F3 Uranium's Strongest Exploration Hole: 4,400 cps Outside JR and Tetra

The strongest radioactivity F3 Uranium Corp. (TSXV: FUU) has found in an exploration hole outside its JR and Tetra Zones came from a hole reported this month, and the company has added a second drill rig to follow it up. The company's JR Zone lies about 23 kilometres northwest of Paladin Energy's Triple R deposit in Saskatchewan's western Athabasca Basin.

The hole is PLN26-232, reported on 21 October and drilled about a kilometre east of the company's newer Tetra Zone discovery on its Broach property. F3 said the second diamond drill will work on Broach for the rest of 2026. The other items this week, two grants of stock options and restricted share units on 26 and 28 October, are pay for staff and one officer and director, and they are dealt with further down.

A kilometre east of Tetra, the strongest count outside the known zones

The number came from a handheld spectrometer, a portable instrument run along fresh drill core that counts the gamma radiation the rock gives off. F3 reports those counts per second, or cps, against its own scale: above 300 cps is anomalous, above 10,000 is highly radioactive, and above 65,535 the instrument goes off scale.

The hole returned 4,400 cps over half a metre at a depth of about 610 metres, in what the company described as strongly altered basement rock. The basement is the older crystalline rock beneath the basin's sandstone cover. In this hole the contact between the two, which geologists call the unconformity, came at about 165 metres, so the strongest interval sits deep in the basement. The hole carried five anomalous intervals in all.

Ray Ashley, F3's president and vice-president of exploration and the qualified person for the release, called it "the highest handheld spectrometer reading intersected to date in an exploration hole" on the Patterson Lake North project. He is not independent of the company, and the release says so.

F3 also gave the limit on the number in its own words. Handheld readings are preliminary, they do not correlate directly or consistently with assay grades, and they are subject to laboratory confirmation. Half of each sampled interval goes to SRC Geoanalytical Laboratories in Saskatoon. As of 29 October the company had published no assay from PLN26-232 and had given no date for one.

The same release reported the rest of the season plainly. Two other summer holes, further south and southeast of Tetra, cut the alteration the company was looking for and no anomalous radioactivity. The winter program, which tested Tetra along strike and at depth, returned one reportable interval: 0.06 per cent uranium oxide over half a metre. Uranium oxide, written U3O8, is the form in which uranium grades and resources are quoted.

F3 has not described PLN26-232 as a discovery yet, but the hole gives the second rig a strong, well-defined place to start.

What F3 already owns at the JR Zone

The reason a single hole at Broach draws attention is the deposit the company has already defined to the north. The JR Zone, on the Patterson Lake North property, carries an indicated mineral resource of about 11.8 million pounds of contained uranium oxide at an average grade of 4.41 per cent, with an effective date of 15 October 2025. Most of those pounds sit in a high-grade core. An indicated resource is an estimate drilled closely enough for the company's qualified persons to state tonnes and grade with reasonable confidence; it is a step short of a reserve, which requires a study showing the uranium can be mined at a profit.

Tetra is the second zone, about 13 kilometres south of JR. A previously reported Tetra intercept, in hole PLN25-217, was 3.5 metres at 0.30 per cent uranium oxide, including half a metre at 1.04 per cent. Tetra carries no resource estimate.

F3 holds three properties in the basin, Patterson Lake North, Minto and Broach, which make up a single project of about 43,000 hectares. The company's stated aim, in its 16 June release, was a summer program across the whole project built to find new zones. PLN26-232 is the first result from that program that F3 has followed with a change of plan.

C$22.7 million in cash and term deposits paid for the summer

The drilling is funded. The company's management's discussion and analysis puts cash, cash equivalents and term deposits at C$22.7 million on 30 June 2026, the end of its fiscal year. That figure and the others below come from the audited statements and MD&A posted on F3's website, which the board approved on 22 October.

Most of that money came in during the year. The company raised C$20.0 million in a bought deal that closed on 3 October 2025, part of it as flow-through shares, which pass the company's exploration tax deductions to the buyer in return for a higher price. It added C$5.5 million of flow-through shares on 17 April 2026.

The largest liability at 30 June 2026 is a convertible debenture held by Denison Mines, a loan Denison may turn into shares, carried at C$12.4 million against C$15.0 million of principal. Of the C$27.1 million of total liabilities at 30 June 2026, C$11.6 million is a deferred income tax liability and C$2.6 million is flow-through share premium, neither payable in cash; current liabilities were C$3.1 million against C$24.2 million of current assets. The debenture matures on 18 October 2028, and the conversion price is C$0.56 a share.

The debenture costs about C$1.35 million a year in interest at its 9 per cent coupon, paid quarterly. The company may pay up to a third of each instalment in shares, and on 2 October 2026 it announced it would settle part of the latest quarter that way (797,872 shares, issued on 8 October according to the audited statements' subsequent-events note), at a deemed C$0.141 a share, alongside a C$225,000 cash payment.

Management's statement on funding is direct: "The Company believes it has sufficient resources to continue operations for the next twelve months." The auditor's report contains no going-concern section. That gives F3 the room to drill through the season on its own money. Like any explorer at this stage it spends cash without earning any, and the debenture's principal falls due in 2028 unless Denison converts it, so further financing will be part of the plan. Management made that twelve-month statement in the MD&A dated 22 October, the day after it announced the second rig.

On 29 October the shares closed at C$0.11 on the TSX Venture Exchange, unchanged on the day, on 209,038 shares against a 953,285-share daily average, with a 52-week range of C$0.10 to C$0.275, per end-of-day data read at 13:58 Pacific on 29 October. The company also trades in Frankfurt under the symbol GL7, with WKN A40KCK and ISIN CA30336Y1079 according to Deutsche Börse, and over the counter in the United States as FUUFF.

The option grants are pay, priced at C$0.10

The release that brought the company back onto the newswire on 28 October was a compensation filing. It granted 3,840,000 stock options, exercisable at C$0.10 for five years, and 3,120,000 restricted share units to one officer and director. A restricted share unit is a promise of a share delivered later if the holder stays, and these vest in thirds over three years.

Two days earlier the company had granted 1,550,000 options at the same price and 1,150,000 restricted share units to employees and consultants. Both are subject to TSX Venture Exchange approval.

The two grants cover 9,660,000 potential shares, about 1.5 per cent of the 663,422,969 shares outstanding on 21 October, the date of the MD&A's share data. They follow a change at the top. Ross McElroy became chief executive on 24 September, and Ray Ashley became president on 3 September. McElroy signed the 28 October release on behalf of the board.

The second rig's job before the year ends

F3 has an indicated resource at JR, a younger discovery at Tetra and, as of 21 October, a basement interval a kilometre to the east that gave the strongest exploration reading the project has produced. That is steady, layered progress at the exploration stage, with a funded second rig now working the newest target, and the assays from SRC in Saskatoon will give the grade behind that count.

What the company has set out to do next is concrete: put a second diamond drill on the Broach property for the rest of the year, drill around the new hole, and test further regional targets with the money it reported on 30 June.