SO after using this enough to thoroughly drain the new batteries I put in it, and put a dent in the new set, I've decided to get rid of it. Today I went to the park with my R2 and my Ace 250. I did a slow, tight sweep for about 50 feet, turned and came back along my path the same way. Didn't find much, a bit of aluminum, a round slug of lead, a watch ring dial thingy, and two pennies. I did the same path with the 250, found three quarters, wadded foil, pieces of can, and a couple of signals that despite digging 12 inches produced nothing, so probably was large iron very deep. (I dug a plow tip 18 inches in a field once, the ace rang as a quarter the whole time) I have found $3.60 in clad in a month of detecting every chance I got. Wednesday a '67 half dollar rang up like trash, skipping between 78 and 96, no trash in the hole, it was just sheer frustration that had me digging every signal that day, otherwise I would have missed it. (Thursday and Friday, two hours each day, landed me a total of four pennies. Four pennies in a heavily used park.) One wheat penny from my back yard, one from an older park. And about a half bucket of aluminum. I have to say I'm not impressed. I thought it was quiet in my backyard because it was able to be ground balanced, now I think it's because it just can't seem to get very much depth. Then I thought maybe I just managed to miss those coins, so I went to a small area by the boat launch I had went over a couple of times this week with the Racer, ended up digging some 10" deep targets with my 250, just cans and one odd copper ring thingy that had an enormous green halo when I flipped the plug, with one dime and one '55 wheat penny in the mix. That the racer 2 missed entire aluminum cans at ten inches is baffling to say the least.
There are other things I don't like about it, like having to switch to deep mode from three tone because three tone doesn't give a id number a lot of the time. Or being in different modes gives you different id numbers for the same target. It's incredibly frustrating to have to constantly switch modes. I absolutely hate that overload, I thought it would be just big objects that did it, but a piece of metal on the surface will do it too.
I was excited to get a detector with ground balance capability again, I haven't had one since my oooooold White's 4900 DLMax that my mom bought way back in the (late?) 90s and ended up giving to me (talk about swinging an anvil, that thing is heavy!). But I will be using my yellow beacon until I decide on a different detector, every time I use the racer I can feel my enthusiasm disappearing as I dig loads of shallow trash, and leave the park with nothing to show for my efforts.
