By: Alan Mash

The Garrett Infinium is a pulse induction (PI) metal detector and differs greatly from the standard VLF machine that is more frequent and abundant in the metal detecting industry. It is unique because the iron mineralization that it comes across is mostly ignored. Just the fact that pulse induction in general has this ability already puts you ahead of the game when you search for gold nuggets.

A standard VLF (very low frequency) detector itself can be built for the gold fields are still very noisy in hot iron infested soil, even if it has an aggressive ground tracking circuitry. When I started with the Infinium for the nugget game, I noticed a huge difference in my ability and mental process as my ears were not bombarded by ground noise through my headphones which lead me to detect longer. Being able to detect longer also increased my odds of coming across some gold nuggets that my detector will respond to.

I detected one day for 6 hours before I stumbled upon on a 1/4 oz gold nugget. My body was tired as I walked a few miles while working the area with my machine, but my ears and my mind still sharp after detecting that long, hearing just a nice emerging tone that never wavered as the Infinium came upon a nice piece of gold. That was refreshing as my switch to pulse induction seemed to be paying off.

My Infinium handled every bit of hot iron infested ground mineralization that it came accross. A VLF machine is so affected by these extreme minerals that you might not hear the nugget under the coil as it could just be ground noise or it could be a desirable target. It can be hard to discern sometimes with a lot of audio signals coming at you in the headphones with a VLF. It can be done with many hours of practice, but a pulse induction detector cuts the learning curve time down a bit so you can concentrate on the terrain features and looking for gold.

Equipped with mono coils the Infinium LS (land and sea) has handled the hot soil very well and I rarely needed to remove them and switch back the DD coils, the DD’s handle hot ground a bit better, but are little less sensitive to small gold nuggets. When I do I use the DD coils, it was for old mine shaft walls looking for ore veins or small pockets of gold left behind by the past miners who dug the tunnels.

This machine is very powerful and has great depth at targets from about one gram in size and larger. Smaller gold are still detectable, but depth is lost, since the elements are very small. My smallest piece of gold was .3 grams at 1.5 inches and another piece weighing .4 gram at 2.5 inches depth. As you can see the Infinium snags these little nuggets, but other manufacturers of metal detectors such as the Minelab GPX Pulse Induction series machines will pick sub .1 gram gold nuggets. But you will pay $5000 for these machines. If you are on a budget, the Infinium is the detector for you.

I paid $1062 for my Garrett Infinium and I paid for it with gold nuggets from Northern California in 3 months with it. I would say that if I give a percentage of increasing my chances for finding these rare minerals in nature by switching to pulse induction, and with the Infinium in particular, I would say a 50% increase in odds over a VLF machine in finding gold nuggets.

The Garrett Infinium is a great bang for the buck while using it for electronic prospecting. Gold is usually found with a lot of iron near or around it. This machine will help you more easily to find it in its alluvial and elluvial form and even if you come across it in its natural state as in the pocket or vein, this machine will sniff it out.

Tags: How is the Garrett Infinium for Prospecting Garrett Infinium for Nugget Hunting