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KAC
In my neck of the woods I come across a fairly wide range terrain from patches of clay (nothing to cry about) to magnetite boulders size of a coffee table and of course areas with very mild ground. Much of my hunting is done with either my Tejon or in all metal mode with the Kruzer or Gold Racer.
Once in a while I would come across a negative hot rock which you can notice especially with all metal mode (not non discrimination mode found in SMF and many other units). There would be a reverse roll to the target loud, blank then loud as if the target bounces. Very obvious characteristics as the signal bounces.

First KAC I would like to thank you for all the hard work you did to bring this information to the readers of the forum. Those that have never encountered hot rocks will find this information really useful. As a gold prospector I encounter both positive and negative hot rocks all the time. So imagine trying to find gold down to the size of a pinhead with these hot rocks around and trying to determine whether or not they're a good target.

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KAC
With all the talk about SMF and that useless nickel test made me thing more on fringe targets disappearing in salt such as gold chains etc. Thought what happens if a gold ring was on fringe of detection in salt? Would some of those bouncing signals be a gold ring or just a negative hot rock as I always thought?

In case you didn't know the US nickel is the standard test target when doing depth tests for beach hunters that are after gold rings. Read or watch most videos and you will see that the US nickel is being used by them. You know why? Because it's a standard everyone can relate to. It's like Montes nail board test. You know why gold rings aren't used? Because not everyone has access to the same size, same diameter, same karat. etc. So if someone throws a 7 gram 18K ring in one hole at 14" and then someone else in a different test throws a 5 gram 14k ring in at 14" they're not going to get even close to the same results. Before even doing this nickel test I had already found 3 gold rings this year with new machines, the Minelab Equinox 900 and Manticore, it's not like I ran right out there to do a test without even know how to run the machines. And contrary to your belief nickels are very useful in determining the depth at which you can find a gold ring. I would go into the whole history of the GSL and my experience metal detecting over the past 28 years out there, but I really doubt it would impress a scholar such as yourself.

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KAC
PI machines work purely on conductivity and if you were to discriminate out a nail or deck screw at the beach you would lose gold and probably nickels and small silvers before dropping the nails out because the only discrimination you have is pulse delay. Last bit on Pi machines is you really need to keep the coil close to the ground to get optimal depth with them. Having the coil an inch off the ground or more you will have really poor performance. I literally skim the sand with mine.
Pi machine also doesn't perform as well on dry sand as an ib machine does.

The best discrimination on a PI is your ears, learn the machine and what it's telling you. Most modern PI's no longer have pulse delay that you can change yourself, rather they have timings you can use that are either more or less aggressive to the conditions you are hunting. And yes I know plenty about pulse delay, I've used the old machines with pulse delay. The closer you can get to 10 or less in the case of the Impulse AQ the smaller gold you can pick up. At the GSL pulse delays of about 17 were necessary on the Whites TDI to cancel out the salt, so there's no chance you are going to be finding gold chains in those conditions. Most modern PI's are dual channel PI's such as the GPX series and the Garrett Axiom. They transmit pulses over various periods of time in different time intervals. This results in the ground noise being separated from the target signal allowing the detector to go deeper than the traditional pulse delay machines. In the case of the GPX 6000 it's constantly evaluating the ground signal with it's GEO sensing technology and can pick out tiny bits of gold that in the past only supper sensitive VLF machines like the Gold Monster could find. The GPX 6000 though is not tuned to work on beaches. But rather to work highly mineralized gold fields.

And I guess I have been swinging my pulse machines wrong for the last 7 years. Wonder I found anything with them, swinging over all that corn, wheat and bean stubble, plowed ground and rocks the size of golf balls. Only reason the coil was off the ground at the beach was to clear the wooden dowels that were in the ground. Which by the way were placed there by driving a pipe into the sand as to cause as little disturbance as possible to he sand matrix. Therefore giving more accurate results.

Finally, I know there's a bunch of people on this forum that think I'm just an idiot with a metal detector and a YouTube channel. It's like it's come to the point that there's the forum followers and the YouTube followers, with very few people in the middle. People on YouTube think they're right, people on the forums think they're right. So rather than learning from each other it's come down to my word is more creditable than your video. Really? Boys and girls it isn't going to be long before forums are a thing of the past. Most of the YouTube video makers have left the forums because of the controversy. So there's my post for the year on this forum, I'll go back over to Detector Prospector now where there are more open minded people that can learn from each other.

Andrew

XP Deus 2-Minelab Manticore, Minelab GPX 6000



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2023 11:49AM by diggindeep. (view changes)