I have written scrolls about this subject of manual GB vs automatic GB. But here is a shortened version:
I hope this explains it well enough to help some understand it a bit better;
"Autotrac", "autotrak", and "auto ground balance" are all the same thing. Every company terms it differently.
"Automatic retuning" is an entirely different thing too, it refers to the automatic return to threshold.
All detectors have automatic tracking (GB)
Most have automatic retune to threshold. A few don't.
The old Compasses nugget hunter models have the original autotrac and also the best ever made. The Tesoros come in at a very seriously close second. Personally, I have found more goodies on the high iron salt beaches here in Oregon, Washington, and California beaches wet or dry, with an old, underpowered Tesoro Silver Saber than with anything else I have ever tried there, and the old Compasses run a very close second place.
Some detectors have a "manual" ground balance too.
A well designed detector with only a super-fast automatic GB will outperform a manual vlf one that is not watched like a hawk and continually retuned every 5 minutes or oftener. It's just the way it works. There are no exceptions, regardless of price or brand name or anything else.
The Tesoro Tejon runs with full gain, AKA power, continually.
Full gain does not mean full sensitivity.
Full gain means full power ..high volt amps.
Sensitivity means "more sensitive to iron or iron ore" (Fe). This includes the soil ..matrix.
The Tejon and the Fisher 1270 and the Nautiluses, and the various cheap White's like the Classics and Prisms, and the various Garretts from the Ace 100 through the Ace 550 and the 1250's through the 2500's all run not only with very high sensitivity, turned down or turned up, they also run with full power .. AKA volt amps. This is why they have such a rotten time with bad soil and linear scrap .. AKA nails, wire, etc, but get some unbelieveable depth in milder soil. They are designed this way.. Read the latest entry for the Garrett 2500 in Metaldetectorreviews.net for more proof of this statement. It's written by a person from the western USA, Washington State, I believe, and an area which is so bad with different minerals that the only detectors that work well enough there are various Fishers, lower-priced Tesoros, old Compasses, and most White's.
Note: In my most recent testing I have discovered that the new White's Pulsescan TID is probably the deepest and most user-friendly PI ever made , anywhere, and by anyone, for teardrop to quart jar sized objects. It is a really powerful detector, seemingly running on steroids. It is possible to achieve as much as 20 inches on a quarter - in the ground. I went to the factory the other day and was really surprized at it's performance. It even has a very good discriminator, better than I've ever seen on any other PI unit.
The various detectors I listed with high gain and high sensitivity including the Tejon, 1270, Cortez, etc. for example, make so much noise on scrap steel and iron objects in much of the nasty western soil - and have problems in even lighter soils too. We can omit some of that though by turning the Tejon's sensitivity down to zero for example, but most people don't want to do that because they actually think for some unknown reason that it will deplete some of it's depth . It will not though, and in fact it will normally increase it's depth in bad soil due to the lack of masking.
All the above I mentioned were designed for the Eastern USA and SE USA soil and Central European market, where the soil is usually much less ironized. The Tejon can be sent back to the factory for calibration along with a soil sample from the bad ground area, but it still will not outperform the cheaper Tesoros with their strictly automatic GB and super-fast speed of recovery time in our nasty western soil, the same super-fast autotune not found with the higher-end Tesoros. The upper scale Garretts can have a chip designed by Garrett to help with this problem a bit in the bad soil, but it does not completely cure the problem. Even the new ones have this aftermarket chip already installed by Garrett but the same thing applies, they are just plain not designed for much of our rotten soil from the Rocky Mountains westward, and a few other places too.
If anybody has any technical or electronics engineering questions feel free to contact me via PM.
BTW, a single or dual frequency detector does as good a job or better on iron and salt beaches as does a multi-freq, regardless of which company made it or how much it costs. In fact, most Minelabs multi's do well on small iron disc but really suck on the larger iron objects when it comes to discrimination, and it's partly due to their super slow processors taking so long to register. The White's DFX has the same problem. It's all in the circuit design, not in the amount of frequencies it choses to run on at any given nanosecond. And yes, there is no multi frequency detector made yet that runs on more than one frequency at the same time. If that happened there would be noise and calamity and mayhem beyond compare and comprehension, much like listening to a short-wave radio, a percussion band, twelve dogs howling at the moon, and a 5 yr old's birthday party all at the same time.
Have a good one all. Hope this helps.
EasyMoney
wow Thanks,
