Unstable ground signal noise around ant nests

I have only recently begun prospecting in my spare time and us a 4500 here around at home here at Maldon in the central goldfields. My primary coil that I use is a 12inch NF adv elipt and most of the time I can get it to run generally quiet and smoothly except when I start going over areas that seem to be more heavily mineralised. I tend to be picking up a lot of false signals around these areas as a result and tend to balance out quite constantly. In the last two days I have picked up what I would consider nice signals near a couple of ants nests and found that it all became a bit frustrating because trying to determine the integrity of the signal versus the ground noise. I start digging and the target noise seems to spread all over the place. I might add that these signals were on the edges of old mullock heaps containing their fair share of quartz and highly mineralised rock. I can understand about increased ground noise fluctuations from high mineralisation but I was wondering if ant nests cause fluctuations in ground noise as well? ie. magnetic fields around nests similar to termites? (or does all this extra noise come under the shite happens rule?) Just interested and curious as to others comments please.

Mal

Get a Garrett Infinium.
You won't get anywhere near as much ground noise and you still pick up sub grammers from 0.1 gm and up. It won't have the sensitivity of your 4500 but at least you will be able to work the realy hot areas where the 4500 is troublsome. Some depth is better than no depth in hot ground. HEH,HEH,HEH.

Just thought I would toss that in to stir up the Minelabers.

Hi All
I think this may be a ground noise from the action of the ants creating tightley packed clay balls under the surface, try knocking the nest over & detect where the base used to be Im guessing you will get a signal, then move away a bit & test the ground do this over a couple of nests it will show a pattern, We have these hard clay balls up this way & they sound like good targets.
cheers
Lee

hi malkorm, you didnt tell us if your coil was in DD or mono mode? also didnt tell us what mode you were in on your 4500, normal, will continue to give you massive false noises, try enhance mode, ground balance again and again, make sure you are doing this properly. if noises are still there, dig like crazy before the ants get you ... kev

Ants have a tendency to use mineralised pebbles to make their homes with and then stack seeds and grasses down below which when burnt become extremely noisy to a detector, as Kevlorraine2 has said try using your 4500 in Enhance timings in combination with a Monoloop coil using Fixed Ground Balance (checking often though), this is the true power of the GPX detectors the ability to ignore the vast majority of ground noise whilst still signaling the nuggets missed by other machines.

JP

PS sometimes the smaller coils will be more problematic generating ground noise due to the extra sensitivity (especially to surface minerals, due to a denser field nearer the coil because of more windings) a shift to a larger coil will iron out some of this tendency if ground noise is still evident using Enhance. It might help forum members if you posted your settings used (Gain, timings etc) to get a clearer picture of what you are doing.

Hi All,
JP don't ants hord gold in the centre of the nest, you know the heaviest particles fall the furtherest, i would never leave a signal, in fact i would go back and get stuck into it before someone else gets it, wouldn't you JP.
Regards Ron

The ants concentrate iron in their nests.
Old Termite nests are the worst for giving a thumping signal, followed by sugar ant nests. I don't dig them anymore and just move on. The tell tale signs of the old nests are easily recognised after a scape, although some chunky base pieces from old termite nests (thousands of years old) are sometime at depth and you must dig until you see the pockmarked texture on the red/black chunk of the termite mound.

tributer

I have often noticed a lot of noise over ant nests. I thought it might have been because of all the air tunnels or something, but I am a techno idiot, so I am only guessing.
Cheers,
Jig.

Thanx for the advice and the sense of humour. Its still early days for my experience in operating the 4500 but I am currently working an old patch not far from home that is producing sub grammers for me each time I go out. (Small beginnings I know but its more about being in the bush enjoying the hobby and lifestyle)

I am running a 12" NF adv elipt solid coil
with the following settings

coil M
GB Fixed
Soil Enhance
Vol 12
GB type Gen
Special S/Smooth
Man tune usually set on 95 but may alter to 130+/- for the small targets
Motion slow
rx gain 12
audio deep
audio tone 50
stability 7
signal 19
target vol 14
response nml
tracking med
iron off

I would be interested to your thoughts about this setup. Generally this setup has been working very well for except over some of the old worked diggins ( the ones with the ants nests).

