First outing with Explorer SE Pro..

[LS hunter]

WOW

 

[TwoRivers]

So........how was it?..What did you find etc?

John in Va..

 

[IDXMonster]

First Explorer? Yeah,WOW doesn't quite cover it. It's good,bad,ugly,frustrating,smile inducing....it's like a really confusing first relationship. And you thought WOMEN were hard to figure out...it takes an enormous amount of time...years,to figure out I'm told. Again,for the umteenth time,don't go ruttin' around in high garbage to learn it,you'll have it wrapped around a tree. Some say high garbage is where you earn your wings with it,but don't. Straight up factory settings with sound adjusted for your taste is where it's at to keep any semblance of sanity. Those settings are there for a reason. Minelab designed a spectacular machine,just don't try to out think decades of engineering,they know what they're doing,it's just that I don't....yet.

Kevin

 

[chuck ky]

how do you eliminate the high garbage on the explorer. on the sovereign i just raised the disc. til it was gone. on the explorer there is no disc to raise. factory settings have the screen still open where you hear the garbage.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

The factory settings are lame you need to turn the settings up. A quick new user setup would be ferrous tones, gain 7, sensitivity 24 to 27 as high as it will go with the machine still reasonably stable, fast off, deep on. To get rid of most of the iron and trash you can black out the left 2/3rds of the screen and the bottom half and just dig high conductive targets in the upper right quarter of the screen for practice. A tip this forum owner gave me when I purchased my first Explorer was for one hunt just dig everything that's over 6 inches deep, if you are digging trash at 6 inches go to 8 inches, everything that deep and deeper. It was an eye opener I learned more the next two hunts digging based on depth than in the previous 6 weeks. Now you have to be centered over the target to get an accurate depth. I highly recommend centering on the target, then turn 90 degrees to that line and center again, then check the depth meter. This method is quite effective at centering on the target with a couple of exceptions. A deep coin on edge can throw the signal off sideways those can be difficult to pinpoint. Silver dimes on edge in particular. Also if there is a shallower nearby target that also pull your pinpoint off center of the deeper target. I got in the habit of checking a coil size area around the target just so I was sure what else I was dealing with in the vicinity.

There are many next levels to the Explorer but the above should result in some decent finds for a new user right off the rip. The Explorer will get hits on targets other machines won't but those targets are still left in well hunted areas usually for one of two reasons, sheer depth of the target or a nearby target that is masking the good target, a rusty nail or other trash, or even shallower clad. Another tip if you are getting hits on the Explorer that indicate maybe some really nice and deep but surrounding targets are getting in the way of pinpointing, dig the trash targets out of the way so you don't accidently dig off center and gouge a nice old find.

Here's some SE Pro motivation

 

[IDXMonster]

I'm not sure I'd subscribe to the above settings as a new user,figuring out what is "stable" and what is falsing can be a tricky thing. I'm not doubting Charles that this setup would find good things,but it seems a bit much for a new user,particularly turning up the Sens to those levels,unless it's Auto in good ground. Of course these are my honest opinions from a newer Explorer user.

Kevin

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

I'm not sure I'd subscribe to the above settings as a new user,figuring out what is "stable" and what is falsing can be a tricky thing. I'm not doubting Charles that this setup would find good things,but it seems a bit much for a new user,particularly turning up the Sens to those levels,unless it's Auto in good ground. Of course these are my honest opinions from a newer Explorer user.

Kevin

The secret sauce is the combination of Gain 7, Fast Off, Deep On and keeping your sensitivity as high as is reasonable for a given site/soil condition. Sensitivity is KING of depth!! In fact lets start with something even more fundamental, no matter what setting you adjust on an Explorer the transmit signal from the coil is always at 100% strength. You cannot increase or reduce the transmit signal out the coil. This means the best possible signal you can get on a target is coming back up to the coil and into the machine. You have no control over this either. All you can do with the various Explorer settings is slice and dice and trim and adjust and take notches out of this received signal. And the signal is a mess. Its got a bunch of ground signal mixed in it, maybe some electrical interference, some soil mineralization, maybe some rotted to nothing iron, but somewhere hiding in this blob of received signal from your coil is say a silver dime.

So I said Sensitivity is KING of depth here's why. Sensitivity is processed first before gain. Targets have a signal strength, a silver dime on the surface is super strong, a silver dime 10 inches down is much weaker, a silver dime 10 inches down and half on edge is even weaker. The sensitivity control is a way of telling the machine to delete all signals weaker than (x) which might include that deep silver dime if you set your sensitivity too low. You can adjust your gain to 10 but its to no avail because the lower sensitivity setting has already deleted that signal. Gain is a volume boost but it can't boost the volume of a target that has already been deleted from the signal by too low of a sensitivity setting. That's the gotcha with gain.

Gain is also one of those settings where you can get too much of a good thing. Again its just a volume boost for weaker signals. A target signal might be weaker because its deep, or it might be weak because its tiny, an earing for example, even the earing backing off an earing or an eyelet from a tennis show. So size matters. We'll talk size again below that's another subject. So what else has a week signal? Yes false signals. Ground mineralization, the rotted remnants of a bit of iron. With the gain set to 10 its entirely possible to make a tiny false signal sound just as loud as a surface dime, that's what gain does in stages it increases the volume you hear in your headphones on weak signals up to the maximum volume. With the gain on 10 everything sounds equally loud. You can't tell the false signals from the targets. But lower your gain to 7 in many soils and its the happy point. False signals are tiny and sound tiny and quite faint with the gain on 7, but deep targets are noticeably louder. Your typical mix of false signals are so weak and faint you can pretty much just ignore them with the gain on 7, just dig repeatable solid signals. The mistake is to have your gain too high, then lower your sensitivity because there went all your deep targets.

