Feeling good about my Vaq.

[Eleven Cents]

I've had a Vaquero for a few months now, and I've had lingering doubts about whether it's really as good as I hoped. But not anymore.

I hoped that the weak performance I was seeing was due to incredibly bad soil conditions in Tucson. Now I have some direct evidence for that. I have a small coin garden with clad dimes at 4, 6, and 8 inches. In disc, I can hit the 4 and barely the 6. Both sound great in all metal. But I can barely hit the 8 in all metal, and some days not at all. I wouldn't dig it. My disappointment was that my BH Tracker IV can also hit the 4 and 6, albeit not as clearly. It made me doubt what I paid for with the Vaq.

My mom is visiting and brought her Fisher F22. It has preset ground balance, and it can't handle the soil here at all. It's not any better than the BH, and maybe even a little worse. But she regularly finds deeper stuff back in Indiana. So now I'm more confident that the soil here is truly terrible, and I made the right choice with the Vaquero's manual GB.

I'm also impressed that the cheap little BH does as well as it does here! I've been thinking about hacking it to see if I can improve its GB for local conditions.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

A Handbook of Civil War Bullets and Cartridges - Grab it through Amazon!

[Terry Soloman]

Set your sensitivity no higher than 6, then ground balance and set your discrimination just below the nickel line. Now test those dimes again. Do the same thing in All Metal. No More Than 6 on your Sensitivity.

 

[jld66]

Years ago I detected with someone who used a Bounty Hunter 505 with the 10" coil on it. Not a bad detector from what I seen for what it was. I certainly would choose it over any of the Garrett ace series.

 

[Eleven Cents]

Set your sensitivity no higher than 6, then ground balance and set your discrimination just below the nickel line. Now test those dimes again. Do the same thing in All Metal. No More Than 6 on your Sensitivity.

Sens seems to make little or no difference in all metal. The coins sound the same from 1 all the way to the high stop.

With disc just above iron, I start to lose the 6" coin if i go below 7 on sens. It gets stronger all the way to the high stop. I start to pick up the 8" coin somewhere above 10.

 

[john845]

i just brought a vaquero i watched alot of videos and what i saw is to hit the deeper stuff you need to super tune it and turn the ground balance about a third of a turn negative check out scannerguys youtube videos

 

[Dan B]

Personally, I think super tuning is over rated. You lose disc and it sounds off on pretty much anything. Power balancing on the other hand, seems way more effective. Look it up. Monte has a good description on how to do it.

 

[doggoneitdignit]

These two features and weight sold me on the Vaquero, the 11x8 DD and 5.75 concentric were just brownie points by Tesoro in putting out a wonderful product. And can't forget the great information from you guys on TN especially Terry Soloman and scannerguy1968 videos, never looked back and will never giver up.

 

[Eleven Cents]

Personally, I think super tuning is over rated.

I could see it being useful in some situations, but I use the all metal button a lot.