finding placer gold with the Etrac,,,

[grouser]

anyone have any luck locating any sized nuggets, anywhere,,, anytime ????

 

[Tom_in_CA]

The explorer series are not designed for nuggets. As you know, most nuggets found in nature are grain of rice sized, at the very biggest. Nuggets larger than that are very rare. In fact, a lot of nugget guys are litterally chasing pinhead and flake sized nuggets, with machines designed expressly for that purpose. The explorer, on the other hand, is designed for coin/relic/jewelry. And the goals of each venue are opposed to each other, when you think of it. A coin/relic/jewelry hunter doesn't necessarily want to hear every pushpin, birdshot, staple, etc.... And for a machine to get extreme depth on pinhead sized targets, it has to for-go iron disc. The coin/jewelry/relic guy doesn't want to for-go iron disc. The the various machines are designed, from the bottom up, for their express purpose.

There's been a few attempts to make detectors which can switch back & forth between tasks. But they excell in neither arena. There will be better coin machines, and there will be better nugget machines.

 

[reltolbert]

I can detect a 6 grain gold nugget with my E-Trac at 28 sensitivity using the Pro and the 6"x8" SEF coils @ 1"-2" deep.
I don't have a larger gold nugget to detect for, but I'm sure the coils would easily pick up on the increase in depth.

 

[D&P-OR]

grouser-----Speaking for myself---I've only known one guy that I come across out in the gold fields that ever found a nuggie "in the wild" with an Explorer (don't remember the size of the nugget).----Like somebody said here--the Explorers/Etracs are not designed for gold hunting (as great as they are for other hunting applications).-----There's an old timers saying---"if ya wanta hunt gold, get a gold machine"-----very true!----------------Del

 

[grouser]

thanks for the info gentlemen

 

[Mick in Dubbo]

Yeah. One of the guys in the club here nailed himself a gold nugget with his E-trac. I can't remember the size, but it was several grams found at about 8 inches, if I remember it correctly. He found that the E-trac handled the mineralised ground very well. There is also another club member who took his Quattro out onto the gold fields with other club hunters using PI machines. Although he didn't find gold for himself, he was able to pinpoint a number of targets that the guys with their GPX's were having trouble isolating. They were all pretty impressed. That said, they are not the most sensitive detectors on the market for gold hunting, but they do seem to handle the ground all right though.
mick Evans.

 

[John]

The Etrac and Explorers are not designed for nugget hunting, but if the nugget is large enough you will find one but be prepared to dig everything. It is best to use a detector designed for nuggets for example on my MXT I have found nuggets between -30 to +50 vdi. Normally I would ignore something as low as -30 but it came up as only 10% iron probability in prospecting mode so I dug it up. My wife found a small nugget with her 1280X aquanaut near Folsom lake a few years ago and that thing runs at 2.4 khz, she just runs the disc really low for gold rings so I guess anything is possible when you are determined.