Hi CW, reply button didn't work - Thanks for taking the time to...

Hi CW, reply button didn't work - Thanks for taking the time to go and get Dean's perspective, and to then provide it here.

However, again I somewhat agree with 2ic here, I don’t necessarily see it as a backward step or a lack of conviction, but definitely as an unnecessary sideways step at the current time.

We can make the argument that streams are a cost-effective way to move from a blank canvas and to highlight catchment areas of interest to then focus your soil grids on, so on that hand I can understand DRE using it…that could just be done in the background and announced once soils have actually defined a zone of coherent anomalism.
One issue (as 2ic eluded to) is that with the UFF-gold sampling it’s no real surprise to see low-level dispersion showing up in the catchment areas below these known areas, and even if some of this signal relates to new areas that are as yet undefined, the soils would pick that up anyway.
The UFF-soil geochemistry was developed by CSIRO, it uses similar principles as many of the partial leach methods (think MMI, Ionic etc) except instead of targeting the desorption of ionic bonded components they instead focused on separating out the size fraction where these metals are concentrated. Basically, trying to overcome geochemical attenuation in the regolith…
And the method has been widely adopted…however, it does have its limitations…particularly when we think about collecting a <2µm sub-sample dug from a stream, and then determining the Au content with a detection limit of 0.5 ppb (That’s half a part per billion!) through Aqua Regia ICP-MS. That’s great, but there is so much variability in the samples…things like, the mix of residual vs transported, mix of background rock types, distance from ‘source’ etc none of which are easily quantifiable for a regional stream sediment program. So its effectively impossible to level the data, and because we are then also dealing with very low levels of anomalism there is no real way of saying…this 10ppb sample is any better than this 5ppb sample OR even to say this below detection limit sample means there is no mineralisation upstream.

What is more frustrating to me out of all this, at least based on the 'proposed work timeline’ is that it seems they are planning on going straight to RC drilling of these fine-fraction soil anomalies.
Whatever happened to regional AC/RAB drilling being the intermediate geochemical exploration tool, used to highlight the priority structures and define the best geochemically anomalous zones along those structures. I know the regolith profile here isn't quite as well developed as say the Eastern Goldfields, so we might not expect 'large' dispersion halos and that AC/RAB drilling takes time and money...but my point is the best place to poke the limited RC drill meters may not be directly over the fine-fraction soil anomalism and so regional AC/RAB drilling would be more valuable than extending stream grids (imo).