Cortes Advice

[Chezhinkle]

Greetings all,
I took the plunge and bought a Cortes, hoping to find an easy-to-use, top end detector for my wife to use. (Yeah right! I think that is right up there with buying a rifle or football for her for Christmas. But she is a good sport!) Seriously, I did not want to afflict her with my Minelab Explorer 2, and wanted to find something easier to use. Well....I am finding it much harder to use, as the display is totally useless--the words and readings spin by so fast I cannot keep up with them. All I can go by is tones (which I am used to doing with the Minelab) but I cannot get any of the tones to stick while I am trying to pinpoint. At this point we have dug nothing, because we cannot isolate that it is actually finding anything. Maybe it is all just ground mineralization? And how do you pinpoint this thing? I have used detectors with a concentric coil before, but they always had a pinpoint button. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Mathew Hinkle

 

[rentasquid]

It will be difficult to use tones to ID with on the Cortes. Especially since the tone feature is a momentary feature. I only found it to be a minimal conformation tool at best. Even though I know that some were really sold on its Tone feature, I never was. I did find it handy in deciding whether something was really iron or not.
I found the display easy enough to read, but I was really distracted by it. I ended up putting a bag over it, and only used it for conformation. I'm not much into cherry-picking, so I tend to dig everything, unless it read 45-49 which was always a tab.
Pinpointing was fairly easy, or at least I thought so. Just "X" over the target and probe. I found it to be pretty accurate. If you are expecting to use All Metal mode, try Xing first. The All Metal retune was too fast to be effective in pinpointing. But you know, I'm just telling you what I experienced. Others have accused me of just slamming on the Cortes, but all I do, is to tell people what my experiences were with it. Overall I liked the detector, but I ended up trading it away for a few things I didnt like about it. Be patient with it. It isnt a EXII. Learn it for what it is, and you will probably get the hang of it in no time.

Best Wishes,

J.

 

[Mike Hillis]

First thing is limit the audio to acceptable limits by using the Disc setting and notches as needed. Raise the disc up into the foil setting if you get a bunch of falses. When in lots of alum trash use the notches. They work and its alot more enjoyable not having to listen to all the noise. When in steel bottle caps, use the wide notch to kill them.

When looking at the meter, you want to pay attention to the bargraph. Then when you get a target with an acceptable bargraph reading, use the Sum mode to get a id number. The bargraph and the Summed id number are very reliable.

When pinpointing, just click over to all metal (make sure you are ground balanced or you will have to raise your coil a few inches to kill the ground signal. For shallow targets, you might need to anyway.

The Cortes is a nice machine.

HH

Mike

 

[Chezhinkle]

Mike and "rentasquid,"
Thanks to both of you for your help. I am going out today to really try to get this machine to work. It should be be very simple to use. I am not sure why I am having such problems, other than that our ground is highly mineralized, and that tends to drive detectors berserk. I have to figure out the right combination of ground balance and sensitivity. I will let you know how things go!

Mathew