice. At first we try to meticulously save every color, with tweezers if needed, maybe feed a little recirculator with a spoon for fear of one tiny speck going out the other end. And eventually you get to the point cleaning out your dredge 5 years later where you are tossing 100 colors out your pan back into the river because the time to clean them up is better spent doing something more productive. Of course it's not really exactly the same since you might miss a lunker somewhere when it comes to detecting nuggets, but it's a risk I am willing to take especially since I do eventually end up back gridding when times are lean.

For the same reason, I probably spend more time wandering around looking for specific types of dirt or specific geology or topography, or just for signs of old timers than I do swinging a coil when I'm prospecting, even if there is no trash around. Which is kinda taking the "don't dig everything" philosophy to the extreme and not even detecting at all now. Because while gold can certainly be anywhere, it seems to me that 80% of the time (random guess again) the better patches are somewhere close to an area that "looks right" to me so I just scout for them and pass over huge tracts of land that previously I would have spent weeks detecting. I probably miss a lot of 1 off nuggets or small patches, but I'm cool with that. Doesn't hurt that I actually like exploring and hitting rocks with hammers more than swinging a heavy coil all day too. 

That said, there does seem to be a point where someone just starting should dig everything no matter what, for a time. That's the only way to figure out what "looks right" in terms of what produces nuggets when they reach the point where it pays to stop digging everything and start covering more ground later.

*PS, if trying this approach I find it essential to keep all your tracks recorded on a GPS and a main database of them on Google Earth or similar. I recently lost a card that held a ton of my old tracks from 2008 to 2015 and it really made things difficult in places I had left incomplete to revisit later. Think of exploration like macro gridding. Find a place you are interested in with good geology then systematically cover it, maybe an area 25 miles square, the same way you'd cover a patch 100 meters square. Keeping GPS tracks is essential in my book. When you find a productive area you can also use your tracks to make sure you've not missed any tiny washes or other productive zones that are easy to miss on the ground.

[Andyy]

9 hours ago, jasong said:

That said, there does seem to be a point where someone just starting should dig everything no matter what, for a time. That's the only way to figure out what "looks right" in terms of what produces nuggets when they reach the point where it pays to stop digging everything and start covering more ground later.

*PS, if trying this approach I find it essential to keep all your tracks recorded on a GPS and a main database of them on Google Earth or similar. I recently lost a card that held a ton of my old tracks from 2008 to 2015 and it really made things difficult in places I had left incomplete to revisit later. Think of exploration like macro gridding. Find a place you are interested in with good geology then systematically cover it, maybe an area 25 miles square, the same way you'd cover a patch 100 meters square. Keeping GPS tracks is essential in my book. When you find a productive area you can also use your tracks to make sure you've not missed any tiny washes or other productive zones that are easy to miss on the ground.

Jason - I agree with you on both topics (dig everything and the gps).  My first couple years were hard.  I had no mentor and no knowledge of how to find gold.  So I dug everything .... when I put my coil on the ground.  And sometimes that just meant finding areas where the bullets were less likely to be, or where the overburden wasn't 3 feet deep.  And I would make sure to go to many different areas and study what the ground looked like on the various club claims.  Eventually, clues on geology and topography began to show themselves.  I started going away from club claims and finding more and more gold.  But still with a lot of dry spells in between.  So my third year or so I decided to start sharing information with a couple new friends and I learned new techniques I wasn't using in regards to getting more out of known gold washes, and I learned different styles of detecting, where you don't necessarily cover every inch of the wash because you're not really sure if there were gold nuggets there.  You are doing quick scanning and cherry picking.  At this point, the information was very useful to me as I had found gold and understood geology a little better.  Whereas if I had done this in the first place, I think don't think it would have been as helpful.  I now see the benefit of being able to quick scan washes and to be able to switch gears once gold is found. 

But the GPS is a much underutilized too.  I also store ALL tracks.  And being able to set up a game plan is a huge benefit that really keeps you focused when in the field.  I hit washes that you can see on google earth, but are out of sight when just walking around on treks.

Andyy