Ann: 2021 Exploration Activities Update, page-5

Thanks for all your ongoing visual updates Salpetie. Massive amount of drilling in progress and finally some assays to come through in July, so the news-flow is on its way. There aren't too many little explorations companies with nine rigs at the moment. I have just one RC on my patch.

Use of drone mag intrigued me. I costed drone mag earlier this year, to infill a 25 sq km hole in available multiclient high res mag data we had stitched together for this exploration project which covers 150 sq km in total. Most of the available coverage is 25-40m line spaced open-access company data, and I had hoped to infill the gap with 25m line spaced drone survey. When the price came back I was shocked to find that for the cost of the drone mag to infill the hole in the data we could re-fly the entire 150 sq km area with a traditional 25m line-spaced fixed wing. Which of course we did.

So why use a drone survey in the Paterson when it is so expensive compared to fixed wing? Logistics? Versatility? Differential GPS-guided positional accuracy? I am sure there must be significant advantages, or they would not be doing it. Probably the main one is the cost of mobilising a fixed wing survey aircraft, crew, fuel etc. to such a remote area. And maybe they don't have access for it to the Telfer or Winu airstrips.

But they are really neat those little drones. They fly all sorts of geophysics on them these days.

Off to that RC rig. Regards,