looking at Tesoro Cortes for coin hunting at old home sites and local parks

[maxxkatt]

Fisher ID Edge vs Tesoro Cortes

I have owned 3 detectors over the past 20 years.

fisher gold bug
garrett master hunter 7
fisher ID edge

We used the gold bug in the north Ga mountains for gold. We would locate buckshot in the streams and then pan the sand and rocks where the buckshot was found and find gold flakes and an occasional nugget the size of a bb.

My son used the Garrett so I didn't have much experience with that detector.

The fisher ID edge I have used for the past 3 years in the north Atlanta area searching parks and old home sites. I have never been really happy with the fisher ID edge. It did not seem to be very good at discriminating tabs, aluminum bits, etc. so I mostly had to dig all non-iron signals.
I was not happy with the membrane buttons that sometimes you had to press exactly right to make them work.

So from what I have read about the Tesoro Cortes it has much better control over correctly identifying a target with the sum switch and notch switch. Of course it has 100%knobs and switches which I prefer. The display seem very logical and clear. Not so with the Fisher ID Edge. to find the depth I think I remember it had a 0 - 99 reading with 99 on or just below the surface. So it was not a real depth gauge but an estimate of nearness. I prefer to know how many inches I have to dig.

I sold the ID edge on eBay. after being without a metal detector for 6 months, I realized I do miss going searching every two weeks or so.


The truth is I dropped out of detecting because of my lack of results with the ID Edge. I would go detecting maybe once a month. I was very good at finding old home sites using top maps and commander compass but would find very few if any coins. Tons of old metal caps, pull tabs, beer cans would signal as coins but of course were not coins when I dug them out.

I have been told by others you need to dig everything. But surely when hunting coins that should not be the case. I don't have time to dig everything since I own my own computer/internet business that takes up a lot of my time. I use metal detecting as a break from sitting in front of a computer screen 8 hours a day.

I am thinking very seriously of buying the Tesoro Cortes detector.

So I guess the question is, should my "good" find rate increase with the Tesoro cortes compared to my last three years of off and on detecting with the fisher ID edge?

 

[slingshot]

Either that or the Deleon- and I say that because Tesoro blew it when they only had g/b in a/m mode on the Cortes. Disc mode on both is preset. I guess the sum mode could be somewhat beneficial, but the numeric ID and ID bar strength icons will help better make decisions.

 

[walnut]

I think that they fixed the GB in disc mode so they they could offer extremely precise notching. Trade off I think, like with the golden umax.

I would like a cortes.

 

[Texas Ed]

I bought a Cortes last year and since it was Tesoro's top of the line machine I thought I would be pulling coins out of the dirt from China - just average like most - light weight easy to swing and can be fooled by pull tabs - square tabs & aluminum can slaw even with the sum averaging tool. Very quite and had no EMI problems and will have a problem locating a target if it is masked by iron. Really dont like AM mode & hardly ever use it on any of my machines - did hit on a 4" rusty washer at 12.5" - quarters average depth 7.5" - dimes & copper 5.5". One thing I don't like about it it does not have a pin point button but I can still recover the target easily. I heard a lot about the read out screen being to small but I really like that feature - knobs will move almost every time I sit it down and you would think the engineers would have solved that problem. Life time warranty was another selling point for me. Anyway it sits on the shelf most of the time & gathers dust and still has the orginal batteries that came with it - I just might consider on a trade sometime in the future.

Texas ED

 

[Stoof-tabsallday]

I bought a Cortes last year and since it was Tesoro's top of the line machine I thought I would be pulling coins out of the dirt from China - just average like most - light weight easy to swing and can be fooled by pull tabs - square tabs & aluminum can slaw even with the sum averaging tool. Very quite and had no EMI problems and will have a problem locating a target if it is masked by iron. Really dont like AM mode & hardly ever use it on any of my machines - did hit on a 4" rusty washer at 12.5" - quarters average depth 7.5" - dimes & copper 5.5". One thing I don't like about it it does not have a pin point button but I can still recover the target easily. I heard a lot about the read out screen being to small but I really like that feature - knobs will move almost every time I sit it down and you would think the engineers would have solved that problem. Life time warranty was another selling point for me. Anyway it sits on the shelf most of the time & gathers dust and still has the orginal batteries that came with it - I just might consider on a trade sometime in the future.

Texas ED

Um, I would take the batteries out of it lol.

 

[slingshot]

I bought a Cortes last year and since it was Tesoro's top of the line machine I thought I would be pulling coins out of the dirt from China - just average like most - light weight easy to swing and can be fooled by pull tabs - square tabs & aluminum can slaw even with the sum averaging tool. Very quite and had no EMI problems and will have a problem locating a target if it is masked by iron. Really dont like AM mode & hardly ever use it on any of my machines - did hit on a 4" rusty washer at 12.5" - quarters average depth 7.5" - dimes & copper 5.5". One thing I don't like about it it does not have a pin point button but I can still recover the target easily. I heard a lot about the read out screen being to small but I really like that feature - knobs will move almost every time I sit it down and you would think the engineers would have solved that problem. Life time warranty was another selling point for me. Anyway it sits on the shelf most of the time & gathers dust and still has the orginal batteries that came with it - I just might consider on a trade sometime in the future.

Texas ED

Um, I would take the batteries out of it lol.

+2.

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