Monty
Gold Member
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2005
- Messages
- 10,746
- Reaction score
- 167
- Golden Thread
- 0
- Location
- Sand Springs, OK
- Detector(s) used
- ACE 250, Garrett
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
- #1
Thread Owner
I recently attended the Chisholm Trail Hunt II and was lucky to find a prize token. I was even luckier when the token won me a new in the box Tesoro Silver uMax. I thought about just selling it because I have 5 other detectors, but so many people swear by Tesoro, I just had to try it out.
First off it strikes me as being an excellent beginners machine. It has most of the basic controls you need to learn to detect including sensitivity and discrimination, and an all metal that requires the coil to be moved to use. It has no ground balance and I assume is preset at the factory. That is one extra you will need if you hunt areas with a lot of unstable ground. Unfortunately you won't have it with the Silver uMax. The controls are handy and can be reached and adjusted with one hand I found out. What I really liked is that when you discriminated out iron, you didn't get a tone on rusted junk. Sometime it would pop and crackle but no tone. That is not true on some beginning detectors. It only has one tone, but with use you can distinguish between most good targets and trash. I was able to figure it out pretty good in only two hours during this test. I still prefer a dual tone however. That's just my personal preference. It does not have an LCD which I missed, but after all it is a beginning detector. There was no pinpoint mode so it had to be done by exing the target. After few times I got extremely accurate at it.
I took it down to a local middle school that I knew usually had lots of clad just for this test. It usually had a lot of pull tabs also, and I wanted to see how well it would discriminate them out. I started out with the discrimination set at the iron level , that is where everything but iron should give a tone. The sensitivity was set at 5, and I was using a set of Radio Shack behind the head earphones since none came with the detector. I found a lot of junk or junque including pull tabs and it was next to impossible to go a foot without hitting something undesirable, so I moved the discrimination over to the zinc penny setting. And sure enough , I didn't find anymore pulltabs! Not even the bent and big round ones. That's something that fools most other detectors I have used. I did dig a couple of deep aluminum beer and if you still hear the don't done dig worked. However I dug them anyway just to be sure. Then I didn't dig any more. There seemed to be dozens of pennies , so many that I got tired of digging them and didn't have much time so I moved the sensitivity over just short of max. From there on out I only dug quarters and dimes.I could still hear the pennies however as they made a popping and crackling noise but no repeatable tone. When I hit one , I'd stop and turn the sensitivity back and sure enough it would identify a penny. In short order I learned to adjust the sensitivity control on the move to distinguish what my target was. And in no time at all I could call my target nearly 100% of the time.
Results? In slightly under two hours I dig 8 quarters , six dimes and nine pennies and only 3 junk items once I felt comfortable with the machine. I would recommend it for the newbie whole heartedly. Someone else said it was much better than the Ace 250. I have both now and I like the Ace better simply because I like the use of the LCD, a two tone sound, an indicator of the depth of the target and a pinpoint mode. With a little more experience I think it would probably be just as good at finding targets and it discriminates better than the ACE. And that's my short test and opinion and I'm sticking to it. Monty
First off it strikes me as being an excellent beginners machine. It has most of the basic controls you need to learn to detect including sensitivity and discrimination, and an all metal that requires the coil to be moved to use. It has no ground balance and I assume is preset at the factory. That is one extra you will need if you hunt areas with a lot of unstable ground. Unfortunately you won't have it with the Silver uMax. The controls are handy and can be reached and adjusted with one hand I found out. What I really liked is that when you discriminated out iron, you didn't get a tone on rusted junk. Sometime it would pop and crackle but no tone. That is not true on some beginning detectors. It only has one tone, but with use you can distinguish between most good targets and trash. I was able to figure it out pretty good in only two hours during this test. I still prefer a dual tone however. That's just my personal preference. It does not have an LCD which I missed, but after all it is a beginning detector. There was no pinpoint mode so it had to be done by exing the target. After few times I got extremely accurate at it.
I took it down to a local middle school that I knew usually had lots of clad just for this test. It usually had a lot of pull tabs also, and I wanted to see how well it would discriminate them out. I started out with the discrimination set at the iron level , that is where everything but iron should give a tone. The sensitivity was set at 5, and I was using a set of Radio Shack behind the head earphones since none came with the detector. I found a lot of junk or junque including pull tabs and it was next to impossible to go a foot without hitting something undesirable, so I moved the discrimination over to the zinc penny setting. And sure enough , I didn't find anymore pulltabs! Not even the bent and big round ones. That's something that fools most other detectors I have used. I did dig a couple of deep aluminum beer and if you still hear the don't done dig worked. However I dug them anyway just to be sure. Then I didn't dig any more. There seemed to be dozens of pennies , so many that I got tired of digging them and didn't have much time so I moved the sensitivity over just short of max. From there on out I only dug quarters and dimes.I could still hear the pennies however as they made a popping and crackling noise but no repeatable tone. When I hit one , I'd stop and turn the sensitivity back and sure enough it would identify a penny. In short order I learned to adjust the sensitivity control on the move to distinguish what my target was. And in no time at all I could call my target nearly 100% of the time.
Results? In slightly under two hours I dig 8 quarters , six dimes and nine pennies and only 3 junk items once I felt comfortable with the machine. I would recommend it for the newbie whole heartedly. Someone else said it was much better than the Ace 250. I have both now and I like the Ace better simply because I like the use of the LCD, a two tone sound, an indicator of the depth of the target and a pinpoint mode. With a little more experience I think it would probably be just as good at finding targets and it discriminates better than the ACE. And that's my short test and opinion and I'm sticking to it. Monty
