How to Order Your First Satellite Geological Report on GeoMines (A Walkthrough)

Last Tuesday a mine owner from Chilas called me at 11pm. He'd been trying to figure out our platform for 40 minutes and gave up. Turned out he'd marked the wrong polygon — his lease was 2.7 km east of where he pinned it.

That call is why I'm writing this.

Most of our users aren't geologists. They're mine owners who inherited a lease, investors evaluating a Reko Diq-adjacent block, or a small contractor in Khuzdar who wants to know if his chromite pocket extends further west. So this walkthrough assumes zero technical background. If you can order something on Daraz, you can order a geomine AI report.

Before you click anything

Get three things ready. Your lease coordinates (or at minimum, a Google Maps pin of the area). The target mineral you're chasing. And a rough idea of area size in square kilometers.

Honestly, most people fumble on the first one. Lease documents in Pakistan often list coordinates in DMS format (degrees, minutes, seconds) while our platform accepts decimal degrees. There's a free converter on the site — I put it there after the third mine owner sent me a screenshot of his mineral title asking what the numbers meant.

If you don't have coordinates at all, that's fine. You can draw a polygon directly on the map. Just make sure you know a landmark nearby (a village name, a river bend, a road junction). I've seen people accidentally pin areas in Afghanistan because they zoomed out too far and lost reference.

The actual ordering steps

Head to geomines.org and hit "Order Report" in the top nav. You'll land on the map interface.

Step 1: Draw your area of interest. Click the polygon tool, then click points on the map to outline your lease boundary. Double-click to close the shape. The platform automatically calculates area in km². For reference, most exploration leases in Pakistan sit between 5 and 250 km². If yours is larger than 500 km², you'll get a prompt to split it — this isn't us being difficult, it's because processing Sentinel-2 and ASTER stacks over huge areas takes longer and honestly the report gets less focused.

Step 2: Pick your target mineral. Dropdown menu. Gold, copper, lithium, chromite, emerald, marble, granite, iron, lead-zinc, barite. Pick one primary and up to two secondary targets. The AI weights the spectral analysis differently depending on what you select — chasing chromite means we prioritize ASTER SWIR bands for ultramafic signatures, while lithium pushes us toward pegmatite indicators and specific hydroxyl absorption features.

Small tip: if you genuinely don't know what's there, pick "General Prospecting." It runs a broader scan and flags anomalies across multiple mineral families. Costs a bit more but saves you from ordering three separate reports.

Step 3: Choose report depth. We offer three tiers. Basic (spectral anomaly map + lineament analysis), Standard (adds structural geology, alteration mapping, and drill target recommendations), and Deep (adds SAR deformation analysis, historical Landsat comparison going back to 1990s, and a phone consultation with our geology team). Most first-time users go Standard. Investors evaluating an acquisition usually go Deep.

Step 4: Payment and timeline. We accept bank transfer, JazzCash, and international wire. Basic reports deliver in 48 hours, Standard in 4-5 days, Deep in 7-10 days. You'll get an order number and a tracking link.

That's it. Four steps.

What lands in your inbox

You'll receive a PDF (usually 40-80 pages depending on tier), plus GeoTIFF files you can open in QGIS or Google Earth if you want to overlay the anomaly maps on your own base data.

The first page is a plain-language summary. I fought hard for this internally. Our geologists wanted to start with methodology sections and spectral indices. But if you're a mine owner in Skardu who paid for this report, you shouldn't have to read 12 pages of technical preamble to find out whether your lease looks promising. So page 1 tells you: high potential, moderate potential, or low potential, with 2-3 sentences on why.

Pages 2 onward get technical. Alteration zone maps (where hydrothermal activity chemically changed the rocks — a big clue for gold and copper). Lineament density maps (fractures and faults that often control mineralization). NDVI-suppressed false color composites. If a term confuses you, there's a glossary at the back. I use it myself sometimes.

The drill target section is the one most clients flip to first. We mark recommended coordinates with confidence scores. A target with 78% confidence isn't a guarantee of ore — it's a statement that the spectral, structural, and topographic evidence all converge at that point. You still need boots on the ground. A geo mine report shrinks your search area from 50 km² to maybe 3-4 high-priority zones. That's the whole value proposition.

What I got wrong at first

When we launched geomines, I assumed people wanted more data. Bigger reports. More maps. More bands analyzed.

Wrong.

What they actually wanted was clarity. Where do I drill first? What's the confidence level? What's the nearest road? How deep might the mineralization go based on the structural analysis? The best feedback we ever got was from a client in Muslim Bagh who said "your report told me to stop wasting money on the north block." That's it. That's the win.

So if you're ordering your first satellite geological report — with us or anyone else — don't chase page count. Chase decisions. A report that changes what you do next week is worth 10x one that just sits on your desk looking impressive.

And if you get stuck on the platform, the WhatsApp number on the site goes directly to our operations team. Not a bot. Not a ticket queue. You'll probably end up talking to me or one of two other people. That's how small we still are, and honestly, that's how I like it for now.

What's the lease you're thinking about?