Metal Detectors Super Store

Detectorist Finds Ring, Pays for
Metal Detector First Time Out!

On Dec 1st, 2004 I purchased a Garrett Ace 250 metal detector at the Kellyco showroom in Winter Springs. I was interested in buying a small light weight machine to take with me on my trips to the East and West coasts. The machine I wanted should have a good discriminator, pinpoint mode, and be light and easily broken down to carry on board an airplane.

After reading the advertisement for the new Garrett Ace 250 in Lost Treasure magazine it appeared that this detector was perfect. Most experienced metal detectorists have learned that a manufacturer will make their product sound great so I was interested in taking my new machine to the beach to give it a good work out. If it did not work out I would give the machine to my 13 year old grandson an avid treasure hunter in his own right.

Since I was staying at a hotel near the Orlando airport I decided to go to Cocoa Beach for my test. After arriving at the beach I went to the area were the people sit near the waters edge and turned on the machine. The detector has 5 modes to hunt in and 7 levels of sensitivity. I opted to hunt in all metal mode and maximum sensitivity. The machine beeped a couple of times and the displays blinked then became steady. I had walked about ten feet and did not hear a peep from the machine so I scanned a piece of metal about three inches from the top of the coil and it responded.

I walked another 7 or 8 feet without a sound so I thought maybe the bottom of the coil was not working. I tossed a penny onto the sand scanned across the coin and the detector responded. The first thing I discovered is how quiet, actually too quiet, the machine is. It took me a while to get use to this. Periodically I would check to make sure it was working. I was curious how the detector would react to salt water so I took it to the waters edge. It did tend to generate spurious sounds but after reducing the sensitivity to level 4 it quieted down. Returning to the drier sand I increased the sensitivity to max and the machine went into its quiet mode again.

Pretty soon I started finding targets so to give a fair evaluation I would dig all targets and compare them to the audio and visual discriminator. I have had some older Garrett Discriminating detectors in the past, none with visual discrimination, and from experience know how accurate their audio discriminators can be. This machine has a three tone audio discriminator and an LCD visual display with 12 segments, target curser and target icons.. To put it in simple terms the discriminator was right on.

I found several pieces of iron and the target cursor locked on to the iron icon. Pennies, dimes, quarters, and nickels locked on at the correct icon. Some targets jumped between nickel and pull tab. They turned out to be beer bottle caps. A silver earring came in at the dime mark and a stainless steel medical alert necklace just below the nickel icon. Pieces of foil fell in the foil area unless they were large then they fell in the tab area. A piece of solder fell in the dime area.

A small 14k gold ring just above pulltab. Much to my amazement I only found 1 pulltab and it was correctly identified by the discriminator. The audio tones all agreed with the visual meter and when the bell tone sounded except for the earring and solder the targets were coins.

The machine also has a pinpoint feature and depth indicator. First off unless you probe a target and measure the exact depth I do not believe that you can tell for certainly the depth of an object in sand. I had brought a flat bottomed sand scoop to the beach and this helped to get an idea of how deep a target was. I would scoop 2 inches deep, and if the target was still there another 2 inches. By using this method I could approximate the target depth. The depth indicator on the detector appeared to be pretty accurate. Most of the target I found were 2 to 6 inches deep and a few appeared even deeper. The pinpoint feature is also a great help in locating the target and is especially useful on deep targets.

Well to sum it up I am pleasantly pleased with this little detector. Mr. Garrett and his staff should be very please with this new machine. This would be an excellent entry detector for anyone joining the sport and I for one would not hesitate to recommend the Ace 250 to anyone. Incidentally I bought my grandson a Garrett Ace 150. If it performs as well as the Ace 250 he will also be happy.

Larry Wendel
Denver, Colorado

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