Nuggets of News Blog 

If you've been prospecting for gold using a pan, sluice, highbanker or other traditional piece of equipment, there's another tool you may want to consider— a metal detector. Gold detectors are not necessarily higher in cost than an all-purpose detector, but they are built with a higher sensitivity to pinpointing pieces of gold, and have better ground balancing and discrimination abilities.   

If you're not familiar with metal detecting, the first thing you should know is that your detector does not actually detect metal directly. It detects magnetic fields. When switched on, your VLF (very low frequency) detector first creates a magnetic field and energizes anything in the ground that responds to a magnetic field. Next, your detector seeks to find a magnetic field that has a response to its initial magnetic field. Because metals conduct electricity, they respond to a magnetic field and generate a small magnetic field of their own. Detectors detect the secondary magnetic field that conductive targets create whey they are energized by the first magnetic field sent into the ground by your detector. In general, the larger the metallic target, the larger and longer and stronger its magnetic response will be.

PI (pulse induction) detectors work a bit differently by putting magnetic field energy into the ground and then switching off and waiting a very short period before they start to look for a response. This makes them better at handling ground mineralization than a VLF detector because during that short delay the magnetic response of iron trash minerals that you don't want to find dies out, but the signal from tiny bits of buried gold does, too. VLF detectors are more sensitive to finding the smallest bits of gold, but do not as easily cancel out ground mineralization.

Read more how-to info and articles here.