Bounty Hunter Platinum Metal Detector

[Coin Digger]

I know there are a lot of people who look down their noses at Bounty Hunters but I can’t stress enough how nice of a machine this one is, the build quality is excellent, and it’s coin shooting is as good as it gets.
Since I have received the detector, I’ve been hunting hard with it and putting it through its paces.
It compares a lot to the Teknetics Gamma 6000. I called First Texas and talked with a sells rep and they confirmed it shared the same coils and electronics as the 6000 but they made a few changes to its features. The build quality is excellent and it’s so light that you can swing it all day with no fatigue. It’s very easy to setup, ground balance and go
It locks on hard to coins and gives very stable ID’s numbers. So far I’ve only found clad with it but then again that’s what I expected to find where I was hunting. I found it easier to only discriminate out iron and foil because you could see the junk targets ID’s jump around plus in 4 tones you could hear the all the changes. I also found that a target that wasn’t round would cause bouncing numbers. The machine was finding dimes at 7 inches with ease and would correctly ID them. It also has lighting fast target response and very good target separation.
Ground balancing is different than any other detector I’ve owned. You have to follow the manual on this one. Switch to all metal, hold the coil 2 feet off the ground, press pin point, when ground grab lights up, lower the coil to with in 2 inches of the ground and wait 3 seconds until the machine starts beeping and you’re done. At first I tried pumping the coil like I have with other machines and it never locked on and acted erratic. At first I thought I had a bad unit but it was operator error not ground balancing properly. The 6000 offers manual ground balance where as the BH doesn’t. It’s also the first machine I’ve seen that has 1/8 and ¼ head phone jacks. (one of the things that’s different from the 6000)
There are two things I think would be an improvement, one is the need for a back light and the other is to move the power button away from the pin point button. I shut it off a few times while pin pointing.
I did run into one problem that took me awhile to figure out. Sometimes I would switch to all metal mode and the detector would go dead silent and not react to anything. I had to switch it off and back on, or switch back to disc mode and hit the pin point button to get it working again. What I figured out was if I was pin pointing and switched to all metal to fast it would cause the detector to go silent.
I’m not a relic hunter but the A/M mode really seems to go deep. When in the A/M mode the machine constantly displays depth. (that’s one of the things that’s different from the 6000). I was surprised at the number of deep targets that showed up in A/M mode. It would be overwhelming to coin shoot in A/M.
I general know after a few hours of use if I will like a detector and I like this one and plan on adding it to my stable of detectors. It’s a great coin shooter that didn’t break the bank.

[SeaninNH]

I love my Land Star. I'd love to try the Platinum.