HagerTX
Newbie
Newbie's first experience 'detecting' & review of the Garrett Treasure Ace 150
Just south of Houston, TX I spent ~2 hours in a park with my new Treasure Ace 150. This is the 4th detector I've owned (first one was a radio shack model back in 1982). Never used it much outside my yard. I bought a White's Classic II back in 1997 but never ended up using it much. In 1999 I bought a Tesoro Bandido (I think that was the model), but again lost interest after a while and never did any serious hunting of any kind. Almost on a whim, I bought the new Garrett Treasure Ace 150, mainly because of the price and visual display.
Just to tell briefly about this model, it has a depth indicator (3 settings: 2",4" & 6"+), has three preset discrimination modes: all metal, jewelry and coins. The coin mode supposedly excludes pull tabs and includes nickles. It also has a higher ringtone when it finds something in coin mode.
Anyway, I went out and covered different areas of the park. The type of soil was rather clay like, which I've heard is common here on the gulf coast. It's also rained a fair amount in recent weeks so the soil was damp and relatively easy to dig through. Within 3-4 minutes, next to a tree, I got a high (coin) ringtone, set the detector aside and dug for the coin that was indicates to be ~2" deep. Sure enough, there was a penny about 1.5" deep. Scouted out some areas adjacent to some trash cans and picnic tables where there was a lot of junkmetal. This is where I learned how the detector peformed in regards to its accuracy on the coin mode vs. all metal. Occasionally, as it turns out, there would be false coin readings with large iron metal objects. Now and again it would ID something as a nickel when there was a pulltab. I ended up ignoring all the nickel ID hits because of this. As the afternoon went on I got a bit more familiar with how to read the detector audibly. There were plenty of times when I would run across a large iron object that would send the ID display into panic mode, scrambling from iron to jewelry, back and forth and often time landing on the ID of non-nickel coins in the 6"+ depth. After a while I learned to ignore this, as I wasn't interested in finding old relics or digging every find.
After everything was said and done I toned down the sensitivity (it has 4 preset levels) and looked for strictly coins no deeper than 4". Ultimatley, I found 5 pennies total. All in all my impressions of the detector is that it's decent for the money. I paid about $143 for it; it retails for $179.99. Although I'm not sure what factors were involved, and as a newbie, not knowing how this detector compares to others, so far I felt like it was a decent buy.
Just south of Houston, TX I spent ~2 hours in a park with my new Treasure Ace 150. This is the 4th detector I've owned (first one was a radio shack model back in 1982). Never used it much outside my yard. I bought a White's Classic II back in 1997 but never ended up using it much. In 1999 I bought a Tesoro Bandido (I think that was the model), but again lost interest after a while and never did any serious hunting of any kind. Almost on a whim, I bought the new Garrett Treasure Ace 150, mainly because of the price and visual display.
Just to tell briefly about this model, it has a depth indicator (3 settings: 2",4" & 6"+), has three preset discrimination modes: all metal, jewelry and coins. The coin mode supposedly excludes pull tabs and includes nickles. It also has a higher ringtone when it finds something in coin mode.
Anyway, I went out and covered different areas of the park. The type of soil was rather clay like, which I've heard is common here on the gulf coast. It's also rained a fair amount in recent weeks so the soil was damp and relatively easy to dig through. Within 3-4 minutes, next to a tree, I got a high (coin) ringtone, set the detector aside and dug for the coin that was indicates to be ~2" deep. Sure enough, there was a penny about 1.5" deep. Scouted out some areas adjacent to some trash cans and picnic tables where there was a lot of junkmetal. This is where I learned how the detector peformed in regards to its accuracy on the coin mode vs. all metal. Occasionally, as it turns out, there would be false coin readings with large iron metal objects. Now and again it would ID something as a nickel when there was a pulltab. I ended up ignoring all the nickel ID hits because of this. As the afternoon went on I got a bit more familiar with how to read the detector audibly. There were plenty of times when I would run across a large iron object that would send the ID display into panic mode, scrambling from iron to jewelry, back and forth and often time landing on the ID of non-nickel coins in the 6"+ depth. After a while I learned to ignore this, as I wasn't interested in finding old relics or digging every find.
After everything was said and done I toned down the sensitivity (it has 4 preset levels) and looked for strictly coins no deeper than 4". Ultimatley, I found 5 pennies total. All in all my impressions of the detector is that it's decent for the money. I paid about $143 for it; it retails for $179.99. Although I'm not sure what factors were involved, and as a newbie, not knowing how this detector compares to others, so far I felt like it was a decent buy.
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