Hello Tom… the weather around here has generally been a bit below the seasonal norm for high temps, although we’ve had a couple of 10 day sessions with temps up in the 90s and uncomfortably sticky… I don’t mind the warmth but dislike the humidity unless in the pool. You know my prospecting season starts late August and lasts until freeze-up in November… so right now I can’t say what it’s been like further north. But I’ll guarantee the biting flies are horrendous about now in the bush.
Joanne and I are heading to the Appalachians for the first two weeks to scout around… gold and other minerals of interest near the Quebec / Maine border country… but nothing too serious with the wife along. Although we will break out our detectors to sample around… first trips to a far country are nearly always spent mostly getting acquainted with the area and looking for potential sites. The following trip there I expect we’ll get down to some serious nugget hunting.
I don’t own / never used the 4”X 6” elliptical for the TDI models, and can’t comment. Is the one-gram nugget you tested a good solid piece or does it have some “character”. That’ll make a difference Tom, and residential (your condo is where I presume you air tested) EMI will reduce sensitivity as well. The best course is to bury your test pieces (not your gold… use lead sinkers cut to whatever weights / size or shape) at suitable depths and test over those. Freshly buried targets will not react to a metal detector as well as similar size / depth targets that have naturally settled or occur in nature’s undisturbed ground, but using a testplot is still better than air tests for relative depth / sens testing. If you decide to check such targets with a VLF unit, do not expect them to read accurately on a target ID meter and that applies to any freshly buried target beyond a few inches depth regardless of ground mineral magnetic susceptible levels.
I have the 5” TDI “hockey puck” coil and it’s more sensitive than my 5” X 10” Razorback mono to sub-gram nuggets but doesn’t go quite as deep on larger stuff. I have lots of buried targets out in the patio, and the 5” round coil easily signals over a half-gram lead piece at 3 inches…I’m sure it’ll go deeper even on a disturbed ground target of that size, and certainly deeper on a naturally settled target in the ground.
For silver… where small target size doesn’t matter nearly so much to me as would be the case with gold… I prefer the small coils in high trash areas using the TDI’s GB control in combination with the tone control to eliminate a lot of the high conductors including most nails… by searching properly ground-balanced in the low conductive tone mode. The small coils work very well in high trash density areas using a very deliberate slow sweep speed to ferret out signals while acquiring best obtainable depths. This technique was used extensively again this past 2012 season, as illustrated in the photo below. In fact I spent far too much time digging very small stuff in one area where they’re plentiful… comparing the Pro against my F75 with respect to size vs depth in bad ground. Despite no interest in sub-oz silver, the nuggets invariably were loaded with good character… and it was not easy to walk away from such beautiful specimens regardless of the size.
The second photo is one of the first silver samples found two years back with the TDI Pro in tough magnetic susceptible ground… that I am certain could not be detected with a VLF unit. It won’t impress the goldhunters, but even at the lowly current silver prices it is still better than a kick in the pants. It doesn’t take many such modest finds to pay for the trip costs if you’re in the mood to sell… there’s been plenty of requests from buyers over the years... and an active buy / sell network in silver country.
Hope you’ve been enjoying the summer so far Tom… pleased to see your post here on the gold sub-forum… a few of the other former AMDS members have migrated here as well.
Jim.
