MXT for Nuggets ?

[Dave (Pa)]

Hi All'

I purchased an MXT in the spring. I was looking for a nugget shooter to use on trips to Va. and Ga. but wanted a good coin shooter too. Now I'm looking to get a new coil to do some nugget shooting and was wondering:

Has anyone used the MXT for nugget shooting and what has your expereance been with it?

Is it worth the money to buy a differant coil and what should I get?

Would I just be better to look for a gold detecter?

 

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[Jon (VA)]

You know Dave... I bought a Minelab Goldenhawk and brought it to your sweet spot. I noticed there are a lot (understatement) of hot rocks there... does your MXT tune those out? I brought a few home to figure out how to cancel them but to no avail yet. Let me know what weekend in September you are going to be there and I may meet up with you

Jon

 

[Dave (Pa)]

Hi Jon' Nice to hear from you. Haven't been able to get back down all summer but am planning on going the last weekend in Sep. ( 27 - 28 ) Just got finished going over the pump moter and got a DD coil for the MXT. With the stock coil I was not able to tune out all the hot rocks. When I did, I have so much dis. that you don't hear a sound. It's like working a trash site in that you have to work around it. We,ll see what the DD coil can do with em'

 

[Jon (VA)]

yeah, mine is a 8" DD and I am still trying to figure that out. Those hot rocks are ALL OVER that spot. I got constant chatter and even lots of false signals. I know I am new at this so I wont be too discouraged and I will let you see my beast and see if you can figure it out too... o btw, check your e-mail. I am going now to send you that stuff

 

[lab rat]

What type of hot rocks do you have? You ever grind them up and pan out the powder to see if there is gold in them?

 

[Fred]

Dave(Pa); I finally got out last week and spent 1(one) day one a promising piece of bedrock. Now I am not sure if the detector was sounding off because it was moving off of the rocks and over air or if it detected the 5 tiny flakes of Platinum that I recovered from 2 handfuls of gravel. My partner and I will be staking that ground when the backroads travel ban is lifted.
Hot rocks,my GMT gave out the most hideous honking noise when it moved over them things and the meter read "bad ground". Grind them up? Tell you what LR,if you will pay the shipping I am willing to send you a whole bunch to play with. There is an overabundance of them on my ground. So much so that I can recognize them on sight,even with my tired old eyes. LOL What say,Tons or Kilos,your choice? Fred

 

[lab rat]

:lol: Maybe just a few cobbles! What do they look like? Mudstone? Granite? Quartz? Mica schist? Are they rust colored? Gray? Black? Do they respond to a magnet?

 

[Fred]

LR; The ones I found were gray with darker splotches on them almost like a conglomerate but fairly smooth. I have no idea if they are magnetic or not. I will pack out a couple next time that I go in there. Fred

 

[Dave (Pa)]

Asked on another forum abut your minelab:

Rob:
About the hot rocks, some can't be balanced out with any unit. I experience hot rocks even with the Minelab GP3000, and have to kick them out of the way, or dig them up to make sure. There is no unit that will not pick up one single hot rock. However, many of the VLF's will pick up much more iron bearing rocks than the PI's will.

Guest:
I know that one can tune out the hot rocks with some VLF type detectors, but how does that affect depth and the true ground balance for the soil that your working. My thinking says that you could hurt yourself performance wise by trying to tune out the rocks? Make sense to anybody? Perhaps a notch filter would work better here, but you would have to be careful not to notch out the gold?

Rob:
You are absolutely right. You can in fact balance out some Hot rocks, but not all of them with VLF's. When I used to use some of the Minelab XT series detectors, I would balance out the hottest hot rock I could find. This would elliminate any sounds from the smaller ones. However, once you balance to the hotrocks, the ground itself becomes hot again in most cases. It is very hard to get best of both worlds... Most of the time, you balance out one (ground or hotrocks) you will hear the other one. Sometimes by masking the ground (bring your searchcoil off the ground an inch or so) you can elliminate most of the hotrocks. You will loose some depth, but this technique has been used for a long time in real nasty ground by VLF users.

Dave (Pa):
The bigest problum I found was that when you tune out the pos. hot rocks I would think you loose sesitivity to some of the smaller pieces of gold. Is that right? I would rather dig up some of the hot rocks!

Rob:
Not certain you would loose sensitivity to a piece of small gold. I know I can adjust the GM3 that I have sitting here to one end or the other of the ground balance and it does not effect the ability to detect a nugget. However, that is an air test...

My suggestion would to just balance to the normal ground conditions, and kick the positive hotrocks away if possible. Sounds like a pain though... but I have found nuggets directly under ironstones and hotrocks in the past.