Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsEasy, accurate, fun, and a classy company
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2013
Sometimes you can "feel" the extra care a company puts into its products, and the Ace 250 brings a lot of that feeling on. The fit and finish are great, it is extremely lightweight, assembly is super quick and requires no tools, and even the batteries are pre-installed. These are all signs of a well-thought-out tool, not just a toy or a careless next generation iteration of an existing technology.
Pull a few pieces from the box, press two rubber washers in place (friction washers for the coil pivot), screw together one plastic bolt (plastic, since by coil and don't want metal!), and screw on the coil cable connector. Then press PWR and you are ready to go!
But better yet, watch the very professional video on how to use the Ace first. It isn't full of amazing surprise finds with cheesy actors, rather, it is very much like a military training video, with a professional voice talent carefully enumerating the features and functions of the Ace while the viewer sees a man demonstrate each step or method at what seems to be a public park. I can't tell you how wonderfully straightforward and "clean" this video is, but I suspect the quality comes from Garret's experience with training videos for commercial/industrial products. And the video is specifically for the Ace 250. Also, watch the pin-pointer video; once you get into the field I think you'll quickly see the usefulness of the handheld pin-pointer, I know I'm planning on getting one.
As for features, this machine seems to do everything I imagined doing with it and should run over 20 hours on four AA batteries, which makes more sense to me than two 9V batteries like many detectors use. It also has its own speaker, so you don't have to have headphones...you'll likely want headphones with their own volume control, though, but if the speaker is too loud at a public place (or just annoying the rest of the family) you can cover the speaker holes with some tape to muffle the sound. The machine shows type of metal and depth. It lets you set custom detection profiles and sensitivity. It even keeps its memory and settings when turned off, which is important because you'll want to turn it off each time you stop to dig. A "custom profile" is essentially a filter that instructs the machine about what kinds of metals should trigger a sound alert--the display will always indicate any find.
Perhaps the best feature of all is the pinpointing. While it doesn't serve the same way as a handheld pin-pointer would during the actual dig, it is invaluable for locating where to dig. Watch the video for instructions, but note that along with the X technique you can also press the pin-point button and do a fine scanning of the small area with the find to get a mental image of the detection circle around the object--your mind will "see" a disc that is "bright" (loud) at the center and fades off at the edges. You can also use a spiral motion you let "decay" into a simple circle and when you can make a circle with the detector's coil that has a perfectly even pin-pointing tone you know that the object is dead center of this circle. Scanning, especially, can be useful for larger, irregularly shaped objects, because your mind is forming a fuzzy image of the object's shape...just don't dig for a buried cable!
As for the function of the machine, I could not have imagined it to be this good. It tells you pretty much exactly what is down there and how for down it is. The video says it can take 100 hours to become proficient at picking up on the sounds and indicators, but the truth is after only about 2 hours you'll already be growing a "third eye" for what lies beneath.
For example, you quickly come to recognize that short, nearly "phantom" blips are foil wrappers, that having two finds very near one another is not that uncommon, and that large iron objects (say, an old drain cover) may sound like coin-iron-coin rather than just a lot of iron.
One thing that is under-emphasized is that detecting is really about digging, or at least scraping. Doing this in a way that doesn't mess up grass, etc., is mentioning in the video, but if you have to travel to get to where you are detecting, be sure to have along a small planting trowel, some sort of dully pointed metal rod for a probe, a heavy nylon brush, a lighter-weight nylon brush, and a jug of water. You'll quickly see why.
