:usaflag:Question for Ace 250 users..

[MNCoinhunter]

I'm trying to get a general idea of what settings 250 owners are using with the greatest success. For example: which mode(s) you use the most and what your sensitivity is set at for that respective mode.

I'm trying to understand the differences in modes. Does one mode go deeper than another?..etc. If Relic or All Metal or Jewelry find deeper coins, than what is the point of even having a coin mode? Or do they all detect at the same depth and a person just needs to bump-up the sensitivity? I just want to get the most out of my machine I guess.

 

[zaxfire69]

I use All Metal or Jewelry. I have my sensitivity set at 4 bars for my soil here. Man congrats on a great machine. You have yourself a coin magnet there. If there is a coin in the ground it will find it. Get used to the crazy pinpoint button. Remember that the sweet spot of the coil is directly in the center where the hole is located. Other than that Gold usually shows up anywhere from Tin Foil to 1Cent.. I have found that out. Dig it all for awhile. Take care.

 

[NM5K]

I usually run mine wide open unless something is bugging me.. Say a slew of nails..
In a case like that, I might notch the nails.. But generally I run wide open. I like to see
everything.
There is no difference in depth between the various notches. That's one of the good
things about the Ace machines vs older technology where notching often reduced
performance.
The notching on the Ace 250 is totally audio only. Even when you notch out segments,
the machine is still actually working on all notches. You can see it hit the notched out
targets, but you don't hear anything because the audio for that particular notch has been
turned off. Or to put it another way, the machine is always in all metal mode no matter
what you notch out. The only way to increase depth from a mid range sensitivity setting
is to bump up the sensitivity. And it does make a difference. But it can also increase
falsing. So you have to adjust for the best compromise.
Myself, I always run mine as high as the ground will allow. You will lose a couple of
inches of depth performance if you stay on "4" all the time vs "7 or 8"..
I crank it all the way up at first, and see what it does. Too much chatter? Bump it
down a notch or two.

 

[oldranger]

I Love my ACE with the sniper coil

It can do a HOLE ( pun intened ) than Im
capable of right now

Good Luck

Ron
RLTW

 

[Uncle Willy]

Too many folks are hung up on the depth myth. and the advertising hype surrounding it, and think all old or valuable coins are buried halfway to China. They ain't. I've found coins from the 1700's at two inches and clad at eight inches or more just a few feet from each other. I recovered a silver Kennedy half one time at a depth of 0ne-quarter inch and much newer coins around it at 5-6 inches.

The modes on your detector are just different forms of discrimination that are factory set to accept and reject certain objects. Before mode controls appeared on detectors one had a discrimination knob to turn to accept certain targets while rejecting others. And for awhile many had a notch control knob for fine tuning discrimination ( which I prefer to the digital gobbledegoop ) .

Sensitivity is the most abused and misused control on a detector. Too many folks have this notion that the higher you crank it the deeper the signal shoots into the ground. It ain't so. The signal doesn't shoot anywhere. Cranking your sensitivity up is like driving in dense fog and whipping your bright lights on. You can't see squat because your lights just bounce right back into your eyes Sensitivity works the same way. The ground matrix is like the dense fog. Cranking the control up makes the coil more sensitive to the target you hope to find but it also renders it more sensitive to everything else in the ground with a similar conductivity which includes all manner of junk and mineralization and creates masking.

It's akin to sticking your arm down into a 50 gallon barrel brim full of water holding 1000 goldfish. Mixed into that number is one black goldfish and by feel alone you must locate that fish and pluck it out. This is the task heaped upon your detector. It can't see into the ground anymore than you can. It must send out a signal that bounces back from a target, then analyze that signal against different conductivities it has been programmed with and make an educated guess as to what is down there and post that probable ID on the screen or emit the appropriate tone.

Years back when I ran the Garrett Classroom one of my students ( who used a 2500 ) had dedecided he had hunted all his old haunts out and needed to find new areas. The first thing I asked him was how high he ran his sensitivity. He replied that he always ran it as high as possible. I told him to crank it down to about half of what he normally ran it and his old areas would become new areas again. It wasn't long till he was posting stories and pics of the old coins he was recovering that he had no idea was there. End of story.

