Bounty Hunter Timeranger Ranger Detector
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As a 40 year treasure finding hobbyist, I have used almost everything out there in the metal detector world. My introductory detector was a BFO but I likewise had an army military detector of the tube type. I have owned metal detectors fabricated by more than 15 companies, most of which are no longer in existence. Medeford, Jetco, Relco, Gardiner, Goldak, Metrotech, Heath Kit, Wilson-Newman, were a good deal of of my early detectors along with BFO's by Garrett, White's, Fisher, Bounty Hunter and others. Technology was fixed in the 60's and 70's but silver and gold abounded and finding thousands of coins and relics each year was very easy. Technology bettered dramatically in the 80's and VLF/TR instruments could go deeper and provide ground control/sensitivity choices with both all metal and motion configurations that made the 80's a super treasure finding era. My lowest coin find year in the 80's was over 3,600 and my high was more than 8,500. I was working full time as a teacher/counselor, had a night school occupation and put in 20-40 hours a week working in respective ministry capacities with my church and still found more than 50,000 coins with more than 7,000 being silver. Not bad for a very busy fellow. What made that time frame so procreative was outstanding exploration and numerous powerful, now deemed vintage, metal detectors. My bestloved of all time is the Fisher 1260. Not far behind it is the Garrett Master Hunter 7 & 10 units and White's 6000 Series 2 & 3. The Compass Relic Magnum 7, the Bounty Hunter Red Barons, and Tesoro Silver Sabre were also procreative units for my coin shooting. The Fisher 1280 and CZ 20 were my best water machines for the duration of that time frame and formulated more than 200 gold rings in the 80's. I continued using this same technology through most of the 90's finding in regards to 40,000 coins and another 200 gold rings. I would probably not have changed the technology I was so successful with, but I formulated a major neurological challenge called Hereditary Spastic Parapelegia in 1994. This is a gait impairment of normal physiological function and has caused me to change to lighter, high tech machines and to concentrate on water hunting where walking/diving are having little impact on me. I refuse to let this challenge take away my favored pastime/hobby! I am just not capable to hunt long periods of time with my old favorites and have sold most of them on ebay and made the shift to the newer technology. I feel that I am capable to talk about the vantages and less favorable advantages of old vintage as well as the newer digital machines. My initial years of using TR-only detectors (Transmitter-Receiver) were marked with a great deal of success because I hunted in some areas with high-iron trash accumulations. These detectors were very quick in response and ignored iron targets. I worked around railroad grounds that were requiring little effort to hunt with TR detectors than any other type. I still use a high frequency TR when I go back to those areas. In the later seventies the VLF/TR instruments gave the capability of going a little deeper and to ground cancel also. The immense majority of these instruments required motion for the ground cancel operation and were non-motion in the distinguish mode. Many of the machines that came after this type required a big learning curve to master their full capabilities. Many detector users dropped out of the sideline because it took so much time and crusade to efficaciously operate these vintage detectors, specially the upper level detectors of most major companies. This led me to commend most newbies to the sideline to start out off with quality lower-level/cost instrumentation in getting started. My bestloved machines to commend then were the Fisher 1210, 1212x and the Tesoro Silver Sabre. These and others had magnificent depth and required very little time in getting to know or learn their operation and grant the user to speedily meet with success in finding good targets. Today, I would commend the Fisher F2 or the Garrett 150 or 250 Aces. These take a little learning curve and are dynamite new high tech instruments that trade for $150 to $250. The deviations among the old vintage machines and the new modern detectors is more a matter of preference. The newer machines will give a little more depth and provide more user selective information but the older TR's grant better detection of a good target near a rejected target and will outperform newer machines in working in areas with high junk iron content. In other words there are times and situations where new will outperform old and vise versa. Which detector type will have to you use today? I personally still prefer the vintage analog detectors, but you may spend more cash for the state-of-the-art new detectors and in galore cases come out a winner. There are millions of good targets going into the ground each year and I am exhaustively convinced that there are more dissembled targets from former centuries than the combined total of all targets that have been recovered. Here's to "diggin it"! Larry |
