Hi legends. I recently got into fossicking and absolutely love it! I’ve found about a gram so far up the Arrow River. I’ve been considering getting myself a detector but have never owned or used one. I live in Arrowtown and spend a lot of time up the Arrow river, so am ideally looking for a relatively high frequency detector with manual ground balance. As I’m new to detecting I’m not really wanting to jump in the deep end and spend a thousands. Does anyone have anything for sale? Or can anyone recommend a detector that would target relatively small gold amongst the Arrow River’s crazy iron content?
Thanks so much!
hi Ive got a minelab eureka gold for sale i paid $3400 about 8 years ago asking $1200
Hi there Ryan, You couldn’t have picked a worse river to want to detect in, outside of the shotover & cardrona. Full of iron sand & iron stone “hot” rocks. Not to mention heaps of old timer rubbish. With a high frequency VLF detector, which are very good on small/tiny gold, the abundance of iron sand in these rivers will just continually overload it with false signals that will drive you insane & render the detector un workable. Even if you turn the sensitivity right down. What’s the point of turning the sensitivity right down & taking away the sensitivity to the small/tiny gold that you are after. Even the expensive big boy Pulse induction detectors get mucked around by the iron stone rocks & black sands. If you are new to detecting the tuning & adjustments that the PI detectors do have so you can ultra fine tune settings for the conditions is a huge head fuck. Nothing but LOTS of time out in the field is going to get you to begin to master that. We are quite lucky in NZ that our soils are very mild & that isn’t so much of an issue, until you get into these high iron sand concentration rivers. 12 Mile & 5 Mile Creeks aren’t too bad for iron sands.
These days modern detectors have gone away from manual ground balance & a VLF isn’t a good choice for the Arrow. Manual ground balance is in the older VLF’s. Pulse induction is your best bet for the Arrow, the likes of the Minelab GP & GPX series of PI detectors. Detecting in creeks & rivers you want the smallest possible coil too. Google & you tube are your friends. Go do some surfing. I can recommended Detector Prospector Forum for any & everything you will ever need or want to know about detectors & detecting. And I mean EVERYTHING. https://www.detectorprospector.com/
Not trying to rain on your parade, but that is the truth of it. Best bet is to have a PI & a high frequency VLF . Covering all avenues. The other side of the coin is that you will not be the first to swing a detector no matter where you go. That too is a hard cold fact. No gold is easy gold these days.
JW 
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Looks like Ryan has fallen off the planet. No reply to what I said. I also sent him a PM elaborating even more & offering more advice & a choice of detectors. Never heard from him. No reply, no thanks, Nothing. And you wonder why I get a bit grumpy when first time posters come on here asking for the world & then don’t even have the decency to reply, give a thanks or even acknowledge the advice & info given. Just takers & users. 
Where’s that whisky bottle?
JW
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