Bill

 

[Yogi Bear]

Hello all,
Went ever I start playing around with my controls to much. My results suffer.
Then I reset my Ace 250 and get back to finding things again. Mostly I turn down the sensitivity to avoid false signals.
I like to run in the Coin Mode in city parks and public areas.
When I have signal I'm not sure of... I switch to All Metal Mod. to check it again.
Now, I just have to dig the target to find out for sure what it is. A lot of the time that how I find the good stuff with trash masking it.
I really enjoy using my Sniper Coil and larger coil rather than adjusting my settings all day long...
HH
Yogi

 

[NM5K]

Dunno Bill, I gotta partially disagree on that. The conditions are too variable to just
leave at one setting all the time.
Sure, depth isn't everything, but I might as well get all the performance out of the
machine that it is capable of.
And being a ham op for over thirty years, I'm quite familiar with these type RF devices,
loops, sensitivity controls , etc.
The signal into the ground is fixed. It's always full blast. All the sensitivity does is
control the level of the receiver. If you run at "4" all the time, you will not see the
full depth capability of the machine in most cases. I've proven it to myself over and
over again on real targets.
It's like setting the sensitivity on a ham receiver to half way. Only strong signals are
heard. The weak ones are pretty much not detected because the sensitivity
is so low. It's the same basic thing on a detector.
I've found many targets running hot, that would not make a peep running at halfway.
I've tested it over and over just to see. It's not a myth.
And to me, it shows up the most on the largest coil. "9x12"
But...
I consider my method more for the advanced user. You have to know the machine
well, and be able to tell chatter from real signals. Which I can... So the extra falsing
really has little effect on me. But to a beginner, it could probably drive one to take up
golf..
So I agree with telling beginners to keep it down, but I think it's a mistake to etch that
in stone for more advanced users.
I think it's best to run as high as the ground will let you if you know the machine well.
And it's never the same, so my sensitivity setting is rarely glued to the same place.
I adjust it on the fly many times if the ground changes, or a place gets busy, etc..
Some places you can't run high. I know those places, and I'll crank it down.
But some places, like say up at my place in Oklahoma, I can run full blast most of
the time. I get no mineral problems cuz it's good ground. I don't have masking problems
because being empty land, there is not much there except for a load of ammo in the
ground. All I get by cranking it there is more depth. But I usually can't run that high
here in town unless I want to deal with the chatter. But I can still often run 6 or 7..
I'll have to admit, I almost never run at 4... :/ I'm losing depth which I'd rather keep,
needed or not.
Anyway, I'll agree it's probably not for everyone, but I stand by my methods if one
wants to scrape every bit of performance out of a 250. And I've seen a few others
that seem to run the same way with good results. But like I say, most that do are not
beginners at the ace 250.
I always let the ground tell me where to set it. Some ground is happy ground.. Some
ain't...

 

[UNCLENICK]

Hey whats up? Feel free to message anytime, like to know what you find, your experiences, etc. Anyway, I have always, since I bought it, put it in Jewelry mode, run 6 out of 8 bars sens, and eliminate foil. All Metal will go deeper, but its too annoying for me. I do use it when trying to "clear" an area of trash, nails. Where I live it is extremely mineralized. I usually get about 7 close to 8 inchs on pennys/dimes. Quarters and bigger, about 9inchs. Now, big iron like pipes, well anywhere from 10-14 inchs. Any detector could probably do that though. All of that in Jewelry mode, with the said sens, and eliminating foil. Plus with the stock coil. I wish the double d from Excelerator wasnt so huge! I would love to have it. Its just to big. Plus is it worth the money? Happy Hunting, take it easy and good luck.

Nick

 

[Old Katz]

There is a custom setting. I don't usually use it unless I am annoyed with the
extreme trash in the area, in which case I often just leave and find
another site to metal detect. If it's that bad I will use just COIN setting and customize
it by knocking out nickels. It runs really quite at that point; you won't have it jumping
around on you making that ding, ding, ding racket. If there's a coin there you'll find it
along with anything that has a similar reading in the silver/clad range. You'll not be
digging up all that junk in an extremely trashy site. If I miss something that's too bad on me!
There are some trashy sites where even the 4.5 coil is much help to me.

I don't know about you guys but at the moment it's raining like a $@#^$ and has been
the last couple days.