On the subject of settings.........I also have a 16"NF adv round in my kit. Should the settings be much different from above. I have dug a few extra holes the last couple of days because of what I thought were good signals to a depth down about 1ft on my patch. I have ended up refilling them because of mixed signals. Not used to hard work LOL . I GB very frequently. The sub grammers I have been digging up have all been what appears to be fresh ground at depth of no more than 6". I will definitely be going over the same patch with the 16incher NF. Can I expect any better deeper signal responses? In the meantime I will keep working out on the pick and shovel and hopefully get a little bit fitter.

Mal

PS. Ooops ....I was supposed to tell that both coils are monos

Mal

Gday Mal
If I can offer a suggestion, flip the switch from Special up to Enhance and reduce the Rx Gain down to somewhere around 8-10. The 4500 will run silky smooth around there. If the ground is reallly inoccuous you can run at the higher Rx gains but if it's just your normal mineralised ground then 12 may be a bit too high.
Sensitive smooth is just that but you also suffer from about 20% depth loss in that mode compared to Enhance. Normal is that much more again but you have to put up with a lot more ground noise.
cheers
Brett

Malkorm,
If you are running in "Enhance" sensitive smooth is not a function.
If you want to stabilise the machine you will need to select "Special" on the box then select "Sensitive Smooth" in the digital read out.

Peter

All you have to do is back off the Gain, 12 is way to high in the types of ground you are working. Keep this in mind, 8 is the comparative preset amount of Gain for the previous GP series, 15 is the maximum for the GPX-4500 so 12 is right up there. Think of it this way, you are using a VERY sensitive little Monoloop coil which due to its size and shape is very susceptible to swamping effect from heavy minerals on the surface of the ground, this is due to the amount of turns required to get the coil parameters right (smaller coils require more turns of wire larger coils less), this means the magnetic field near the windings is a lot stronger on the smaller coils (hence more sensitivity) so the Gain does not need to be lifted as much to bring the signal responses in, try backing off to 8 and see how the detector behaves on your area, at the same time also take a small nugget with you and try it on the noisy spots experimenting with the Gain comparing the response over the target and without the target.

It also might pay to run your detector in Normal Audio filter rather than the Deep (this is in the Audio filters section of the menu not the Deep search mode option on the front end cap), the Deep audio filter also has an increase in overall volume attached which can make the detector seem noisier, or conversely if you must run the high Gain levels but use the Quiet Audio filter instead of Deep or Normal, once again do comparative testing on a target on the ground that is giving you problems.

All the other settings on your detector are good, just remember with the Soil Timings switch if Enhance is selected Normal and Special are turned off (special has a number of timings within the Special heading in the menu).

Hope this helps,

JP

PS a lot of this is covered in our "SETA Project" DVD on the GPX-4500.

Thanx everybody for your wise words. Am learning heaps. Some things have just clicked into place with timings and gain etc. I will be back out again this arvo and give the machine a tweak or two and see how it behaves.

Mal

hi malkolm, hope you had some luck today, you should of had a lot of fun and learnt a lot by experiementing.
do yourself a favour and get that DVD "seta project" that jonathan porter told you about.
in that dvd you get actual footage of him finding and digging nuggets. detailed explanations of most all the knobs and dials you have to fiddle with.

you get HIS prefered settings that WORK in this anthill type country.(i use them most of the time)

explains the easy to see differences of SMOOTH compared to ENHANCE. the special modes of 4500.

another good revealation is the benefits of reverseing the signal response to INVERTED when you are looking for the deeper and bigger nuggets, but thats getting a bit more technical, and will not prevent you from finding deeper nuggets if you get rid of the noises by useing ENHANCE and keeping the rx gain at about 8.

a bit miffed when you say the TUNE reading is two definite numbers? are you tuneing the machine daily, and sometimes two and three times a day? the best auto tune spot will change several times a day. if not done you can end up with noises that you cant get rid of, or explain.

hope you are getting rewarded for your excess exercise ... kev

Gday


Its common to get signals from ant nests, I usually dont get too exicited about it as in the past I have dug about and it has turned out to be just ground noise from the collection of materials that the ants depostit there.

