A
Anonymous
Guest
Hi,
I recently made a gold nugget hunting trip to Ganes Creek, Alaska. I have visited the mine before, and so am very familiar with what makes for success at finding gold there.
At Ganes you are looking for large gold nuggets in miles of tailing piles. The ground mineralization is very low, but the amount of iron and steel junk in the old tailings is very high. So generally at Ganes what has worked for me is to cover as much ground as possible with a good iron discriminating detector. The thing I want to avoid is wasting huge amounts of time digging junk targets.
The MXT has been a proven winner at Ganes Creek, both for myself in the past, and for others more recently. So it is the machine I choose to be my main hunting unit for this trip. It's 15 kHz frequency, excellent automatic ground tracking, and exceptional discrimination system (for a nugget machine) make it a great unit for the particular set of conditions at Ganes Creek.
So I had the detector, but that other thing I wanted was ground coverage. Another great thing about the MXT is not only that White's has a very good coil selection for it, but because of it's popularity and the fact that it shares coils with the DFX other companies have jumped in with accessory coils. The MXT has one of the best coil selections of any VLF detector on the market at this time.
The largest I know of is the 18" DD eXcelerator coil. This coil is an open spoke design, and so relatively light for it's size. I figured the 18" swath it covers with every sweep would be of great use at Ganes Creek compared to the stock 9.5" coil. The area at Ganes is huge, and the nuggets few and far between, so covering lots of ground is a key to success.
I had little time left before departing for Ganes, but did give the coil a few minutes use at a local beach just to make sure it worked at all. It ground balanced fine even at high gain and to my surprise seemed quite sensitive to smaller items than I had expected. As with all large DD coils pinpointing was tougher than normal but for nugget detecting that is not much of an issue, as you can just go ahead and dig big holes. The coil was stable and I knocked it around a bit, and found it to be stable and relatively resistant to false signals.
Anyway, let's cut to Ganes Creek. My friend Todd also got the 18" coil for his MXT for this trip, and he went out the very first evening the day of arrival and hits a 5.3 oz specimen in the cobble piles! So one of the first nuggets found in the trip, and one of the largest, was found with the MXT/18" eXcelerator combo.
<img src="http://www.akmining.com/ganes/todd53.jpg" alt="" />
Next morning I had the 18" on my MXT, and we headed back down to where Todd had found that big chunk of gold and quartz. It looked to be a broken piece of a much larger specimen and so Todd was determined to find the other parts of it. So we both started scanning away, and within a few minutes Todd finds a .33 oz nugget.
A short while later I found a nice .53 oz slug of pretty solid gold. I like those solid gold pieces! It was a faint signal at a fairly respectable depth, But then our luck petered out, and we continued on for some time with no finds. So I wandered of rather randomly just scanning away. Finally, many hours later I hit a very nice .73 oz nugget that was practically on the surface.
<img src="http://www.akmining.com/ganes/ex18.jpg" alt="" />
The coil is not that heavy for an 18" coil, but it is plenty heavy when out there on the end of the MXT. I used a harness and bungee, and with the bungee attached at the "S" curve of the rod assembly the unit was fairly well balanced. But I'm an aggressive detectorist and when nugget detecting can't resist side hills and other uneven terrain. The 18" coil was working my arm hard, and by the end of the afternoon my arm and back were really feeling the strain. Towards the end I stayed on flat ground and basically just swung my body as my arm was about shot.
End result is I went back down to a smaller 12" coil for the MXT. The 18" coil worked well, and Todd continued to use his. But my particular hunting style at Ganes Creek involves what I call "mountain goat detecting". Up the hills, down the hills, into the gullies, and through the brush. If I were to concentrate on the more level and wide open areas the 18" coil would be the only way to go. But as Ganes has been hunted by many people I decided to concentrate on harder to detect areas. Which paid off as along with a little luck I netted just shy of 7 ounces of gold on the trip and more actual nugget finds than anyone else that week.
I can't comment on how the coil would do in more severe mineralization, but for areas with lower mineralization the coil covers huge amounts of ground, and reaches depths usually associated with Pulse Induction (PI) detectors. The deepest target I dug was at just over two feet (a steel punch plate) and Todd chased on signal to over four feet before the hole caved in and he gave up. It was probably a steel drum but as it was in the area where he found his big specimen he was convinced he might be on the way down to a 50 oz nugget. That may seem optimistic, but the largest chunk found at Ganes this summer weighed over 88 oz, so you never know. Deep targets you would just assume are junk elsewhere could actually prove to be a huge gold nugget at Ganes Creek.
Bottom line is the 18" eXcelerator coil is very good product. Although I only used it the one day, it more than paid for itself and I will use it in the future. Like many very small or very large coils it is a niche coil, not the one you use every day. My only concern is the weight, and anyone getting this coil better get a bungee setup for anything more than very short use. I do know the coil now has me interested in the 14" version, as it may give me that little extra over the 12" coil but still not be as tiring as the 18" coil for long hours of use.
