When dowsing native gold weight, a reading can be the total amount found in a particular spot or the actual weight of a nugget. I'd dowse for myself, only on known coarse gold sites for the best places to prospect.Most places with nice gold nuggets around Phoenix are already under a mineral rights claim. Plenty of prospecting clubs around your area, lots of people to prospect with or ask them questions. I bought a book once called "Little Know Arizona Gold Placers" most of those sites (a couple near Phoenix) you can find small grains 18" down.
Here is a page with photos of prospecting sites mostly Wickenburg vicinity.
Gold Prospecting and Nugget Hunting is what We do! Rich Hill this time.
Somebody made a video of visiting the Lucky Linda claim at Stanton (2 lb. gold nugget found there once near the road).
The other video is at Lynx Creek gold panning, apparently it was a TV episode for GPAA. However you go about it, gold prospecting is a challenge.
[video=youtube;GBaScV5iPA4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=10&v=GBaScV5iPA4[/video]
When I bought my Garrett gold panning kit (back in the mid 1990s) it came packaged with an article "Find an ounce of gold a day" which used gold detectors as part of the strategy. Garrett once went to Mexico to do a video, using this technique. The steam had been a place nice silver nuggets were found. They used manual ground balance detectors wading the stream with the coil in the water. Detectoors were balanced to find pockets of black sand rather than metal. The idea was to dig up these concetrations of black sand and panning them later.
No silver nuggets were detected (yet plenty found later during panning) only the black sand and this is Garrett's method to locate gold for panning also. Most people with the manual ground balance machines will tune them to find metal and eliminate the mineral detection. Tuning these gold detectors you lift the coil then lower it repeatly, listening to the sound. Balanced toward mineral the sound is louder as you lift the coil. This finds more hot rocks, a pocket of black sand contration will be wider and not a small hotspot.
One problem will be where the ground is very mineralized, then sensitivity must be turned down to smooth out the threshold. L-rods are very good for picking up these concentrated black sand deposits. Other people beeping pass right over the pockets containing gold.