"mineral hunting" - your experience/opinions

I recently acquired, for a fun project, a c.1977 vintage Whites blue box machine. It's a CoinMaster 2 / DH, a hip-mount version of the 2 /D. It's a TR machine, with discrimination, and a 'regular' 8" concentric IB search-coil.
Like this one:
[detecteurmetaux2.blogspot.com]

I've successfully brought the thing back to life, and have been reading the manual to work out it's unusual operating modes. I'm curious about it's ability to work in some kind of 'reversed discrimination' mode, where it doesn't respond to non-ferrous targets, but will pick up ferrous ones, and changes in ground signal. The manual states this can be used for 'mineral hunting'.

So, my question: Have any of you experienced folks ever used this kind of hunting? Does it have any special niche ... meteorites, etc?
Anyone seen anything related on any of the other detecting (or other) forums? I see 'FindMall' forum has a 'rocks and minerals' sub-forum, but no obvious mentions of electronic searching.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/17/2018 11:37AM by Pimento.

Calling Tom/Keith.

Might have been designed for locating black sand for prospecting or panning gold???

Definitely be interesting to test with meteorites though!

I speculate that the intent was for gold-laden black sand locating.

Thanks for the thoughts. It does seem that black sand locating in streams is a potential use. And I read that Whites haven't abandoned this idea, the GMT has a mode for finding black sand:
[www.mindat.org]

On a mineral hunters forum, there is a bit of chat about detector use. Most of it related to 'normal' detector operation, looking for things that have some metallic response, though black sand is mentioned:
[www.mindat.org]

When it's all fully commissioned, I'll have to have a play with this mode.

[ Side note: I have to say I'm impressed by the machine's frugal power consumption. It actually runs on 6 x AA cells (=9 volts) and I thought it may be a power-hog. But it only consumes 7 mA, meaning 24+ hours runtime on a little PP3. No need for anything more.]

Not sure if its a similar type of setup,but if i recall correctly Red Heat xd17 machines made by Vic Fiveash who passed away back in 2007,some of his machines had a 'reversed discrimination' setup,was just about too buy one of his detector but alas he passed away and did not fancy being stuck with a machine that could not be repaired.

The 'reversed discrimination' set was a very interesting setup and could confuse you,especially after how the normal discrimination setup is used.