Finding gold is one thing. Knowing whether you’re doing it as a hobby or a business is another — and the difference affects everything. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew breaks down the crucial distinction between recreational and commercial prospecting.

Running water is nature’s sluice box — but only if you know where to look. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew pulls on his waders and steps into the current to reveal how gold behaves in streams and rivers. You’ll learn the physics of why gold settles where it does, the key hotspots on every waterway (inside bends, bedrock crevices, potholes, and more), and a step‑by‑step sampling method that finds the paystreak without wasted digging.

Gold isn’t random — it follows geological rules. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew teaches beginners how to read the landscape like a prospector. You’ll learn the three rock families and which ones host gold, how to spot faults, shear zones, and contacts that control mineralisation, and why rusty quartz, pyrite, and garnets are clues you shouldn’t ignore.

Think gold only hides in mountain creeks? Think again. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, host Andrew heads to the coast to reveal how gold ends up on beaches, where to find it, and how to recover it — even when it's finer than flour. 

Every grain of gold in your pan started deep underground, locked in solid rock. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew takes beginners on a journey from the birth of a gold vein to the creek where it ends up. Learn the crucial difference between lode and placer deposits, the tools that match each type, and the permits and ethical practices every prospector needs to know.

What if the secret to capturing gold was hiding in your kitchen scraps? In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, host Andrew explores the fascinating world of biosorption — the science of using cheap, abundant agricultural and microbial waste to pull gold ions right out of solution. From rice husks and coconut shells to spent grain from breweries and dead fungal biomass, these unlikely materials are proving to be powerful gold‑grabbing tools.

In the 1920s, a Nobel Prize‑winning chemist set out on a secret mission to pay off Germany's entire war debt — by extracting gold from seawater. His name was Fritz Haber, and he was already famous for inventing synthetic fertiliser and infamous for pioneering chemical warfare.  In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, Andrew tells the gripping story of Haber's obsessive quest to plunder the ocean's hidden gold. 

You've found a promising creek, hillside, or desert wash — but where do you start digging? In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, host Andrew teaches beginners the systematic art of sampling and testing your ground. 

The world’s great deserts hold some of the richest gold deposits on Earth — and the dry conditions that make them challenging also preserve nuggets in place for millions of years. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips, host Andrew takes you deep into arid‑land prospecting, covering everything a less‑experienced prospector needs to know to find gold where the creeks dried up long ago.

The easy gold has been found. The next giant discoveries are hiding under deserts, jungles, and hundreds of metres of barren rock — and finding them demands a new set of tools. In this episode of Gold Mining Tips (Ep. 22), we explore the cutting‑edge technologies that are transforming gold exploration: artificial intelligence that learns the hidden signatures of ore deposits, drones that fly geophysical surveys over impossible terrain, and satellites that map gold‑related minerals from orbit.