Mrs OB
Momento, por favore, gotta be careful with this big cup of coffee I have sitting here..
I have always appreciated the Tesoro line of detectors, but some of the higher-priced ones tend to run a bit too much power for really high-Fe soils. This is not true with their nugget hunters though, such as the SuperTrac.
A woman who went with me exploring an old town using her Cortez had a heck of a time getting it to handle the bad ground. And yes, her sensitivity was too high too, but the gain (power) was the real bad boy. After 30-40 minutes in one area she found 1 penny and two bolts, and I found more than 30 coins (one wheatie) with my cz-70. I also found lots of scrap lead, copper, brass, and even a bit of iron. The cz L-O-V-E-S brass, lead, and copper. She was constantly re-setting the GB and discrimination in order to compensate for the depressing ordeal. The Cortez and Tejon for example, have real fits in such nasty soils. But the cheaper ones run smoother and actually go deeper. Too much gain in bad ground achieves a real bad experience without some tools to quell all the madness. The SuperTrac was MADE for bad soils. It's not my first choice for deep nuggets but it will suffice.
A best rule of thumb for anybody wanting to find gold,, is to buy one with an expanded iron range, and ignore it completely as long as you dig everything. Yeah this was a dumb joke, but it's true. Gold and small iron cross paths, regardless of which detector one uses.
A detector that goes awry when the searchcoil hits something either has a loose searchcoil from smacking it, or it's inferior to begin with. But either way there is something wrong. Good detectors and searchcoils don't normally act that way any more. One time smacking a rock and the whole searchcoil can be toast though. They aren't designed to be whacking rocks, grass, or bushes, rather they are designed to be run (continually) 1-2" up off the actual dirt.
BTW, I found more goodies with my old Silver Sabre on high black-sand/magnetite beaches than with any other machine, including my Minelabs, Whites, Garretts, Compasses, other old detectors, and other Fishers. But for all-out depth in those conditions the cz70 went the deepest, and yes, because I ran it in disc with EVERYTHING notched in. Only in the Puget Sound area in WA State did I do any better for depth, and that was with a mid-70's Garrett Deepseeker, sometimes finding old crusty pennies 10-13" deep in some of the nastiest soil in America.
Time for
LL
).
