2-Tone Ferrous

[OhioCoinHunter]

I have never hunted in 2-tone ferrous because I have never understood its advantage over the multi-tones conductive mode. Goesforever schooled me a bit today but I'm still lacking a complete basic understanding. Here's what I know. To hunt in two tone ferrous you simply switch to two tones and switch from conductive sounds to ferrous sounds. Silver still gives you a high pitched tone in ferrous like it does in conductive sounds. That's about all I know. I think I need some more schooling.

Here are some basic questions I have. I appreciate any help you can give me. (I feel like a newbie again.)

A. How or why does 2-tones ferrous get silver that is missed while hunting with conductive sounds?

B. I hunt with the default discrimination pattern with silver dollars notched in. Do I need to open up my discrimination screen or can I leave it as it is?

C. Is there anything else I need to know? Are there any other settings I need to change?

Thanks
Dan

 

[Bill M]

Ditto on all the above questions!!!!

 

[LabradorBob]

In conductive sounds,Tones are emitted according to the targets conductive ratings,The same in ferrous.The tones are emitted according to the targets ferrous ratings.In Conductive,the more you open up the lower part of the screen,the more you will get iron that gives a high tone.
In conductive,sometimes,there is just too much junk and iron masking a coin for it to come through.
although the E Trac is famous for getting coins in trash,sometimes there is just too much for it to respond in a way that
would make you dig it,especially if the junk is sounding like silver.
Ferrous makes all,should i say almost all,iron,junk,respond with a low blat tone.
anything with higher conductive side will give a higher tone.
and in areas with bad mineralised ground,plus a lot of junk,the id's wont be correct either,in conductive or ferrous.
So this is when you go by sound alone,if in ferrous,dig anything that gives a higher tone.
I did this in front of a podium at an old park,it literally had thousands of nails around it.
i had been over it numerous times in conductive as slow as i could because it was a complete null.
one day i went over it in ferrous and picked out two quarters,two dimes and three pennies.
I run a wide open screen in ferrous,i just ignore the low iron tones and listen for anything higher.
I now have a saved pattern for conductive,and one saved for ferrous.

Labradorbob

 

[Goes4ever]

ok Dan to the best of my knowledge this is how I understand it, using 2 tone ferrous in coin mode would be fruitless you need to have an open or mostly open screen for it to be effective. The reason to use two tone ferrous is because your etrac is nulling out completely causing you to miss targets. I know you hunt parks almost exclusively, but if you were hunting an old farm house or old one room school you would understand why this is so important because of the massive amount of iron at these type sites.

By having an open screen there is no nulling out and your detector can separate these targets better. You HEAR the iron, but you also HEAR the non ferrous item directly beside it when you creep thru these areas. You have to go super slow and when you get a high tone you have to slightly wiggle the coil over it to locate the exact location. Sometimes you have to walk circles around the target to get it to really POP out of the iron grunts, but trust me, this works miracles at iron laden sites. I can't really say enough to you, You just have to try it yourself to believe just how effective this method works at pulling good targets out of the iron.

just remember open screen NO NULLING, no lost threshold, so you hear it all. Give it a try the more you use it the easier it is to understand.

 

[OhioCoinHunter]

Alright, Everyone. Thanks again. I guess the only thing left for me to do is to get out in the field and give it a try.

 

[Goes4ever]

make sure you save all your settings before you change anything!

 

[OhioCoinHunter]

Thanks, Terry.

 

[Slay in IA]

Hey Dan,

When I use two tone ferrous I usually use a smaller coil and open up the screen. Last year at a one room schoolhouse that I've hunted to death I tried this and picked up two indian head pennies that weren't very deep but were surrounded by iron. I don't think I'd dug a coin there in at least four to five trips before this. Remember to go slow. HH

 

[Chris(SoCenWI)]

At the risk of a firestorm....

Has anybody discovered anything GOOD about Minelab's decision on the E-trac to map most of the ferrous values to 12? Many of us use the older models in ferrous for the reasons described in the answers to this post. Sounds like ferrous/open screen has advantages for even a faster machine like the E-trac. With the older machines you could use ferrous but didn't have to use two tone because the ferrous values were spread out. You can tell a nickel from silver from pull tab by sound. In ferrous/open screen you don't have the constant nulling, pretty soon all those low iron tones fade away like department store muzak, but you can still pick out the more interesting stuff from the back ground noise. A null tells you nothing.