Katz:sad:

 

[Md Epidemic]

i run mine allmetal sensitivity to the max unless theres alot of trash.

epi

 

[MNCoinhunter]

Thanks for all of the input guys. I have had relatively good success with my Ace up to this point. But it's always nice to hear different opinions and I certainly will take all of them into consideration. It almost sounds like sensitivity at the half-way point would be a good all-around setting for where I am. But I do believe that one has to adjust for the area they are hunting. Good stuff..thanks again.

 

[wheath22]

Not to get off the subject but checking out the ACE with some coins I had buried( old ones ) I found that it won't pick up a quarter much deeper than it will get a dime, it doesn't make sense to me, have any of you experienced this?

 

[Old Katz]

Did you put it in all metal? How far up do you put the sensitivity?

Personally I've found the same thing to be true as it is for but I hear
some people claim a different story.

Katz

WHERE IS THE DANG THING!

 

[slingshot]

Here's from my experiments that I'm continually doing with the Ace:
There is very little target masking in the Relics mode, yet it has just enough discrimination to avoid the nails, paper clips,etc. and still get the small gold. In tot lots where the diggin's easy, the a/m mode will find the tiny gold earrings and the gold chains. What's coins mode for? Well, in East Texas we don't know what a trash can is. and all the sports fans throw their tabs everywhere to the point it's hard to move a foot before you find some. My lil' sniper coil allows me to find the stuff without finding THEM -I paid for my sniper coil in 3 months because I'm able to hunt in places where no one else will. I ran my sensitivity at 6 bars, constantly rechecking some signals because of the signal overload, and when I finally found what seemed like a deep target, I immediately lowered it to 4 bars to check the difference. The only difference I could ever find was that the 4 bar setting was smoother sounding on targets-I still got the target. Seems like the soil here only increases the ground signal. We also seem to have another problem with large iron ore rocks and what seems like large iron pieces that maybe welders left behind when building and they are detected at great distances. Finally, there are some places that are so trashy that I go to 2 bars and cherry pick the surface-it's a KILLER on places where hardly ANY detector can be used. The Ace is about the only detector I've owned where you can get the sensitivity BELOW a factory preset level ENOUGH to get to some really tough places. I could go on and on.. It's capabilities just keep growing the more I use it.

 

[Uncle Willy]

It's the "driving one to golf" crowd I was aiming at. There are just too many variables in this gig to narrow it down to "one size fits all" category. But sensitivity on a detector can be a tricky devil and drive you to drink till you get it figured out. I always advise beginners to run it low until they have everything else figured out. Saves a lot of aggravation and frustration and dampening of those high hopes.

Bill

 

[Uncle Willy]

Yeah if ya play around with the sensitivity it will do tricks for you. Usually with the Sniper one can run it a little higher depending on ground conditions and trash but it seems you have a system figured out that works for you. A lot of experimentation is involved in this hobby.

Bill

 

[slingshot]

Yeah if ya play around with the sensitivity it will do tricks for you. Usually with the Sniper one can run it a little higher depending on ground conditions and trash but it seems you have a system figured out that works for you. A lot of experimentation is involved in this hobby.

Bill

Some of the areas that I hunt, 4 is even high for the sniper! Now tot lots are a completely different animal. I want at LEAST 4 bars with the sniper coil so the tiny earrings and such will be picked up should they be a little outside of a bad sweep pattern. Some have been by accident- like when I was under a ton of highline wires and sensitivity 2 shut off the inteference and I was afraid I was not gonna get any depth. Really well thought out design.

 

[joejoe7us]

Yesterday I dug 3 holes in my back yard and buried a nickel in each one. I took my Ace 250 and scanned over the holes. Some times I would get a signal and other times I wouldn`t. They were buried about 3 " deep. I had the machine in coin mode with the sensitivity set at 5 notches. Was just wondering why it didn`t pick them up all the time?

 

[MNCoinhunter]

One thing that irks me about the Ace, is the signals that jump around. I have iron notched out..yet I will get coin tones..and it will jump between a certain coin and drop back to iron...back and forth, back and forth.....like it can't decide. And it's almost always a nail or something else. If I were to dig up every single one of those...I would be in one spot all day. I guess what I'm getting at, is that I want the Ace to not chime-in like that if it's a nail. You can discriminate the iron..but you still have to listen to it either way..it's frustrating.

 

[Uncle Willy]

Try the "twitch" to change some of those signals. Badly corroded coins will often give off readings like that or broken signals.

Bill