Conductive or Ferrous Sounds?
Use both!
You've probably noticed that in Ferrous you have to look at the screen for everything you hear just to know how conductive the target is. That's the drawback to Ferrous.
In Conductive when you get a high tone it's telling you coin or other high conductive target.
In Conductive you can focus your attention on hearing and then use the screen for confirmation if necessary.
Lots of places have so many nails etc. or high conductive rocks/minerals that ferrous will help you find
non iron better than conductive. You're not hearing 150 high beeps a minute like in conductive at these places.
I highly recommend getting used to both. And know what the sounds mean in both.
In FERROUS:
lowest pitch tones mean iron and anything above the lowest couple of notes is NOT iron.
In CONDUCTIVE:
lowest pitch just means lowest conductive(foil, small aluminum, small anything)
middle pitches are (tabs, gold, nickels, aluminum, flying eagles, fatty indians, many tokens, lots of jewelry etc.)
highest pitches are highest conductive(silver coins, silver rings, indian cents, large cents, pop cans, belt plates, big aluminum, big keys, heel plates, many tokens, etc.)
When hunting in conductive sounds don't worry about the left to right reading of the cursor or the ferrous numbers if you're using numbers. They don't mean much except to tell you how possible it is that the target is iron(cursor pegged left).
If you have to have a 100% positive ID on something before you'll dig a hole then you should wait a couple more decades before detecting because they don't make a machine that does that yet. If you have a site that gives up good old stuff then dig all kinds of signals.
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If full manual sens. DEEP on, gain and volume all the way up isn't hot enough then get a bigger coil.
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If you're hearing BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, then a soft beep, then BEEP, BEEP. You might miss that soft one. Turn up the gain and they are all equal.
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If the ground is clean enough you could try manual sensitivity FASToff and DEEP on at even a 32 setting. Turn the gain up to 8 or 9 and go REAL slow. When you hit an iffy
punch from manual to semi-auto for a quick test scan. I'm thinking a ball field might be clean enough to try opening it up like this.
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The Sunray X-8 coil is a great addition...
There are many places where it will find stuff the stock coil won't! Just the right size to get between the stuff that the stock coil can't and still get real impressive depth. You can bump the sensitivity all the way up(manual sens.) in many places, max out the gain, go DEEP only, a little more volume, a little less iron mask and you have one deep seeking machine that can separate like nobodie's
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The Explorer has 2-D discrimination/ID.
1)The first dimension of disc/ID is conductivity. Low conductive targets ID toward the bottom of the screen and higher conductive targets toward the top. You can discriminate any amount of conductivity or any small notch blackening out that part of the screen which also makes it so no tone is heard in that notch or area.
2)The second dimension of disc/ID is ferrous content or you could call it the "probability of being iron" dimension. High iron content or "high probability of being iron" targets ID toward the left side of the screen and low to zero iron content items ID toward the right side of the screen. You use the iron mask feature to discriminate targets that are more probable to be iron. Just a thin line of iron mask discriminates only targets that are most probably iron. The more iron mask you use the more targets you are discriminating that may not be iron.
The idea of two dimensions addresses the fact that all iron is not a high conductive metal. Depending on the size, iron can ID at the top of the conductivity scale or much lower than the top. That's why all the metal detectors with only one dimension of ID(almost all machines) will often give you a "coin" ID or other ID's with a solid iron piece of metal in the ground. The piece of iron can have the exact same conductivity as a coin or even lower but there is no way for a one dimensional detector to tell you it's iron.
On the Explorer if you have a speck of rusty iron or a big nail or a steel spike or any solid iron target the tone may be high or low on the screen but it will definitely be far left on the screen telling you it IS iron.
As far as hearing a coin next to a nail: in all metal mode(no discrimination or iron mask) you can often hear two separate tones if you sweep slowly. One tone for the nail and one tone for the coin. OR if you are using a little iron mask you'll hear the null(silence of the threshold tone) then the coin tone. Again the slower the sweep the better the separation. HOWEVER, it is not the iron mask that makes the Explorer excel in separating targets. It is the double D coil that gives the Explorer the thin line of detecting transmission into the ground enabling one target at a time to be heard even when they are close.[left
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