How do you tell how mineralized your soil is?

How do you tell how mineralized your soil is?

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This is a good question that I have asked about with no real answers
I once tied a large strong magnet to a rope and drug it around in a place I wanted to detect, with every pass it was covered with iron filings.
(was this mineralization?)

cliff490 said:

This is a good question that I have asked about with no real answers
I once tied a large strong magnet to a rope and drug it around in a place I wanted to detect, with every pass it was covered with iron filings.
(was this mineralization?)

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That is one kind of mineralization, the other kind is conductive salts. The two types, ferrous and conductive salts, usually coexist with each other and one or the other will be dominant in a specific area.

A Vaquero would be a good choice if you want to manually adjust ground balance.

Thanks Rudy;
Thats a good explanation

Cliff

cliff490 said:

Thanks Rudy;
Thats a good explanation

Cliff

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You are welcome Cliff. However, I was pressed for time and didn't finish what I wanted to say.

The explanation I gave you, only goes as far as telling you that the "ground phase" can spread across a wide range of phase angles --or VDI-- numbers if you'd rather think in those terms. But, it doesn't really tell you anything about how "strongly" mineralized the ground is.

For example, in the form of a thought experiment. Suppose you had a bucket of non-mineralized dirt and you mixed into it a couple of table spoons full of iron filings. If you had a detector able to display the ground phase (such as an MXT), you would get a ground phase reading in the ferrous range. But it wouldn't give you a clue as to how strongly mineralized your dirt bucket really is.

Light mineralization is not usually a problem for the detector.

Now imagine that you added 1 cup full of iron filings to the bucket and stirred it in well. You would still get approximately the same ferrous reading, but now you have a pretty strongly mineralized ground that is a challenge for the detector to "see" through.

Thanks again Rudy for the more in depth explanation.

Sorry Mojave didn't mean to hijack your thread
But this information has helped me/others understand mineralization.

Cliff

Mojave said:

Currently trying to decide on a Cibola, Vaquero, or DeLeon. I live in Southern California, and I have no idea how mineralized the ground is here. I'm sure it will change depending on the environment... whether I'm hunting backyards or I'm out in the desert somewhere. How do people know what their soil is like? Maybe I should just get the Vaquero to play it safe....

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It would be best to get something with ground adjust. To answer your main question: I take my preset detector and if I get weaker than usual responses I speed up the sweep speed and the signals usually get shorter and I know that I'm in the bad ground. I then slow down my sweep speed to hunt that area, giving the ground filters more time to adjust.