Tesoro Vaquero with NEL Sharpshooter on gold

I haven't taken the Vaquero out for a while, but I did notice how sensitive this machine is on gold with the NEL Sharpshooter fitted up. I've been playing around with a 0.34 grm nugget and a 2.4grm nugget, the Vac manages to pickup the smaller nugget at 2-3 inches buried with a noticible peak in the threshold, and it screams on the larger nugget, even held 5-6 inches off the ground it still has a very noticible threshold peak, with the nugget buried around 4" down. This was set on high sensitivity in all metal mode for both nuggets, on lowest setting in discrimination mode, the smaller nugget doesn't register, but the larger nugget manages to picked up, albeit only an inch or two off the ground surface.

Pretty impressed for an all-rounder detector, also impressed with the NEL coil, though in highly mineralised ground, the Vac will have to be dulled down on the sensitivity a bit to prevent chatter. I still manage to pull out small lead shot in the local goldfields, so that goes some way to show how sensitive it is, and what a good frequency that was chosen for the Vaquero. Whilst I'm not pretending that it's a dedicated gold machine, it is certainly no slouch and in fact a very versatile machine

Try it after super tuning ( see the manual )

The problem with super tuning is that it gets too chattery in mineralised ground to be of any use, ok for parks and dry sand at the beach though.

I've got a Tejon that can only be used in the discriminate mode in mineralised ground , I understand what your saying .

The Vaquero can run in the local goldfields, seem to be able to ground balance it fine using it in all metal, still have to deal with hot rocks though, as with any VLF, plus steer clear of areas with abundant ironstone. Mainy use it for relics, buttons and coins though around the fields, and in discrimination mode to knock out all the abundant ferrous junk lying around. Would have to run it purely in all metal mode to look for pieces of gold, the discrimination seems to knock out smaller gold, even at the lowest setting.

I think the Vaquero is one the best all round easy to use / great performance detectors out there .

Hot rock signals are a pain ' The Tesoro Diablo Umax has a second GB mode to cancel them out , wish they had incorporated that into their precent units .

Tesoro put out some terrific detectors, I have the Cibola Willo

Im not a fan of them really i have 5 of them