Nugget Finder Advantage Coils - Day Trip with Pics

Fred takes an opportunity to examine an exposed reef of quartz on the roadside.

First of all, let me apologize for the picture and color quality. My usual camera is in for service and a repair and I grabbed an older IXUS camera... which had been placed a little too close to my Super Magnets.

I took up the offer to pop out with the Fred, the President of the local detecting club to explore a couple of areas were were both researching on the way through Trunkey & Tuena, in NSW on Sunday. I found myself with a free day at very short notice and called to say I'd be happy get out for the day since the weather was warming at last.

On the way along the road between the towns, we stopped numerous times to take the occasional picture and to examine the ground minerals. We even stopped to examine an echidna which rambled across the road in front of us.



A friendly echidna who did not want his belly scratched.

A visit to the the local pub gave us an opportunity to chat with the locals and to obtain information on local prospectors and we managed to take in some lunch and obtain fresh water before we moved on. There was an abundance of evidence showing digging activity (both recent and ancient) along either side of the road wherever we went and we stopped to admire the many numerous quartz blows, many of which had been broken apart by earlier generations of prospectors.



Scattered chunks of quartz as far as the eye could see.

Fresh roadkills warned us to remain alert as we drove. Quite a few kangaroos were cutting in front of the car at times and although we avoided any collisions, rain falling in the early evening ensured that we killed a lot of frogs - which couldn't be avoided and made me feel a little bad for them. Fred spotted some diggings on the side of the road and we pulled off onto a track to investigate and I picked up a fragment of hand-painted ceramic that was of a style common several centuries ago. I liked that a figure of a woman and young child can be seen at the top of the shard. It was too thick to have been part of a plate and my wife Rena later suggested that it showed an indication of being from a hand-basin. I suspect that this was from the 1700's and had been brought to Australia from England or possibly Ireland during the early days of the Gold Rush.



A fragment of a painted Ceramic basin - left behind in the 1800's but probably much earlier in origin.

There was plenty of diggings right on the side of the road. Some were the results of echidnas tearing up the local termite mounds but other evidence showed shovels had been used to extract a lot of dirt from the walls of creeks and natural water courses. The usual modern trash littered the ground. From beer bottles to unfilled holes. A short drive from there and we were at Trunkey. I read once that the district was named after a local prospector who went by that name... due to his large nose, if I recall the story correctly.





The popular Trunkey Creek Pub at the Black Stump Hotel.

The Hamburgers and Chicken Schnitzel at the Trunkey Creek Pub were actually quite nice, with fresh vegetables, crisp salad and hot chips. I took some pictures and obtained local information and then replenished my drinking water. Then we proceeded down towards Goulburn to explore some areas we'd been interested in on the maps. I suspected something was wrong with the camera but there was nothing I could do at the time. I had to correct most of the pictures here before uploading them and they're still rather dark and desaturated.

Eventually we arrived at the area which we had been curious to research for future visits but it was getting late in the afternoon and clouds had moved in. The weather forecast was for strong winds and late showers and we were not disappointed (sarcasm). We drove offroad and into the bushland for a couple of kilometers before stopping. Finding the right spot to stop and detect was not as simple as it sounds because Fred wasn't keen in digging any place that was devoid of quartz. I think quite a few prospectors are told not to bother digging where there's little or no quartz on the ground and whilst quartz is a good indicator for finding Gold, in many locations the gold is stripped of quartz and redeposited elsewhere. Sometimes there's no obvious quartz on the ground at all. Much of the Gold in North America is found in locations far from the host rocks and this happens here as well. It's one of those things that you sometimes need to research before visiting an area and a lack of quartz indicators isn't too big a deal. But as I was speaking to Fred about this, I spotted a large chunk of white quartz between his shoes and he suddenly seemed comfortable with the idea of detecting there.





The rather large 24x12" NuggetFinder Advantage Elliptical Monoloop coil.

No sooner had I
unpacked the detector and fitted the coils for a few photographs, the wind began to pick up.
I swung the larger 24x12" Advantage Coil and found it was responding too much to the metal on my person and in my pack. The storm made it unstable as any other large coil tends to be in such events. I swapped coils in the light rain and put on the 14x9" Advantage coil... which was smaller and somewhat lighter. As soon as I had fitted a coil, the rain began to drop in earnest. At first it was
just a light spatter. But by the time I'd taken several pictures and
had tuned the detector, the rain came down in buckets and the light
began to fail. We disassembled our gear, jumped back in the 4x4 and off
we went again to return home. The rain brought frogs out onto the road in the hundreds and, sadly, many a frog was crushed on the long drive back to Bathurst.





Closeup of the smaller 14x9" NuggetFinder Advantage coil with Fred's mini-nugget... just 0.17grams in weight.

Fred had a small sub-gram bit of gold (a micro-nugget) that he wanted me to test with the Advantage 14" coil. He threw his plastic 35mm film canister on the ground in front of me and asked me to scan it. Inside was a TINY little bit of gold that was 0.17 grams. Even in the arcing storm blowing up around us, the 14" coil howled whenever the bit of gold came near. It's a shame that it was sprinkling at the time because I'd have liked to have detected the area carefully for native gold. Air tests are usually pointless unless you want to compare the general strength of one coil to another. With so many variables in play concerning coils, nugget shapes and sizes, soil types etc, air tests are not really going to be very scientific in most instances. But to see the detector in default settings responding so brightly to such a tiny bit of gold during a thunderstorm, it was pretty cool and something of an eye opener. I think the gold responded at a good 6 inches or more from the coil. It was much more sensitive than the 11" DD Minelab stock coil - although that was to be expected simply because the monoloops respond better to smaller gold than the DD coil of a similar size.

I like the Minelab Commander Coils simply because they perform well and they're reliable. But I like to buy and try new coils from time to time and I'd been following the progress of the new NuggetFinder Advantage coils prior to their release. Some things worth noticing about the new coils are apparently as follows:

NuggetFinder Advantage Coils
* Full 2 Year Warranty
* Stronger UV Resistance
* Stronger ABS Plastic (instead of Fiberglass)
* Water Resistant Design - to approximately .5 metres
* Stronger Immunity to EMI
* New, Epoxy Reinforced Shaft Mounting Brackets
* Enhanced Sensitivity

These new NuggetFinder Advantage coils are replacing the older, light-grey coils from the same manufacturer and will suit all detectors. They appear to be very similar to the Coiltek Golstalker coils in terms of sensitivity. When I ran both a NuggetFinder Advantage (14x9" Monoloop) alongside a Coiltek Goldstalker (14x9" Monoloop) in a bench-test and found that the Advantage coil was more immune to EMI in the area that I tested it. The difference was noticeable although both coils are quite similar in most respects. Users of the older NuggetFinder coils will attest to just how popular and effective the original coils are in some locations.

There's a few members of this board using these new coils, including Jonathan Porter - and he did quite well with them in WA recently. I'm hoping to test out the 16" Round Advantage (also one of the coils JP is using) in a few days on a new property near Hill End that was considered very rich in past years. So far i really like them and the 14x9" Advantage will probably be my general search-coil for the time being. They almost make the GPX detectors feel brand new again.

Cheers,

Marco