Here are some outstanding questions I have on Gold detecting from the Daylesford expedition:

My Fisher Gold Bug Pro settings for pretty much the entire expedition were gain at 11 o'clock, threshold at either 11 or 12 o'clock.  I liked to detect with a small constant audio tone. I was very careful to ground balance using Ground Grab often.

1. What happens to the ground phase when gold is present? Increases or decreases?

2. In hot ground should I ground balance to hot rocks?

3. What features should be detected first?
     - ie old dried up creeks
     - bush areas near mine shafts?
     - compacted areas of soil full of rocks in places like pine forests?
     - areas with lots of quartz sitting on the ground?
     - areas with lots of hot rocks sitting on the ground?
     - areas with highly magnetised rocks and soil?
     - areas next to tree trunks?
     - areas with high iron oxide readings on my detector?

4. If I am fully ground balanced, I often get a lot of subtle VCO audio cues - with no target ID in All metal or discriminated mode.  Should I investigate these? In some areas I was in I would get this literally every metre or so, became ridiculous quickly.

5. If I investigate 4. and find that after taking a few inches of topsoil off I still can't get a target ID in all metal or discrimination mode, should I abandon the dig and just put it down to a particularly hot patch of soil?

6. If I do get some target id's in discrim mode, but they are weird numbers like 1 or 80 and moving around everywhere should I investigate or is this again just a hot patch of soil?

7. If target appears to move around - ie target id and VCO seem to trigger in different locations with each sweep of the detector is this a hot patch and should it be abandoned?

8. How do I know what bedrock is and do I need to find it to get gold?

9. This is the ultimate question, at what point does an audio signal and ground phase alteration warrant further investigation?  I did not know what this threshold was so I had to investigate everything which was time consuming and ultimately did not turn up any gold.