Steve Herschbach
I recently made a gold nugget hunting trip to Ganes Creek, Alaska. I have visited the mine before, and so am very familiar with what makes for success at finding gold there.
At Ganes you are looking for large gold nuggets in miles of tailing piles. The ground mineralization is very low, but the amount of iron and steel junk in the old tailings is very high. So generally at Ganes what has worked for me is to cover as much ground as possible with a good iron discriminating detector. The thing I want to avoid is wasting huge amounts of time digging junk targets.
The MXT has been a proven winner at Ganes Creek, both for myself in the past, and for others more recently. So it is the machine I choose to be my main hunting unit for this trip. It's 15 kHz frequency, excellent automatic ground tracking, and exceptional discrimination system (for a nugget machine) make it a great unit for the particular set of conditions at Ganes Creek.
So I had the detector, but that other thing I wanted was ground coverage. Another great thing about the MXT is not only that White's has a very good coil selection for it, but because of it's popularity and the fact that it shares coils with the DFX other companies have jumped in with accessory coils. The MXT has one of the best coil selections of any VLF detector on the market at this time.
The largest I know of is the 18" DD eXcelerator coil. This coil is an open spoke design, and so relatively light for it's size. I figured the 18" swath it covers with every sweep would be of great use at Ganes Creek compared to the stock 9.5" coil. The area at Ganes is huge, and the nuggets few and far between, so covering lots of ground is a key to success.
I had little time left before departing for Ganes, but did give the coil a few minutes use at a local beach just to make sure it worked at all. It ground balanced fine even at high gain and to my surprise seemed quite sensitive to smaller items than I had expected. As with all large DD coils pinpointing was tougher than normal but for nugget detecting that is not much of an issue, as you can just go ahead and dig big holes. The coil was stable and I knocked it around a bit, and found it to be stable and relatively resistant to false signals.
Anyway, let's cut to Ganes Creek. My friend Todd also got the 18" coil for his MXT for this trip, and he went out the very first evening the day of arrival and hits a 5.3 oz specimen in the cobble piles! So one of the first nuggets found in the trip, and one of the largest, was found with the MXT/18" eXcelerator combo.
<img src="http://www.akmining.com/ganes/todd53.jpg" alt="" />
Next morning I had the 18" on my MXT, and we headed back down to where Todd had found that big chunk of gold and quartz. It looked to be a broken piece of a much larger specimen and so Todd was determined to find the other parts of it. So we both started scanning away, and within a few minutes Todd finds a .33 oz nugget.
A short while later I found a nice .53 oz slug of pretty solid gold. I like those solid gold pieces! It was a faint signal at a fairly respectable depth, But then our luck petered out, and we continued on for some time with no finds. So I wandered of rather randomly just scanning away. Finally, many hours later I hit a very nice .73 oz nugget that was practically on the surface.
<img src="http://www.akmining.com/ganes/ex18.jpg" alt="" />
The coil is not that heavy for an 18" coil, but it is plenty heavy when out there on the end of the MXT. I used a harness and bungee, and with the bungee attached at the "S" curve of the rod assembly the unit was fairly well balanced. But I'm an aggressive detectorist and when nugget detecting can't resist side hills and other uneven terrain. The 18" coil was working my arm hard, and by the end of the afternoon my arm and back were really feeling the strain. Towards the end I stayed on flat ground and basically just swung my body as my arm was about shot.
End result is I went back down to a smaller 12" coil for the MXT. The 18" coil worked well, and Todd continued to use his. But my particular hunting style at Ganes Creek involves what I call "mountain goat detecting". Up the hills, down the hills, into the gullies, and through the brush. If I were to concentrate on the more level and wide open areas the 18" coil would be the only way to go. But as Ganes has been hunted by many people I decided to concentrate on harder to detect areas. Which paid off as along with a little luck I netted just shy of 7 ounces of gold on the trip and more actual nugget finds than anyone else that week.
I can't comment on how the coil would do in more severe mineralization, but for areas with lower mineralization the coil covers huge amounts of ground, and reaches depths usually associated with Pulse Induction (PI) detectors. The deepest target I dug was at just over two feet (a steel punch plate) and Todd chased on signal to over four feet before the hole caved in and he gave up. It was probably a steel drum but as it was in the area where he found his big specimen he was convinced he might be on the way down to a 50 oz nugget. That may seem optimistic, but the largest chunk found at Ganes this summer weighed over 88 oz, so you never know. Deep targets you would just assume are junk elsewhere could actually prove to be a huge gold nugget at Ganes Creek.
Bottom line is the 18" eXcelerator coil is very good product. Although I only used it the one day, it more than paid for itself and I will use it in the future. Like many very small or very large coils it is a niche coil, not the one you use every day. My only concern is the weight, and anyone getting this coil better get a bungee setup for anything more than very short use. I do know the coil now has me interested in the 14" version, as it may give me that little extra over the 12" coil but still not be as tiring as the 18" coil for long hours of use.
Steve Herschbach