Tesoro Lobo Supertraq 'River Performance'

The Tesoro Lobo Supertraq is one hell of a machine, it operates at 17.5 khz and is used for hunting gold nuggets by quite a lot of treasure hunters out there. I wanted it for my river Thames hunts because I didn't have a Tesoro operating at a higher frequency. I managed to get one on eBay from Italy, it was in really good condition but the speaker wasn't working very well so I sent it off to Dave at Pentatonic, he replaced it along with the battery wires and holders and gave the whole thing a good going over, it's now working like a dream.

Less Is More With The Lobo

Prior to getting it repaired I took it down on to the Thames for a few hunts, this was using the larger elliptical coil that came with it, swinging this coil sort of felt cack-handed but it still managed to pick up tiny pieces of lead and copper, you could also isolate really small targets. I like digging the really small stuff because there's a lot of tiny treasures to be found, for example, doll house parts, tiny buttons, cogs from pocket watches, medieval clothes pins, the list goes on and on. 

The way the Lobo hits on the small stuff has to be seen to be believed, it literally kicks the crap out of them with a loud dense audio response. I sensed that the machine would be a proper weapon if I could find one of the smaller high frequency coils that Tesoro use to produce. Many Tesoro users will know that in this day and age the smaller coils are really hard to come by, especially here in the UK. So it goes without saying that I was more than surprised when I logged onto eBay and saw a brand new 4 pin 5.75' inch concentric coil for sale so I purchased it straightaway.

The Lobo has quite a few different settings, I tune all my machines down when hunting on the river because targets aren't very deep, the Lobo is crazy sensitive with literally zero sensitivity. I run it on 2, the disc is on 2 and the threshold is in the two o'clock position, so all the 2's. The soil setting is on normal and I'm running it in disc mode, I favour pushing my threshold higher than my sensitivity on all my Tesoro's because the ground comes to life but it's not erratic. 

If you run your machines 'hot' on the Thames you'll have problems, the terrain is like no other, there's millennia of iron to deal with, running my disc low makes for a sparky hunt but that doesn't bother me. I've learnt how to identify iron both large and small with all my machines and because of this, my disc is always at the minimum I can get away with.

The Module

I don't subscribe to the mindset of totally silencing the iron, this weird viewpoint appears to of solidified itself over the past 6 or 7 years when the digital machines started to take over. Running a high disc and suffocating the iron will make your hunt easier and quieter but you will be missing targets. All the mainstream companies are chasing their tails because they want to market their machines towards the casual masses so they have to package and produce metal detecting in the most basic form possible.

They're selling machines that provide you with the option to kill the iron outright and then they're trying to improve their unmasking ability, these two elements just don't walk hand in hand. Knocking the iron out completely is always going to handicap the unmasking of any machine. In my opinion Tesoro's have some of the best discrimination circuits ever designed and there are a number of machines that you can run close to zero disc and they still handle medium to large iron really well, like I've stated many times before, if you learn what large iron sounds and feels like then you can run you disc low which in turn aids the machines ability to unmask. 

A Monster On The Small Targets

I have dug lots of masked, or partially masked targets, both same plain and on multiple levels, in regards to identifying large iron, the disc circuit clicks really loud so it's easy, not only that but the audio is outstanding with so much nuance. As with all analog machines, the audio will break up when the perimeter of the coil is on the edge of real large iron, even with a disc setting of two it will cancel out nearly all small to medium sized iron with no issues. The audio of the Lobo is basically VCO, large shallow targets will sound dense, small shallow targets have a defined punch to them and the deep targets have a modulated softness, out of all my Tesoro machines the Lobo has the most expression within its audio, once mastered it's such a joy to use.

In regards to the auto ground tracking, this only functions when you're hunting in all metal mode, it doesn't function when using the discrimination setting. This really doesn't bother me, I'll ground balance the machine prior to hunting, switch to disc mode and think nothing more it. The machine performs faultlessly and runs super stable considering how harsh the terrain is on the river. 

To sum up, the Lobo is the closest thing to literally walking along and picking targets out the ground with x-ray goggles on. Ergonomics wise, if you position the module under the arm cuff it balances the coil out perfectly. It's a really powerful machine that needs to be dialled back on the terrain I choose to use it on. If I was going to rate the machine for foreshore use I give it a 10/10, they're expensive on the 2nd market but I can honestly say that they're worth every penny.