Quest Scuba Tector Underwater Metal Detector

The Quest Scuba Tector is a handheld underwater metal detector rated to 200 feet / 60 meters, made for divers who want to search a seabed, riverbed or lake floor while they are down there. It is a one-piece probe with a rechargeable battery, listed by Quest Metal Detectors for scuba diving and underwater treasure hunting.

Who this suits

Divers who lose things, or find things. A dropped wedding ring on a sandy bottom, coins around a jetty, small metal on a wreck site. The tool is one unit and three ways of telling you it found something, which is about the right amount of complexity for a job you are doing on a bottom with a buddy waiting.

It works for shore dives and snorkel searches too, since the depth rating leaves a wide margin at those depths.

Skip it if you want to know what you found before you fan the sand away. The listing names no discrimination or target identification feature, so a bottle cap gets the same response as a gold ring. Skip it as well for technical and decompression work: 60 meters is a hard ceiling, not a working depth.

The depth rating and what it buys you

Quest gives the waterproof depth as up to 200 feet / 60 meters. That is well past normal recreational diving depths, and the point of the headroom is not that you will ever use it.

The point is that on an ordinary single-tank dive the housing is nowhere near its limit, so a cold, salty, repeated duty cycle is not steadily working against a seal that is already at its edge. Practically, this is a detector you can take on any dive you would already be doing without thinking about it.

Three alerts at once

When the Scuba Tector passes over metal it signals through LED, buzzer and vibration. Underwater, the redundancy is the whole feature.

Sound direction is unreliable underwater and a neoprene hood makes a buzzer easy to miss, so the vibration is the one that actually reaches you. The LED flash is listed for low light conditions, which is where most lost metal ends up: silty bottoms, shadowed structure, the tail end of an afternoon dive.

Battery and power management

It runs on a built-in lithium polymer rechargeable battery rated for up to 10 hours of continuous use. That is several diving days on one charge for most people, because a detector only draws while you are actually searching.

Two listed features protect that figure. There is a standby mode, and an auto power off after 3 minutes of non-use, so a unit you clipped off and forgot about shuts itself down rather than draining on the bottom. A low battery indicator tells you before the dive whether you need a charge.

What the listing does not state is which charging hardware comes in the box, so check that with the seller if you need a particular cable or plug.

Color, carrying, and which version this is

One version, one color: the listing gives it as black. Worth knowing before you set it down on a dark bottom, and worth a strip of bright tape if you are the sort who puts things down.

A lanyard is included and attaches to the cap, so if you let go while you fan sand it stays with you rather than disappearing into the silt.

The bottom line

The Scuba Tector is a simple, genuinely dive-rated search tool: 60 meters, three alert channels, ten hours of run time, nothing to configure. It is not a precision instrument and it is not a prospecting machine, because it will not tell you what it has found. Buy it to recover things and to poke around sandy bottoms on dives you were doing anyway.

Specifications