Grid Patterns

Looking in grid patterns is a technique that has demonstrated to do well in field prospecting when searching for veins. It gives you the chance of getting near a vein or another type of deposit from a couple different directions, while helping you to avoid the possibility of walking parallel to a vein but never actually getting to it or crossing it. You should place a crisscross pattern and sweet the search coil across it in broad and even strokes. 

If you can we recommend you use a detector that has a non-motion all metal mode, balanced to the mineralization of the ground. It is also useful if your detector provides manual audio tuning. You should start by walking in a straight line but very slowly while scanning a wide area with the search coil in front of you. As soon as you come to the end of one of the lines, turn and walk a parallel path in the opposite direction at around ten feet from the first path you walked. Keep on going until you have covered the whole area that was chosen. You should then do this procedure again only now you should walk parallel ways at ninety-degree angles to the first paths. This is how you will have completed the fixed crisscross pattern area search.

If the sound of your detector starts to sound or if the meter indicates there is increase while you are scanning, you should check the intensity and how long the increase lasts. It is possible that you have located a vein or ore pocket underneath you.

The other possibility is that your detector might have changed its tuning due to atmospheric conditions, because of interference, etc. Avoid touching the controls though. Instead you should go back to that point where you were scanning before you became aware there was an increase. If the speaker or meter goes back to the last level, it means the detectors response was due to conditions in the ground and not because there was a problem with the detector.  

You should keep on retracing your steps. When you reach the place where the sound changed, you should notice that it changes again if you are detecting an ore or pocket. As you keep on walking, be very attentive to the audio responses of the detector. These should either enhance more or drop off to the starting tuning level. If the responses start increasing it means the ores are enlarging. When the responses go back to the beginning point again it generally means you walked over or past the ore deposit. Here you will want to map the deposits or veins. If you have found a number of them, write down where they cross each other under the surface.

After you have found ore that can be detected, make out their nature by using your detector in the discriminate mode. When the detector is in this mode it should tell whether the deposit is mainly iron or if it is mainly non-ferrous metal. Veins interlace each other under the surface, and a vein of gold might be divided by various iron veins. The location of these veins can be found quite precisely if you pay a lot of attention to the responses your detector gives you. You will additionally get positive metallic signals from heavy pockets of magnetic black sand. Due to the fact that these pockets usually have gold in them, they are worth checking out.