I purchased the X-Terra 70 because it not only had an excellent coin and jewelry mode but because it also has a full blown excellent prospecting mode.I have done very well using it hunting for coins and jewelry but just before Christmas I had a chance to really see how it would do prospecting. I went to the Stanton,AZ gold fields around Rich Hill for a week. This was my first time in that area so most of the time was spent getting familiar with the area and the claims that I could hunt on. I did spend a fair amount of time nugget shooting and also dug a couple 5 gallon bucket full of dirt out of a friends glory hole.
While nugget shooting I found the usual small iron items like nails and boot tacks, plenty of bullet lead and shell casings. I found that some of the hot rocks sounded different that real targets. They had a ring tail sound as you passed the coil over them. There were others that sounded just like real targets but I found a way to use the threshold auto tune to determine if they were hot rocks or real targets. Then there were those that I had to dig to make sure
On the last day I was hunting a claim and spotted some decomposing bed rock along the edge and bottom of a wash. I had the X-Terra 70 in the prospecting mode and was using the High frequency 5x10 coil. I was using the stock iron mask settings and the sensitivity at 24. I auto ground balanced the detector and hunted in the tracking mode. I would place the coil on the bed rock and allow the detectors ground tracking to track to the bedrock. Then I would sweep over the cracks and crevices listing for any change in the threshold. If I heard a target I would switch the detector out of Track to keep it from tracking out the target. I worked very slowly and listened for very slight changes since some of the cracks were pretty deep. There was about 60 feet of exposed bed rock so it took a while to work it all at the speed I was going. Several times I thought I had found a nugget only to have it turn out to be a small piece of lead. Finally I hit pay dirt. I heard a weak signal over a crack. I took my crevice digging tool and cleaned out the crack and out popped a small elongated gold nugget. It was about 3 1/2" down in the crack and on edge. The nugget weighted slightly over 1/2 gram, was 7/16" long and 3/16" wide. The signal was not super strong but it was clear and repeatable.
[attachment 44415 AZNugget.5gramss.JPG]
The X-Terra 70 proved to be a good prospecting tool as well as a good coin and jewelry machine.
God Bless,
Smitty II
While nugget shooting I found the usual small iron items like nails and boot tacks, plenty of bullet lead and shell casings. I found that some of the hot rocks sounded different that real targets. They had a ring tail sound as you passed the coil over them. There were others that sounded just like real targets but I found a way to use the threshold auto tune to determine if they were hot rocks or real targets. Then there were those that I had to dig to make sure
On the last day I was hunting a claim and spotted some decomposing bed rock along the edge and bottom of a wash. I had the X-Terra 70 in the prospecting mode and was using the High frequency 5x10 coil. I was using the stock iron mask settings and the sensitivity at 24. I auto ground balanced the detector and hunted in the tracking mode. I would place the coil on the bed rock and allow the detectors ground tracking to track to the bedrock. Then I would sweep over the cracks and crevices listing for any change in the threshold. If I heard a target I would switch the detector out of Track to keep it from tracking out the target. I worked very slowly and listened for very slight changes since some of the cracks were pretty deep. There was about 60 feet of exposed bed rock so it took a while to work it all at the speed I was going. Several times I thought I had found a nugget only to have it turn out to be a small piece of lead. Finally I hit pay dirt. I heard a weak signal over a crack. I took my crevice digging tool and cleaned out the crack and out popped a small elongated gold nugget. It was about 3 1/2" down in the crack and on edge. The nugget weighted slightly over 1/2 gram, was 7/16" long and 3/16" wide. The signal was not super strong but it was clear and repeatable.
[attachment 44415 AZNugget.5gramss.JPG]
The X-Terra 70 proved to be a good prospecting tool as well as a good coin and jewelry machine.
God Bless,
Smitty II
