Using drones for metal detecting purposes

[49er12]

Gee what a great idea, why not aerial view to study and learn from and then use for areas of interest. Question anyone currently do this and what drone do you use and any software that helps you further more,thanks.

 

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[djackson7348]

I received a drone for Christmas and plan to start doing this. I want to use it to verify some old sites back in the woods as well look for tell tale signs hard to see from the ground.

 

[49er12]

Great, it something you video or takes pictures and view at your leisure. Reference points, yep id advise other to do that.

 

[Oregon Viking]

I use a DJI Mavic 3 drone for gold prospecting. Great to scout creeks, rivers and terrain as we have literally hundreds of creeks around here, and 7 rivers within 75 miles.

 

[Gold:Au]

Drones, even the cheap garbage ones, can be useful for prospecting in a greater capacity than just having a general look see while on site.


In its most basic form, you can throw Mr. Buzzy up into the air a few dozen yards, take a few hundred overlapping photos, then stick those photos in a photo-stitching program to get a large zoomable image of the area. While you don't get GPS details, it is enough for you to find interesting things "just over the bank on this bend in the creek" over a beer when you have time to just look around.

Or, you can get a drone with a better camera and the ability to follow a pre-determined path and take photos at various angles, then throw those images into some free software that will spit out a 3D point-cloud and allow you to measure distances and heights and volumes and elevations, and...

A few years ago I used a Mavic Pro to take lots of photos of a square mile of my lease then used a GIS program to import those images to overlay over Google Earth relatively accurately. (Some edges of the overlay were mis-aligned by a yard or two, which isn't that bad, to be honest.

It was a clunky and fragile system that eventually fell over, and I am looking into options to recreate it in a simpler format.

Most recent DJI drones can be tricked into flying pre-programmed waypoints (with external software) and there is a new wave of free/cheap software to massage those images into a result that you can view in 3D.

This dude's youtube channel shows what drones can do.

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[Gold:Au]

The big boys use specially kitted out light planes flying a grid pattern over the area collecting relative magnetic strength data to find areas of higher density.

Now with the advent of drones and ebay parts, that is a technology open to us amateurs. In theory, you can attach a Honeywell HMR2300 magnetometer to an arduino and GPS shield programmed to take readings every couple of seconds and with the right process to massage those data into information and do your do your own localised survey to find areas that have a higher density.

However, there are many issues to overcome.

The first one is the fact the drone itself has lots of magnetic noise, but I uncovered a paper that did the experiments which found that dangling the sensor 10-15m below the drone gave a large enough reduction in that noise for it to be effective.

That system would probably work on flat ground, but you'd need to have some sort of terrain following for your drone if you were in hilly areas.

We have heard rumours of a major mining company's test drillings identifying an "extremely rich" ridge on our lease 30 years ago but the area was too remote to be viable. Maybe one day we'll have the time and money to look for it.

 

[Oregon Viking]

I'm trying this software out so far .... Great!