Hi Monte. Well you got me thinking maybe my statement was a little exuberant so I will run the test again to confirm. I made up my test garden when I got my sov maybe 4 years ago, and I buried a nail, pulltab, bottle cap, nickle, dime and quarter all 9-10 inches deep and flat because the sov was supposed to go so deep and really find the deep old stuff, so I made it up to practice on the sounds of deep targets. the test garden conditions have no trash and i know exactly where each target is so it is better than most field conditions so there is an advantage. each year I would get another coil and compare them. the sov with the 5" excellerator didnt pick up a thing, the 8" was iffy in discriminate, but better in all metal, the 10"stock coil gave faint but definite hits on all. if i didnt use the meter, i could get a slightly stronger signal. when i got the vaquero i went right out to the test garden with it and ran the 8X10 and 5.75. i guess i would call my ground moderate. if i remember right, i ground balanced a bit on the positive side, sens at 10, supertuned all the way, discrimination all the way down. i also have the "high tone" vaquero which seems to have a much clearer and discernable response than low tone all metal, but maybe that is simply my perception. the 8X10 hit all targets clear and repeatable, though fainter as the depth would cause. then i switched to the 5.75 and got solid hits again on all targets (not the nail in discriminate). i was expecting nothing because the 5" on the sov wouldn"t pick up a thing. The sov with 8" didnt give near as good a response.Part of the better response is DD versus concentric I guess. Again, i will go out this weekend and repeat the procedure and try a new dime at exactly 10" and let you know the results. all i can tell you is that i am so impressed with the performance of the vaquero and 5.75. it goes DEEP. Also thanks for the info the cortez, I didnt know the ground balance was only in all metal. Do you still have the TID function in all metal? Also, regarding ground balancing, I have found two places that the vaquero would not ground balance with the stock 8X9 concentric. I believe all i could get was a negative response. One was on the Outer Banks of NorthCarolina(Nags Head) where you could literally see gobs of black sand all over left when the winds blew the lighter sand away and second was Golden Colorado where the mining ground was so mineralized that the result was the same. Further north at Ocean City, Maryland and various New Jersey beaches I had no problem ground balancing. In Colorado, I could ground balance fine with my whites 4b gold machine and 5X10DD on the Colorado ground due to the extended ground balance range of the gold machine. I was thinking that i could have gotten the vaquero to balance with a widescan DD. Would you have any comments/suggestions? Thanks, Cash
Solid hits on 10" small coins doesn't come often or easy, especially if the ground is moderate to highly mineralized.
