Ace 250? Good or Great???

[devan24]

Hi, I'm down in South Africa and a collector of coins, I am consedering buying a metal detector to spark a new hobby and only get confused
with all the models out there, please help!

I will concentrate 90.00% of my efforts to find coins, gold, silver, bronz any and all coins! and the other 10.00% will be for jewellery hunting
on beaches and parks.

Please tell me what I can expect from the ace 250 and what it's best at finding. I will mostly use it in parks, lawns, beaches the usual places.

kind regards and many thanks for your help!

 

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[stanjam]

There are three ways to test the iron content of your soil:

You could spend a few hundred bucks and see what your White's tells you is the iron content just as you fire it up..

or...

You could buy a Fisher cz and have a bit better detector ( I only say this because Fishers are usually better made well enough that they don't break down as often as many other detectors, they and Tesoros), and the cz GB knobs read 1-10 telling you what the percentage of iron is; All numbers are inversely dis-proportionationately read, meaning that a 2 equals more than a fingerful of iron in a cup of the soil, and an 5 or 6 means that you have less than the amount you could pack into a marble sized container. A 10 means that you have zero iron in your soil but you could have sodium.

Or you could do the easiest and cheapest thing too, and get a bar magnet and pull ALL the iron filings out of a cupful of your soil. Some soils here have as much as a fingerful of iron in them, and some as much as 3/4 of a cup of it being iron. Even a good PI will play heck in that stuff, and we have some of that here in the Pac NW too.

PS Stan, if you can afford $100 go to eBay and get yourself an old Silver Saber. I think you would really be surprized at how well a really good "auto" ground balance detector actually works. The one I have has found me more coins here on these bad Oregon beaches than any other detector I have ever tried. You would be seriously surprized at how well they handle bad ground, salt, and how superior they are at discriminating out iron in amongst a lot of trash. The Golden Sabers were that way too.

Good luck

EasyMoney

I may try the magnet thing, as I suspect there is a bit of it here. However I made my detector purchase already and will stick with it for now, until I am ready to get something more advanced. Then I think I will do some heavy research, both into detectors and into my soil. However the ACE so far is doing pretty well, and only getting real thrown off if I set the sensitivity too high, so it should be ok. I know it doesn't auto balance. It is more of a preset, which isn't auto balancing. Just finished grad school (at the ripe old age of 40) and am only an adjunct professor right now, so money is not something I have a lot of at the moment. If that changes I may just check out the auctions. Right now my wife would kill me if I came home with another detector!

 

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[thompy]

easy money thanks again for an intresting rundown, i run the t-2, and love it, I live in the U.P. of michigan, and have some bad ground in areas, old gold mines, copper, silver and of coarse the iron ore mines, in the northern areas plenty of the black sand. my question is ive had a couple of the QXT pros and really liked them, think they are a hotter machine than the xlt's, at least for relic hunting.when hunting an old abandond part of Negaunee, i hardly had any targets, the ground here is red with iron ore, thought it may be messing with my machine but it ran smooth, then figured it probally has been hit to death over many years, very little in trash, this is in caving grounds that were just opend back up. then i hit some tracks in a nother area where the iron ore pellets get sent to the ore docks for shipping, i picked up a cresent wrench down about 8 in. in these iron ore pellets, is it just the magnitite that messes with machines? we have plenty of hotrocks as well both +- in the hills around the old gold mines. thompy

 

[EasyMoney]

Thompy

That's an interesting question;

I suppose that most people don't realize that a discriminator control (or a ground balance control) are voltage limiters. When we look at iron, it is one of the poorest (metalic) conductors of electricity that we can find. That's why we can cancel the small iron before other metals. Then next would come some metals that come into the aluminum range. After that, we would find that lead would conduct electricity a bit better than aluminum. Then of course brass and bronze would fit right in with lead. Gold however, has a much wider capacity to conduct electricity. So does silver and copper.

So the end product can be different with an XLT compared to say, an M-6. There is no way to match the two, save for their behavior in the real world vs the theoretical world.

The answer then, is that iron alone is not the only thing that determines where and how a detector should be ground balanced. Even sodium and magnesium and high copper can affect the ground balance, depending on how much of it there is and whether it is widespread, or here and there, or in little spots in this place and that place. The faster the rate of retune to a predetermined ground balance set or preset parameter, the better the ability to continue cancelling whatever high mineral there is in the ground at each given. nanosecond and at each spot.

In short, ANY metal or mineral can affect the ground balance capability of a detector, but iron minerals are the most predominant found in the ground, and that is what the detectors have their platforms built on. Additionally, iron is the least conductive of all metalsand is therefore tended to as a starting base for discrimination and ground balancing (both are the same thing).

Some detectors have had their scales calibrated to enable certain electroconductive metals to fit where they don't belong on a gradient scale. We see this when some detectors accept aluminum clear up into the high coins range (such as many Minelabs), while some detectors shut it off way low and just above the iron range. This is why many MInelabs cannot completely cancel all aluminum pulltabs.

The problem is, that with too high of gain (such as many Minelabs, some 1200 series Fishers, some high end Tesoros, Many Garretts ie; 100 to 2500 series, etc) the circuitry is overdriven (with ridiculously high gain, actually warping the RMS voltage constant) far beyond the abilities of the detector to combat that - in addition to being able to cancel the high iron content simultaneously.

White's and others have some similar problems but their problems are not as acute as with other brands and some of their detectors. And beside that, there is no constant either, meaning that every White's, Minelab, etc detector are NOT just like their cousins; ie; x-terra vs Expl SE.

So yes, it is (mostly) the magnetite or hematite or pure Fe (iron ore) that affects the ground balance, but that's not the only thing that does.

 

[Larsmed]

EasyMoney

I hear you are a huge bounty hunter fan. 8) why not give some good advice to the newbie?

larry

 

[Urban Prospector]

An Ace on and swinging out performs any of the best detectors gathering dust in the closet. The important part is to get a detector and use it. I bought a used Compass at the swap meet in 1972 and never saw the need to upgrade till last year and then only bcuz I wanted to snipe for nuggets. Some thing to consider is how much you want to dig and how curious you are about what is causing that beep. My new MXT barely knows the difference between a nickle poptop or gold ring. Personally I don't trust any machine till I authenticate visually what is there. As Nike says "Just Do It". Best o Luck Urb.

 

[Ozzygold]

I own the ace and it finds me plenty of one and two dollar coins, it gives out a distinctive bell and I know I have a better than 40% chance of digging a coin when it does, I'm happy with mine for the price!

 

[Larsmed]

Its Great for anywhere other than beaches!!!

Larry

 

[Ricardo_NY1]

It's a good machine............for the price, it can be said it is great. The only time you'll realize why it's not great is when you pick up a Minelab Explorer or something of similar performance. Otherwise, one of the best entry level detectors out there for the money. It doesn't do well on wet sand I hear.........I've never tried mine at a beach.

 

[treasurefiend]

I love my Ace 250