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Hidden Treasure: Where to find it, how to get it

Dear all

Thought you might like to hear from one of your English users. I have never owned a Bounty Hunter before, but have known them around for a great many years. Recently I decided to look for a light easy to use machine that would not cost a great deal. Frankly I did not really expect to find such a super detector - a Fast Tracker.

The detector was purchased for my wife who now accompanies me on trips during the summer months. The key specifications I needed for the machine were weight & price. I looked at the models available in the £100-£150 price range. Time & again in looking the Fast Tracker came out on top, there just wasn't anything else to match. There were no other machines that offered the following: Variable sensitivity & Discrimination as well as tone ID. I was very impressed, even more so when the unit actually arrived & I put it through some tests.

I have been a detector user since 1977 - continually - & use some very sophisticated machines. But what really takes me with the Tracker is its usability. No weight to speak of, accurate discrimination, wonderful tone ID. A great detector for younger folk, or those needing a great backup machine. One of its excellent features is the discrimination. This unit will cut iron out - dead! It will not cut out desirable targets, its tone is the key. By careful adjustment it becomes very simple to ignore low tone silver paper without the loss of small rings & other desirable items. A setting of 10 o'clock on the disc is just right for me, at this small rings still give high tone & silver paper a low tone. Even if rings do give a low tone you can still ID them by carefully listening & understanding the audio response. This will put the operator in a great position to identifying targets before they are dug. Large positive signals like cans are easily identified by raising the coil off the ground, coins etc quickly disappear whilst cans etc. do not. Very useful in a coinshooting area where large alloy junk abounds.

The first trip out was a site that we search on a regular basis, its an industrial river foreshore. The whole area is a mass of iron fragments and large pieces of steel junk. It's the toughest site we have, but in amongst this by very careful searching you can find coins from the last couple of hundred years. My normal method with my 'big' machine would be a six inch coil, you just cannot use anything else. Your mind must pick through the continuous rejected signals looking for those 'pips' that might be non-ferrous. The Fast Tracker was in its element, by the end of the two hour session I had recovered 25 coins from 1900 to present date, also a big pile of fishing weights. This was a super example of just how efficient the machine is, very, very impressive on this hardest of all sites. And this was how things were to continue on other places we visited.

Another area that I frequent is a local beach, and many hours are spent there testing different units we own. Straight out into the wet sand, no response to the saturated salt conditions - excellent. After a couple of hours the numbers of recovered coins was relatively low, about 15, but this is quite normal using an expensive machine not a budget example! My buddy was using such a unit & there wasn't anything he detected that I couldn't, & my discrimination was more accurate. To operate on wet sand without any difficulty is something rather special that other manufacturers should take note of - especially on a machine that costs a fraction of some of the others available that don't work there at all.

Finally I took a deep breath & went to a field that I have been searching constantly for many years. In that time I have made some very good recoveries, mostly coins from pre 1600. It is now very hard to get much, but memories keep your patience on the field. A section of the site has a very iron contaminated section that's always hard to work, especially with the normal large heads that we use for the rest of the site. I reasoned that this might be the place to use the Fast Tracker. Boy was I right! After three hours of intense hard searching, a number of buttons, a fob seal & small buckle, I found a hammered silver penny of Edward I (1280's). It took me ages to find the coin in the soil & grass, but the FT wouldn't let go. The small coil is a super aid in this type of contaminated ground. Right at the end of the day whilst idly walking back to the vehicle, I got a rough but slightly positive signal. Cutting a turf down to four inches, the signal came much stronger & in the center of the hole was a green point. Carefully digging around it out came one of the best Roman brooches I've found pointing upwards! chuffed - you bet!

I have really enjoyed using this machine & look forward to my wife Caroline having as much fun as I did, that's if she gets it back! I can only dream as to what the more expensive models in the Bounty Hunter range might be like, would sure like to try one. But I can only say that it's impossible to be disappointed with the Fast Tracker in any way at all. Its performance, features & price are staggeringly brilliant...

A big congratulations to First Texas Products, you've got a winner in the Fast Tracker!

Yours truly,

Stuart Rainford