Gold detecting and listening and hearing faint signals

Hi,

Mostly a training video that might assist the new (detector) prospector.

I read some reporting here that they have been out detecting, and have found trash and the likes - but no gold has been found.

It is a late release instructional video according to the topic (July 2019) that wasn't available when I started.

It may help, illuminating what you might be doing wrong, or unknowingly, or have not been trained for - to help get your gold finds up.

[video=480,360]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y6rB4EdXsc[/video]

Cheers stevewilko
p.s. I am not affiliated with the site nor author in any way.
I just thought it had merit because it is not the usual 'look at what I dug up' video.
Any infringement of any rules - Mods please remove. Thank you.

G'day

Excellent instructional video for the new gold detectorist, many people start out with detectors searching beaches and parks, just like I did, and like the man said you train your ears for the loud positive signals that you mostly recognize as coins and avoid the feint iffy ones that you think are most likely trash, when I first started detecting for gold I did exactly that and must have walked over dozens of gold signals that I just thought might have been trash, my first nugget was a 7.6 gram piece that I still have to this day, anyway it was shallow and loud and sounded just like a coin so I picked it up and it turned out to be a nugget, after awhile I realised that the best idea was to dig and investigate everything I heard, and that's when I started making consistent gold finds.

In coin hunting depending on the area you are working you also come to realise also that feint targets can of course be deeply buried coins, as I primarily hunt pre-decimal coins I will always try to investigate these signals, as many park areas were top dressed with sand in the early days to help improve the grass some targets can be very deep, when hunting gold nuggets can be much the same in worked areas, with the soil being turned over and such, I have found hundreds of nuggets over the years and many were very feint and iffy signals that could easily have not been recognised at all, but as the man said you have to train your ears to that subtle change in the threshold, and later with more experience you will also sometimes dig a spot simply because you think that you might have heard something, I call these sub signals that for some reason are not audible but at the same time there's still something that alerts you that there is a target there.

cheers

stayyerAU

That last part of StayyerAU's post is spot on.

Don't just dig signals. Dig anything that is repeatable, and often times it's almost like a repeatable nothing at all, just something different even though there is no noticeable alteration of the threshold.

Steve that's a great series of videos. By the look of that his book might be a good read as well.

G'day

I did look into the phenomenon of digging target signals that you can perceive but cant really hear some time back but forgot about it all until now, these are called infrasounds and are below what was considered the lower end of human hearing range of 20Hz, the normal range of a human hearing they thought was 20Hz to 20kHz, but research has shown that in some cases we can hear below the 20 Hz range, research still continues and it involves things like people being effected by low frequency sounds that are produced by wind farms at the low end of 16Hz, many animals also communicate with low frequency sound like elephants.

Most of these low sounds we are probably hearing all the time but don't readily recognize what they are or where they are coming from, but if you sometimes feel agitated and uncomfortable in a place for no apparent reason then its probably due to these low frequency sounds, as we get older we lose our ability to hear the higher frequencies, and I know in my own case that is correct as the missus uses 19 kHz which I cant hear anymore, but as we lose our ability to hear the higher frequencies maybe our perceptiveness to the lower frequencies might improve to help compensate for the high end loss?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15273023

cheers

stayyerAU

With all due respect Stayer, there's no way that low wattage metal detector circuitry, much less the small speakers/headphones used, could possibly produce any infrasound frequencies. It takes lots of amplifier power and big, heavy subwoofers to get down that low:



(From https://wiki.seg.org/wiki/Infrasound)

G'Day Grubstake

Its purely speculation, I wasn't saying it was an absolute fact but simply trying to look at answers behind a phenomenon, but the fact remains that sometimes people are able to detect the presence of a nugget with a detector when there is no audible target response, I have done it many times myself and I know of others that have also done the same, there is obviously something going on that defies correct description, but as we already know we all share the same basic physiology but some people are just more in tune to certain things than others are?

cheers

stayyerAU