northwest?

[Elbandido]

Any one from the pacific northwest?

 

[POLEWAGGER]

Born and raised.
Renton to Bothell and all points in between.

 

[bigolhorns]

Forest Grove, Oregon

 

[Monte]

around the NW Oregon metro-to-Portland area for about 44 of my 62 years.

I don't get into Washington all that often, preferring to head to Central and Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and especially my home state of Utah. A variety of different ground mineral make-up and site challenges to deal with. Not all but many of the ground mineral sites here in the NW region can be a bit of an annoyance due to higher Fe3O4 mineral content.

As Director of AHRPS we host a monthly metal detector meeting and outing (weather permitting) in the Portland metro area. It is interesting to hear comments from attendees who have traveled about or hunt often enough to encounter different areas and comment on how bad some of our ground is.

Monte
monte@ahrps.org

(PS: I don't see bigolhorns registered with us so I'll send along our current meeting notice and invite.)

 

[Elbandido]

Thanks Monte.
The ground over here in Vancouver just sucks to say the least.
I miss the coast where it was mostly sand.

 

[Monte]

Thanks Monte.
The ground over here in Vancouver just sucks to say the least.

I learned long, long ago just how challenging some of our local area ground conditions can be. It made me really appreciate even more the benefits of having Ground Balance control AND the ability to accept ALL metal targets (ferrous and non-ferrous) in the really bad sites.

Some of the early-era VLF/TR-Disc. models worked pretty well for what they were capable of, and with the right motion-based Discriminators I don't find the ground to be all that terrible. Some models on the market, based upon how they were engineered, can be a bit annoying for me because they require frequent manual GB tweaking. Other models have served my with equal, or better field performance, yet haven't called for constant GB maintenance.

We have a lot of "bad ground" in all sorts of communities, whether bare dirt or grassed over, and then there are the tougher sand, pea gravel and small rock burdens we face. In late fall, when the major river waters fall, the Willamette and Columbia River beaches are were I really appreciate working with a true zero-discrimination mode (no metal rejection and only dealing with the ground signal).

I miss the coast where it was mostly sand.

Some of the coastal areas aren't too bad, especially in the dry sand, but we also have a lot of highly mineralized (iron) beach sand at some coastal sites that causes difficulties when we hunt the wet salt sand (the low-conductive wet salts).

I like the easy digging in the sand, but .... In the end I would rather hit some of my favorite ghost towns, homesteads, pioneer and military encampments and other sites. Many that I work, in Utah and Nevada and a couple of places in eastern Oregon, are more mineralized that sites around our area. No problem, however, since most of the coins, trade tokens and miscellaneous smaller artifacts are only on the surface or down to about 4". Seldom do you have to recover deeper targets in the 5' to 7" range, and quite rare are 8" deep targets.

Tesoro has produced some models in the past that were favorite of mine, but I haven't been very excited about many (most) of their offerings in more recent years. Their iron rejection hasn't been as 'clean' as the better early offerings, but maybe that's just me. I know that in some of the field test examples I set out to compare detectors when they are released, or for folks to learn more about their detectors when I do seminars or after our monthly Detector Owner Rendezvous meetings, quite a few are surprised at how poorly their detector choice performance. I am referring to comparing a really "versatile" detector, not just a simple coin shooter, etc.

As a rule, most Tesoro models can perform quite well when they take on the Nail Board Performance Test, especially with a good, smaller-than-stock coil (such as a 5