I like the other changes they made to the E-trac, just can't figure out what they were trying to accomplish here. It may seperate better than the older models, and may ID better, but mapping most of those values to a single row of pixels defeats the idea of a two dimensional display. Instead of grouping stuff together perhaps they could have spread it around the screen even further, or map the pixels to spell out "Garrett MDs Suck" or almost anything else.

Ben Stein in Ferrous Bueller

"Anyone?, Anyone?"

Chris

 

[Jack Flynn]

I think having targets run along the 12 line is superb. The CO being the number to look at but the second most important if looking at TID is if it boucing around the 12 line higher or a little lower but will still give you a 12 at times it is just more pieces to the puzzle to decide to dig or not. This is decide to dig or not machine period if you ask me. It keeps you from doing what we all hate to do, dig junk if we don't want to. The E Trac to me is a discrimination masterpiece. It was built to keep you from digging everything imo like a lot of other machines virtually require you to do. 2 tone ferrous is the best way to dig jewelry too, rings and gold but it will put you in the somewhat discriminated beep and dig mode but it is dang good at picking out the good stuff. I run 2 tone ferrous when hunting relics or a beach and in heavy iron. However the versatility of being able to have many machines in one that does it's job so good is worth it's weight in gold.

 

[Ray-Mo.]

As mentioned in the past 2 tone ferrous is not at its best in a park type setting unless you are in an area where old buildings were burned and left a carpet of nails.I have found that the E-Trac hits on very tiny targets like tiny pieces of lead when set up this way and I have a hunch 2 tone ferrous would be a killer on small gold jewelery at the beaches.

 

[Barry NY]

Dan - I'm just hooked on FE 2 tone since reading all of Gaz's posts, watching his videos and setting up my unit exactly as he has done for England and testing it out in some plowed fields the last 3 times out. I have found two King Georges coppers, one 1787 CT copper and a 1795,6 or 7 half cent (my first one but in bad shape) using this program on these sites.
Tomorrow, I'll upload the mode and pattern and post it/send it to you. It's really easy to get used to hunting in this mode.

Now, I'm typically not a schoolyard or park hunter (since most of the people where I live look at you like you're nuts if you cut a plug in a public grass area) so I prefer to hunt the farm sites in the Revolutionary War era fields out on eastern Long Island, but since the crops are in and I was itching to do some detecting today and had about 2 hours to kill I hit a 1950's schoolyard nearby (there probably are 15 sites like this near me on 4 acres plus each and I never see anyone detecting them ever)...and worked the side portion of the property.

I was using FE 2 tone wide open and as soon as I started walking the grass the signals were coming in like crazy...both the low tone iron and the higher tone good stuff. Either this site was never detected or hasn't been for a long time. I quickly decided to avoid all the 12/37-43's that were everywhere (assuming they were Memorials) and focused on the 12/12-16 for gold and anything 12/45 and above. I got 6 clad quarters, 2 clad dimes, 7 nickles, 2 memorials, 2 wheaties and one 1940 Merc dime plus a few pull tabs and some other aluminum junk. There were two pocket spills - one with 5 of the assorted coins and one with 2 of the coins.

I then switched over to Andy's modified coin program for the walk back and all I can say is that the nulling and multi tones really made it harder to separate the good lower FE items from the iron. It's amazing how the open screen and 2 tone FE can have you separating out the good and bad targets and also isolating the multiple good targets that are sitting right next to each other rather quickly - it's so easy to isolate the good stuff and get a screen reading on what's down there. Anyone that spends some time using this mode is in for a real treat - and, as has already been discussed on the forum by a few postings - you WILL find good targets that you missed when you used the CO multi tones and discrimination pattern the last time you detected your sites - I urge you to go back to those hunted sites and try it.

 

[CrazySlasher]

After reading this thread I finally understand the purpose and benefits of 2-tone ferrous. I decided to give it a try in my yard a few minutes ago and could not believe all the sweet and deep signals I'm picking up now. My house was built in the 1800's and there is iron EVERYWHERE. I've been wondering why I haven't pulled as many nice coins as I hoped out of here and tomorrow we'll see if it's the reason.

 

[NebTrac]

After reading this thread I finally understand the purpose and benefits of 2-tone ferrous. I decided to give it a try in my yard a few minutes ago and could not believe all the sweet and deep signals I'm picking up now. My house was built in the 1800's and there is iron EVERYWHERE. I've been wondering why I haven't pulled as many nice coins as I hoped out of here and tomorrow we'll see if it's the reason.

Good to see you here Crazy. This is one of the best instruction E-Trac forums I've found. Let us know how your finds turn out running that program.

Thanks for the posts guys. So far I haven't used ferrous too much, but have delved into it and have benefited from it. I'm just enjoying the program I'm running right now. But I love the versatility of this machine to be able to use it like this.

