Waaaay out there beyond what you can see from the station. The further out you go the more you'll find, also the more radiation you'll get hit with so you'll need to have stronger power generation and higher level magnetosphere hooked up to protect you from the radiation, otherwise you'll get a lot of damage. No shield the max distance you'll safely get is about 500 meters from the station. The level 1 magnetosphere will protect you up to 2500 meters from the station. After that you'll start taking damage. I haven't been able to upgrade mine beyond level 1 so far, so I can't say about the rest but that's what I know so far.

Originally posted by Convieo:

After searching 2km from station, I travelled 6km out and started looking from there. Best I found was 3kt of gold... After nearly an hour of looking.

Am I doing something wrong?

Gold seems to be the rarest of the first 3 tiers of elements. I search from 5km out (the limit of my magnetosphere 3), and rarely see gold, and when I do it's in small amounts like you say. When I go out to 7500, it's in more rocks, but still small amounts per rock, and the radiation is so bad I turned the difficulty down to easy to cope.