Sometimes you would swear that there is a piece of gold hidden there as the signal can be so good, Its tempting to have a bit of a dig at it but the ants tend to get a bit upset, the red ants here in WA get really pissed even when you walk on to their turf never mind banging away at it with your pick, their nest often cover several square metres and often you do not realise it straight away but your standing in the middle of it while doing this and then you start to feel the bites.

I found out the hard way that I am not elergic to ant stings having been stung muliple times, and having to do the "Lambada" while peeling off gear and clothes before they started to bite my nether regions, nothing more pathetic than watching a fat man dance is there , I was still picking them out of my clothes for twenty minutes or so after, but I have heard that some people are alergic and it could possibly be very bad for them but I dont know if it could be fatal or not?, anyway their nests are best left alone.

A mate found a nice specimen nugget in an ants nest so it is possible, others had most likely heard it and just put it down to ground noise and just walked away from it like I do.


cheers


stayyerAU

I went out yesty arvo again and reset the gain down a couple of notches to and upped the stabiliser a couple and things seemed to smooth out a lot more than my previous couple of days. Its a funny thing but I purchased JP's DVD set on the 4500 about 3 months ago and well before I got my machine. Never used a detector before and didn't really understand much about all the jargon and terminology etc. I have since watched it again a couple of times and the info is starting to sink in.....along with lots of swinging practise working on some good old ground. The trouble for me up to now in my short prospecting experience is that I have met a couple of so other prospectors out in the field who have done me the favour of giving me their recommended settings and this has only resulted in only adding more confusion instead of sticking to the script so to speak. I am still having my fair share of digging up my fair share of junk ( but interesting junk ) but hell yeah... the exercise has been a shot in the arm for my weight loss program LOL. Back to the ants..all the advices now makes more sense....I am still waving the wand over the nests but not as frequently....and you need eyes in the back of your head to watch out for the big 1 " long bullies ....they are the ones that I have a allergy to. One bite and I blow up like the Michellan Man. Its been great fun out there this week finding my first ever gold.

Mal

Good on you Malkorm, now you've had some success you may find yourself addicted to "the hunt" like a large number of us.

Regards Bill.

Congrats Mal !
Nice pieces, you lucky !@#$%&.
If you put a matchbox or a match etc. in amongst the nuggets we get to see how big they are.
Keep them coming, it encourages us all.
Cheers !

Good on ya Mal.

I knew there was still gold in Malden.

M8 I've found small nuggets in ants' nests so don't ignore 'em.

I hope you're running your coil as close to- or on the ground. No good waving it inches off the ground.

Put your bits in some Hydrochloric acid for a day or so to clean 'em up. Be careful with it though.

Robert

The little bit at the very top of the pic is about the size of a match head if that helps the perspective. I'm happy. Now I am beginning to see why you guys out there have so much fun. Its ADDICTIVE...

A wise man once told me....a fail to search is fail to find.


Mal

The old guys sometimes sampled ant hills to see if they had brought up any fines.

Alan

Just to add my two bobs bit...remember there are those people out there that think its funny to drop small shot down the hole of an ants nest... I have dug a couple of them out now...and there is no other way they can getdown there....

Also for cleaning gold I reckon u cant go past 'Allibrite' you get it from Supercheap Autos...

Hi, having read this topic before leaving for the goldfields i was sceptical when i got a nice signal from the side of an ants nest about 2wks ago. But luckily for me i took a scrape out of the side of the nest and out popped a nice little piece that went about 1.2g So maybe recheck those signals you were'nt sure about???

Well done on your first bits of gold. That's exciting. Keep them and the pictures coming.

Dicko..