NebTrac

 

[Digger]

I do run in Ferrous tones with an open screen at many of the old farmsites I hunt. I call it my all metal mode, with ferrous tones and both ferrous and conductive TID. But I run multiple tone mode instead of the two tone mode you guys are talking about. Seems to me, if I were running two tone mode, I'd spend much of my time looking at the screen. With multiple tone mode, I am able to better ID the iron with the low Ferrous tones and sort the conductive targets "by ear", to a certain degree. Maybe I'm missing something. But what is the advantage of using only two tones instead of the multiple tones? HH Randy

 

[Goes4ever]

I do run in Ferrous tones with an open screen at many of the old farmsites I hunt. I call it my all metal mode, with ferrous tones and both ferrous and conductive TID. But I run multiple tone mode instead of the two tone mode you guys are talking about. Seems to me, if I were running two tone mode, I'd spend much of my time looking at the screen. With multiple tone mode, I am able to better ID the iron with the low Ferrous tones and sort the conductive targets "by ear", to a certain degree. Maybe I'm missing something. But what is the advantage of using only two tones instead of the multiple tones? HH Randy

Randy at the first site I tried this program at there was so many targets it literally sounded like a machine gun going off in my ears, and with multi tone I simply could not tell any difference between targets, but with 2 tone the non ferrous items "jumped out at me" This was a one room schhol house, so I was not worried about clad, pulltabs or can slaw, if I got a high tone I was digging it. I was moving about 5 seconds per swing because the amount of targets, it was absolutely unreal.

 

[Digger]

Thanks for the input. I fully agree with the open screen concept. And if I understand you correctly, the only reason for just using the two tones is because that allows every target to produce either a low tone for ferrous, or a high tone for conductive. If it is high, you're digging. If it's low tone, you move on. Did I get that right? If so, then IF a person wasn't bothered by hearing multiple High and Low tones, multiple tones should "hunt" the same as two tone. They would just get more "on the fly" ear candy by hearing different pitches of tones in both ferrous and conductive target categories.
All things being equal, I can see a benefit of using just two tones if you're digging everything conductive. "Go or No-Go" is bound to be less tiring on the ears and cause less brain-drain. But for those who are comfortable using Multiple tone mode, I can't see where they will miss any targets by doing so. They'll just have more variety of High tones for the conductive targets and more Low tones for the ferrous targets, instead of just one tone for each. Shouldn't effect their results, if they interpret the tones correctly.

Let me know if that is how you see it. I sure don't want to be overlooking something by making this too complicated.
Thanks again. HH Randy

 

[Goes4ever]

I actually tried multi, then 4 tones, and to tell you the truth Randy, there was absolutely so many targets my brain went into overdrive.....
so that is when I switched it to 2 tone and then it was smooth sailing. And yes you are correct to say, low tone keep moving, high tone dig.

I also noticed that when using this even the "good targets" do not settle on a number solidly and when using multi tone the tones are all over the place making it much more difficult and caused you to have to move 5x slower. I was swinging about 4-5 seconds per sweep each way and even that was too fast for multi tone. When I switched back to 2 tone the 4-5 second sweep was perfect.

Now I would NOT use this at a park, but an old farm, 1RSH or even better, a field where a homestead once was, is the perfect place to dig everything above iron.

 

[Gaz]

.....blimey!

Sounds like a revolution!!!!

For people who haven't tried this.....just give it a go and give us some feedback!!

As the guys have said.....it has to be used in the correct environment.

One thing worth mentioning from developing this separation theory, filtering and wot not.......I'm not fully open. Well, I am and I'm not!!

The only disc I have is on the very top line (FE01 line) This quietens things down somewhat. I'm convinced that large deep iron falses and wraps around from FE35 to FE01.
This is what we don't in this setup because you get that annoying high tone 'blipping' which you think is a good signal and it isn't.
It just puts out your rhythm when sweeping. So I have discrimmed out FE01 - CO 01 - 37, left CO 38 - 48 open and shut CO 49 & 50. This leaves a small window open for where certain large silver comes in.

Gaz.

 

[Goes4ever]

Gaz, all sounds good and well, as I do get a lot of 01 falsing for iron. And I would disc it out if it weren't for the 3 deep indians I have dug that came in at 01-31
I just can't get myself to disc the 01 line out. And the other day at the old school where I was also using 2 tone ferrous I had a war nickel read 01-12. Maybe you can give an explanation for this, but even if I am finding coins every now and then on the 01 line, I refuse to disc that out