A few small bits...

[trinityau]

Hello all, I got out for a late afternoon hunt today. A friends son has had some classes here in the Redding area. He wanted to go out and detect after class today, so we did. After picking me up we headed to a small strip of BLM land. There is a small dry wash that runs down one side of the area and we started the hunt at this wash. Within minutes I had a small piece and a few minutes later he had found a small one also. We detected for a few hours before the sun started going down. We both got three more small pieces of gold. I only have pictures of my four little nuggets. He may post his at a later time. I was using the GB Pro and he was using a GBII. I may go back in the morning and hit that same wash a bit more. Thanks, TRINITYAU/RAYMILLS

[Ccarson]

Hey Trinityau do u think the Minelab eureka would hit on gold that size ?

[trinityau]

Hello Ccarson, in a word, yes. I used a Eureka for many years when it first came out. Ground conditions and coil size to me are factors with the Eureka. I almost always ran mine in the 60 mode. I found that I got just about the same signal on larger targets at depth with the 60 freq as the other two modes/freq. The Eureka may be a bit slower on the smaller targets, sub-grain, than the GBII, GB Pro, on some surfaces. It has its place however on teeny tiny gold that is on a flat surface and in hotter ground than the GBII can handle. I went to the Eureka when I could not ground balance over some soils I have here in the Northstate while using the GBII. The Eureka picked right up where the GBII stopped operating on the Serpentine bedrock. I used mine right up till a few years ago when the GB Pro came out.

A few bad points to me concerning the Eureka Gold would have to be the lack of a smaller more effficient coil. I had always wished that Minelab would have come out with a smaller eliptical coil for the Eureka similar to the GBII.I went through several units and the same problems always came up. The control box at some point in time will have to be modified as to how it is secured to the handle. After quite a bit of use the control box will not stay tight. The point where the coil power cord connects to the control box was always giving problems. The adjusting knobs and flip switches were always getting loose. These problems occurred after lots of use and I ran mine into the ground. I called Minelab many times back then and they never made a modification to the Eureka Gold that I know of. The last few years I used mine I had the control box chest mounted and just swung the coil/stick. This is a very nice option and worked well for me.

There are some areas where I found lots of gold over the years with my 3000 and was happy with that, however, probably 90 per cent of those nuggets could have been found with the Eureka Gold. I have found sub-grainers at inches and pulled nuggets at sixteen inches that were two to ten pennyweight. Yes, it is still a good unit, I might even get me another one to play with. These are my opinions, TRINITYAU/RAYMILLS

[oldies1955]

Hey Ray:
Congrats
Glad your getting out and finding some gold.

All im finding right now are bullets and pieces of old metal.

But! at least I know im in virgin washes

Thanks for posting.

Tom H.

[Ccarson]

Thanks for the info Trinityau. I'm heading up to slate creek up in the north yuba county. Maybe next month do you think it will do ok up there.