So, you’ve bought yourself a brand new gold detector, lots of gold maps, have gone out a few times and have finally found a few nuggets, and the 6 million dollar question is….. “Now what?”
You obviously want to find more, so what is the best way to go about it? Well it is generally true that where there is one nugget, there should be more nearby, so carefully detecting the surrounding area should be your first priority. Detect under every bush, around every tree, move fallen logs and detect the ground under them. Now let’s assume you’ve done all this for one extra little nugget, and you feel like you should move on to another area. Okay, rule no.1, don’t think the pastures are greener on the other side of the hill. You’ve found some nuggets in this spot, so you know there is gold there, so what else can you do to find more nuggets?
If you picture a side profile of the top 1 metre of soil in your gold producing spot, there could be a few 0.1 gram nuggets at 80 cm (unfortunately out of range of any detector), some 15 gram nuggets at 60 cm, a few 2 gram pieces at 40 cm, and a 3 ouncer at 10 cm that everything has dismissed as junk (but that’s another story), and on it goes. Any gold producing area will have different sized nuggets at varying depths, and some will certainly be out of range of your detector. However, many of the nuggets will be close to the limit of detection, and therefore easily missed by careless technique, so “low and slow” is the order of the day. To improve your chances further, you should optimize your set-up for smaller shallow pieces and detect the ground again, and then optimize for larger deeper gold, and redetect the same spot.
On the GPX series of detectors, to optimize for larger deeper targets use the Deep Search Mode in combination with a larger coil, and one of the deeper Timings - Enhance for mineralised soils; Sharp for very mild soils. For smaller gold, use an 8” or 11” Monoloop, General Search Mode and Sensitive Extra for mild soils; or Hi-Mineral Search Mode with Enhance or Fine Gold timing (GPX 5000) for mineralised soils. These are just a few simplified examples of optimizing your detector, as there many coil and settings options for different Minelab gold detectors, and if you are a little unsure feel free to email us. By using different settings and different coil size combinations will optimize the detector for different target sizes and depths (often referred to as “windows”), and will ensure you don’t leave much behind.
So when you think you’ve detected the area thoroughly, and are ready to move on, here’s my final tip: go back to the same spot, but park your car at the opposite side of the gully, or on the other side of the hill, and approach the spot from a different perspective. You’ll just have to trust me on that one! :)
Nenad Lonic
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