Bounty Hunter TRACKERIV/TK4-PL Tracker IV Metal Detector

Comment: I bought this. Works fairly well. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to use it much. New job keeps me fairly busy.

Comment: Don't believe the hype.
The ONLY thing this baby needs is the accessory coils for more depth.
Folks will tell you Oh you need that five hundred dolllar too one thousand dollar detector for finding anythng.
Dont buy into it.
While yes the meter may be useless overall.
For one hundred dollars you can't beat the value.
Only four and a half times out hunting and already I've found bus fare for myself.
a 1954 Rabies vaccinnation tag.
A duck from who knows when, It looks like something natives made, Or a prison inmate?
An VERY antique Water faucet where the end is small unlike todays...
I plan to go our library this week and see a directory on our how old our house is.
I found an 9mm Luger spent shell casing..
A wheat penny..
Though ALL change "new' and old I'll probally end up keeping for the find value. LOL
And oh my yard is getting cleaner of garbage.
So maybe our grass ll be cleaner n Greener?! LOL

Comment: I bought this detector for a different reason than most. I took up archery a couple of years ago, shooting in the pasture when no horses are in the way. I found that the arrows can bury themselves completely under the grass and dirt if you miss the target. You can be looking right at one and not see it. They cost six bucks a piece, so losing them was making the hobby kind of expensive. Since my arrows are aluminum, a metal detector seemed like a good idea. Like other shoppers, I had a hard time trying to pick the right unit. The Tracker 4 was available at a good price and had good reviews. Let me tell you, this thing works great! It has paid for itself several times over in found arrows. I like the tone feature that helps discriminate what kind of metal is being found. Battery life is very good. I am about the change the batteries for the first time since I bought it--and it's been used a lot! I haven't had the opportunity to do any hunting at local parks and beaches, but have practiced around the farm. It can zero in on some really tiny pieces of metal. I'm sure the more expensive units can help determine trash from treasure, but I'm happy with the money I spent.

Comment: Taken out two seperate times and my daughter found numerous treasures. The huge lost nails used to help build a barn over 40 years ago was her very first find and they were over 6 inches down in compacted dirt. Light weight, easy to assemble, and thankfully easy to use...she is even easily understanding the differences in tones and how to use the discrimination.

Comment: I have had little experience with metal detectors, except for having built one once about 40 years ago as a project I found in an electronics magazine. I still understand in principle how these devices work from that experience and from a general background in electronics. Basically a balanced circuit is produced in the two coils at the end of the unit. When the flux lines in the coils are changed by induced eddy currents (by passing near a metal object), a difference signal is generated from the unbalanced conditions which lets the operator know that something has changed in the field of the detector coil. BTW, this is why one must move the coil in order to induce a signal. A static coil does not experience any changes. Different metal groups produce different phase responses, which allow for some rough discrimination of the type of metal producing the response.

My point is that these things can finicky as most anything that changes the reluctance of a tuned circuit will generate a difference signal. So the trick is to just generate a signal when an object of interest is passed over.

All of that said, I am favorably impressed with the operation of this moderately priced unit. It is rugged. It is very stable. It is sensitive without being too sensitive so that too many false signals are generated. The notch filter function seems to work well. It does not seem to be much affected by soil mineralization (at least in my yard) or soil moisture levels.

I purchased the unit to find nails in the yard. I had my roof replaced a couple of months ago and even though the crew did an excellent job and ran magnetic nail sweeps over and over the yard, I could still go out with a powerful hand held magnet mounted on a short wooden handle and find nails. After several weeks of this sporadic activity, I realized that if I were to have a shot at finding 99.9% of the extant nails, I would need a better way to detect them. Hence this detector.

I use the detector in the non-discrimiating mode and have found nails that were obviously left over from when the house was built almost 20 years ago! For this purpose it has worked and worked well. I have even done a small amount of digging to get the long buried metal up and out of the yard for no other reason than I can locate it and then retrieve it.

No treasure, so far.

Learning to narrow down the source of a signal by making "X" sweeps takes a bit of practice. After only a few minutes, however, even a novice such as I can quickly get an idea of whether the object is on or under the surface and if it is iron/steel or not.

The grand daughters, 6 going on 7, and 9 going on 14, have taken to this device in a big way.

Let me explain.

I salted two areas of my rather large yard with 1- $1 coin, 5 quarters, 5 dimes, five nickels, and five pennies each. These areas were well removed from one another. I made sure that the coins were not very visible, but otherwise were dropped randomly. When the grand daughters last came to visit, I asked them to help me find treasure in my yard. I produced two wadded up "treasure maps" and let them select which one they wanted. Then I showed them the metal detector and explained how it worked. I had a minute timer along with two baggies labeled with their names in my pocket. The timer was to keep the piece as each girl got ten minutes alternately. The baggies were to keep the loot separate and separated.

I believe the 6.5 year old would still be out there looking, if we had not forced her to come in that evening. All in all the youngest found all but 6¢ but oddly enough, she ended up with 4¢ more than I had planted. You see, she found a dime that I had not put there! The older one came up 11¢ short and was most disappointed that her sister had found more than she! As a bonus, they did find 7 nails that I had not expected to find as these were in areas well removed from the perimeter of the house.

I also had an opportunity to explain to the older one that this was an application of science, where she could use a device to sense things that she could not see, hear, or feel. This made an impression on her, I could tell.

They want to come back and do this again!

Suits me fine.

So what does this have to do with a review of a purchase? This unit has worked well in not only my hands but in the little, inexperienced, and often clumsy hands of two children (after shortening the pole). It is light enough in weight that neither I nor the children had any difficulty using it. The smaller did have to use two hands, however.

I am pleased with it in general, but I have yet to test it for unsalted "coin shooting" (I love that term), relic hunting, prospecting, or general treasure hunting as in finding objects of value say at a public beach, park, etc.

I would recommend it as a good, affordable, general purpose metal detector, with the caveat that I have few benchmarks such as how a higher end unit would perform for comparison, such as a unit that worked by pulse induction, for example.