Where You Find It

Where You Find It was Originally Posted on February 21, 2013 by lavarock

I have mentioned it in the past, and posted a picture recently, but now can post a link to a video.

When I was in Maryland, before the home craze, I had one of the few satellite dishes. IT was a patio mount, which is a sort of a tripod on its side to hold the dish antenna. The dish was about 6 foot or so and made of light aluminum. There were 3 pods that came from the edge of the dish to the front center. There was a ring that held the actual antenna. People think that the large part of a dish is the “antenna” and it is not. That is all a reflector that directs the signal and focuses it at the focal point. For a satellite dish in the frequency band I was using, the actual antenna, the part that collected the TV signal was about as thin as a paper clip.

The TV satellites are arranged in an arc overhead and just the right distance from earth that they stay in the same spot relative to the earth underneath. Further away or closer to earth and they would move along and not be useful for TV. A bit nearer or further and they would go off into space or crash land.

This was back in the time of start-ups like TBS, a local Atlanta TV station that decided to broadcast via satellite and call itself a “Superstation”. Thus became TBS Network. Transmitting movies HBO had a west coast and east coast satellite feed and both shut down around midnight local time. I hear that since then they kinda run 24 hours

Also on the “birds” (as satellites were called at the time) was a show about gold prospecting. Looking almost like todays infomercial, it was not. Each week was a different show which taught you how to look for and find gold. The catch was that they did not tell you exactly where you could go, because that land was often privately held and/or managed for their members. However for just $62.50 you could become a member and use these properties.

I moved to Georgia and became a member, traveled to North Georgia a few weeks later and found myself in the middle of a TV show being filmed. The same people I had been watching on TV were there in the common dig, showing us how to find and keep gold.

I can tell you that when you see the old TV shows and movies of an aging gold prospector digging and panning, it is not far from what really happens. Now we use better equipment and gas pumps and better designed equipment, and don’t need to have a mule carry our finds. I used my Camaro for a while

What I noticed was that everyone there had a touch of gold fever. It is very exciting to watch as someone digs in the dirt and pulls up gold which is like finding real money. Unlike metal detecting on a beach, here you are finding treasure that has never been seen by humans before (otherwise they would have kept it).

The recreational miner as we were are a pretty responsible group, digging in the dirt with a shovel and filling in our holes when we are done. I won’t go into all of the issues with government regulations and fights to keep this type of “hobby” open to the public, but understand this is recreation (and work).

The location I went to in North Georgia is called the Loud Mine and is not far from Cleveland Georgia in the mountains. Gold was being mined here before the big strike in California. That find created the “rush” that caused people to leave places like Washington DC, the Carolinas and Georgia and rust to California in the hope of finding more gold. This also happened with Alaska.

Rather than bore you with lots of talk, I found a video which was recently filmed at the same location I was panning. In one scene in the first 10 minutes, there is a concrete building in the distance. That is the showers and rest rooms they built.

I was working at Hewlett Packard down by Atlanta and would leave work and head up the road to this site, pitch a tent in the dark and start prospecting in the morning.

Eventually I bought a sluice (an aluminum trough with a plastic bucket on top and a pump to pump water through it. This helped us dump dirt in and recover hidden gold.

Anyway, I’ll let the video do the talking, but it will give you an eyewitness account of how and where I used to prospect.

You may not find big nuggets, but you often can find “flour gold” the flakes that are commonly melted down for tooth fillings or printed circuit board connections.

There is also an unwritten code to talking about how much gold you are finding. First, if you are not finding much, you may exaggerate things a bit. But if you are finding a lot, you don’t generally talk about it or show it. This is because the minute you turn your back, someone else will come in and start working your spot. You might want to come back a few weeks later and not have had someone taking gold from your hidden spot.

I’ll admit to not finding any large nuggets, but I did find a lot of small ones and lots of flour gold. It is not easy prospecting for gold, but it becomes easier once you know where to look. It is a great recreation and you meet a varied group of people in this hobby. I highly recommend it and wish I could still prospect. Unfortunately, here in Hawaii we don’t prospect. It has something to do with us being created by molten rock that makes it hard to find any. So my LDMA membership goes to waste. I may decide to put it up for sale at some point, but I still support the organization and enjoy reading the magazines and newsletters.