Silver Umax Review

[Rainyday101]

I now have over 20 hours on my Silver umax and can't believe what this little wonder can do! At first I started in all metal and then would switch to disc. to check the target. That works great but is time consuming. Most of the areas I have been in are trashy so I now set the disc just past pulltab and cherry pick. This little wonder ignores all the trash and hits on coins with a nice sweet tone. By ignores I mean that it might crackle and pop on the trash, but a solid tone is guarenteed to be a coin. Set-up in this cherry pick mode the detector has only been fooled twice by a shotgun shell and a twist off cap. I know I miss nickels and jewerly, but I don't have to dig tons of trash. I would rather dig just what I have to dig to get the good stuff and not leave the park all dug up. My soil is mild and I can run the sensitivity as high as I want without any loss of stability. My deepest coin with the disc. that high has been a dime at 6 inches with a nice solid tone. If I am in an older area I will hunt in all metal and switch to this cherry picking setup on a target so I can get the deeper silver. If the target drops out with my cherry pick setup, I will turn the disc down until I get it and then decide if I want to dig. The battery last forever in one of these. Night detecting is no problem because you are not relying on a display that needs a backlight! Dollar for dollar this is one heck of a detector.

I was thinking about buying another higher end Tesoro to use to setup for cherry picking and then letting the kids use this one. After my last hunt I just can't see doing that right now because the Siver uMax already does that and does it really well. I guess I will be buying another silver uMax for the kids. I might try a Deleon or Vaquero next year, but for now the Silver does everything a land detector needs to do for me.

I am running the 8" concentric coil and thinking about trying the 12 x 10 to gain a little depth.

I haven't used other detectors side by side with this, but I would bet it could keep up with some much more expensive equipment.

The thing that improved my silver umax the most was the recent addition of a Garrett Pro Pointer. Recovery of coins and MUCH quicker and precise.

Tesoro definetely made a winner with the Silver uMax. (Tiger Shark also!)

 

[mojotrout]

agreed on all accounts! I use it more than my Outlaw, as my ground has very low minerization but is pretty trashy. A is a very effective coin-shooter! Definately a machine I'll always have.

 

[mojotrout]

...and please let us know how your 10x12 performs, I haven't tried mine on the uMax yet.

 

[machineman]

I like the 10 x 12 dd for searching wide open areas. You wont get a lot more depth but the coverage is nice. The large dd likes steel bottle caps. I would suggest putting that Silver umax in disc just around iron and then learning what good and bad sound like. I am starting to be able to tell if the target is good or bad just by the sound. On my outlaw I can tell most foil and canslaw from the coins by the way it clips the response at the end of the sweep. Also coins and most good targets will simply fade out as you lift the coil, but bad targets will start to chatter and go one way. Airtests arent real indicators of depth but you can try different targets and see what I am talking about. Also I always try to guess what I am digging up before I see it. Im right more than you might expect. Good luck and tesoros rock. Lots of people love the silver umax.

 

[tabman]

Nice review! It's hard to beat a Silver

 

[GunnarMN]

Hay man when i used to do tile people wanted the strongest glue they could get when they only needed the normal stuff, because when it came to fixing a broken tile it would tear out the floor with the tile. where the normal glue could hold it down and yet could be replaced without taking up the whole floor and in the case of the Umax How much do you need ? sounds like the silver is just right .

 

[Rainyday101]

I agree with ya Gunnar. I just wonder if I am missing deep silver in certain areas. Some of the areas I hunt are sandy and the coins tend to get a bit deeper.

Machineman, thanks for the advice on your hunting technique. I will be sure to give it a try. It just seems that the areas I have been hunting are really trashy. Because of that I have just been trying to cherry pick the good stuff. Oh, and I agree with you on the air test for this machine. It is definitely doing better in the ground than air test.

Spots to hunt around here are getting harder to come by. When I look up city ordinances for nearby towns it is a bummer. In my town just about everything that might even be slightly fun is prohibited. Some really old parks are off limits. In a nearby town parks with beaches are okay as long as you stay in the sand. So far I have not found anything on county parks and they are what I have been detecting along with beaches with my Tiger Shark.

Soooooo..... do you get a deeper detector or stick with the coin slayer and try the 10 x 12? I have been thinking about just sticking with the Silver uMax all year for a land detector and seeing what this thing can really do. One thing for sure though is that this little gem will never be for sale.

An interesting note I read on another forum sometime this winter was that someone had a coil made by Tesoro with cable length just long enough so that it only made a couple of wraps around the shaft. The depth increase was considerable. Might be something I try with another coil.

 

[Topdecker]

The 18"x3" cleansweep is a winner on the Silver. If you need deep, yeah, the 10x12 DD might be nice, but I would not get the concentric since the DD coil will level out any ground balance issues you might be having (DD coils are affected by poor ground only 25% as much as a concentric coil).

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[Rainyday101]

I would probably go with the concetric though, because a concentric is deeper than a DD and my ground is so mild I can run sense at absolute max and never false.