Anybody ever use a Coinmaster V supreme?

[thebeatmachine]

I was re-reading Understanding White's DFX By Jimmy Sierra and on page 20 he speaks of this detector and its performance on the salt water. It says it operated on 1.79 khz wich I thought was unusual. Has anyone used one of these detectors, and how did it perform using such a low frequency?

 

[coinnut]

I used the Coinmaster V Supreme when it first came out. It is a beast with 14 AA batteries and very heavy to use. But the previous metal/mineral units which were either BFO's or TR's were always finding hot rocks. This machine broke the mineralization barrier and reduced the number of hot rocks we found. I could find a dime at 8" but it was just a slight whisper in the threshold. No discriminator back then, so it could be a coin or a nail, no difference. It did like finding the green Indian Head pennies around here though For it's time, it was a breakthrough machine. Now, I couldn't go back, although the analog way of doing things, could allow you to cheat the ground balance and other settings a bit. Tricks of the trade. HH

 

[thebeatmachine]

Thanks for the great story. That was the info I was looking for!

 

[Tom_in_CA]

It was the first vlf/tr that Whites came out with, if my memory serves me corrected. I never used one, but hunted with a fellow or two that was using one. It would be similar to the ADS II and III of Garrets, for instance. The all-metal vlf would be similar, and competitive with today's all-metal modes (like pinpoint mode for instance). You could walk right out to nasty ground, and using the double-stacked tuner, dial right into any soil with that manual ground balance.

The TR disc. was wimpy though. Depth dropped dramatically, and you had to click and tune right to the ground, and scrub, lest it blare off. Just as other TR disc. of the era, you'd be doing good to get 4 or 5" in good ground on a coin. So a lot of guys just used the all-metal mode, and tried to use their ears to tell surface vs deep, nail verses conductive, etc.... It was a good beach machine on the wet mineralized salt, ONCE you got good at the constant dialing in to keep the threshold there.

 

[Monte]

I was re-reading Understanding White's DFX By Jimmy Sierra and on page 20 he speaks of this detector and its performance on the salt water. It says it operated on 1.79 khz wich I thought was unusual. Has anyone used one of these detectors, and how did it perform using such a low frequency?

The original Coinmaster V Supreme was our first modern metal detector that provided ground canceling capabilities. It was much more difficult to tune that model than it is to ground balance any detector today because it meant adjusting two knobs, back-and-forth, as you lowered the coil to the ground or raised the coil from the ground.

The detector was quite large (as many were back then, about a quarter of a century ago), and heavy. The good news, for many of us who had been using BFO's or TR's or TR-Discriminators, was that by providing a means to cancel the ground effect we could raise and lower the search coil without any false signal. You could sweep over a little dip in the ground or over a bump w/o falsing. Go over a pine cone or more easily search plowed, uneven ground w/o falsing. And the depth! It was amazing how well those detectors would respond to deeper targets ... of all sorts. Tiny little boot tacks, horse shoe nails, crate nails, small wadded foil, all manner of iron junk, as well as other metals to include coins and tokens.

The problem was that there was no provision to eliminate unwanted trash, no discriminate circuit, and that meant the typical hobbyists, a coin hunter, wasn't able to reject iron and foil and bottle caps and the then still recent pull tabs. Many who were avidly searching "relics" of all types loved the ground cancelling capabilities for ease of operation, and the extreme depth of detection. They were, however, going after any-and-all metal targets most of the time.

If your ground was low-to-moderately mineralized, you still gained a little better ease or use and better depth, but if your searches had you hunting a more mineralized ground, believe me it made a very noteable difference! Much easier searches, and in many cases the depth of detection was doubled. At places where there had been fill or plowing or other disturbance that relocated coins beyond the depths of most detectors at the time, the Coinmaster V Supreme would respond quite well, producing smaller coins, such as Indian Head and early 'wheat-back' cents and silver dimes at honest 8"

 

[Tom_in_CA]

thanx for the nostalgic look-back Monte. Your friend Chris got 2 half reales and a few phoenix buttons on a recent road trip we made

I just now see an error I made in my post above yours: the GEB Supreme wouldn't be similar to the Garrett ADS II or III. I meant to say it would be like the VLF/TR of the Ground-hog type Garretts.

 

[Uncle Willy]

Dang Monte, thanks for tweaking some old memories of the "bread box" detectors and what an adventure it was to detect back then. .

Bill