So why Fast Off and Deep On? This combination make a real target like a deep silver dime appear wider and bigger as you sweep it, while true false signals remain tiny. A false signal might appear to be 1/4 inch wide where an actual target might seem 1 to 1.5 inches wide. If you turn Fast on what happens, yes it narrows all the signals making it more difficult to tell the difference between a false and an actual deep target.

Size matters and does affect the accuracy of the depth meter. Minelab seems to have calibrated the depth meter on a penny size target, assuming you are centered over the target the depth meter can be relied upon. Larger targets throw the depth meter off, a large cent throws it off quite a bit as does a half dollar, etc. Those larger targets will read shallower than they really are on the depth meter. Conversely and the gotcha to really watch out for are tiny targets like an earing or bits of scrap metal. Even with the coil centered on them the depth meter may tell you they are quite deep when in fact they can be quite near the surface. This is the tiny target fake out but there's a method to win this contest. A truly deep target say a silver dime at 10 inches or even a large cent, if you raise your coil off the ground more than 2 inches or so the signal will vanish. Explorers really hate air space between the coil and the ground its a depth killer so use that to your advantage. A tiny near surface target that is trying to fake you out as a deep target can still be detected typically even with your coil raised 3-4 inches off the ground, that's your ah-HA moment on those.

So if just starting out with an Explorer there is no reason whatsoever to handicap yourself with the lame factory settings. If you insist on learning the machine hunting a nightmare trash heap park well then use a smaller 8 inch coil. Double check your pinpointing to make sure you are centered on the target, check a coil size area around your target to make sure there isn't something shallower nearby trying to fake you out, near surface clad dimes on edge shooting a signal off sideways are my hated enemy. Check your depth. Dig only solid repeatable signals not those that blip every third swing. Don't be afraid to raise your coil off the ground to confirm a truly deep target vs a tiny shallow target.

I'd say that's a good phase 1. Phase 2 would be mastering rusty iron nails, you will learn to love them, many an awesome find is hiding in the iron. Phase 3 well that's getting into the black arts of the Explorer, there's some really interesting stuff at that phase.

 

[BigTony]

Hello Charles, thanks for making that transmit/recieve make sense. That is why deep on doesn't work in trashy areas.
I like your plain truth explanation and will turn on my deep when I find some less trashy sites. Some fields and privates and some areas of parks that have little targets....
Thanks and good luck this fall...too dry now in NJ

 

[BigTony]

Charles, thinking about a few past deep finds that I made I can understand your explanation - I found a deep barber quarter under a pull tab when my sensitivity was at 32 and gain at 7 but my deep/fast were off. It didn't id higher then a penny/dime but the tone was there. Then there was another larger object a belt plate - solid copper - it to id as penny/dime but again deep was off and sen was high. Both of these were found in not to trashy soils and yes at different places at different times of the season.
I can't wait to get out there now - you have given me a new thing to test on my old but terrific Exp II
Thanks and good luck with the hip

 

[IDXMonster]

This is kind of what I don't get,the Minelabs being a high end machine. There should be a user manual that comes with the machine as thick as an encyclopedia that would EXPLAIN THESE THINGS! The manual really just skims over the very basics,the above explanation of how the processing works is NOWHERE to be seen,at least in mine! If I would've known these things I'd be doing stuff differently. I have ABSOLUTELY noticed that increased Sens equals REAL WORLD depth,although you're not controlling the TX coil in ANY way. I believe Sergei called it "depth potential". I didn't even see the above explanation on HIS site,Metal Detecting World.com" for those who haven't been there. It's extensively extensive. In most of the areas that I hunt,and this is my own choice,the garbage and little metal trash is ridiculous. A 5" coil is about the only way I can get anything done at some,though I've been very surprised some days using the stock 1050. Although it seems a bit heavy,shortening up the rod helps and it really does well in many places. In clean dirt,it's a MONSTER! All kidding aside,at manual 28 I dug a 12" quarter in an old ball field that had NO trash and very nice dirt. It was a clad of course.....which lends the question....what IS the depth potential of these things? 32 would've gotten how far on a quarter?
I'm getting off track....Charles,thanks a MILLION for the explanation,particularly of the processing and gain setting. This is where I've been going wrong,I've set the gain to 10 to hear every blip,and I'm getting overloaded with too much to listen to. I in fact will run your settings tomorrow morning before work and report back. This is why we have forums and discussion,I feel I've been seriously handicapped by just NOT KNOWING WHY.

Kevin

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Kevin years ago there was a cage match discussion regarding Sensitivity vs Gain. The Explorer was still pretty new and quite a few people were convinced Gain should be kept high even if that required lowering the sensitivity. This seemed wrong based on what I had seen in the field so I called Minelab to get a definitive answer as to what exactly Gain does on the Explorer and which Sensitivity or Gain was processed first.

The Explorer factory default settings, they are very conservative, the machine is setup for maybe 60% of what its really capable of. Some say run the default settings for weeks or months to learn the machine. I say you are not learning the machine with those settings. Hunting targets in the 0 to 6 inch range is different from hunting targets in the 6 to 15 inch range so basically you have just delayed learning the machine at its potential.

Now the above settings are not cast in stone. They are good solid settings that will frequently work but I do often fine tune my settings to the particular site, and the site conditions on a given day. For example is the soil bone dry, middle of the road moist, or sopping wet. There are sites with abundant rusty nails I just won't hunt when the soil is sopping wet. Rusty nails get BIG in sopping wet soil and will cast an iron signal out sideways along the length of the nail over the top of nearby good targets. I will wait and come back when the soil has dried a bit and the iron has quieted down. Similarly if the soil is bone dry you typically don't get the best depth from the machine. You might be able to pick off targets that have been hiding near the iron but understand your depth will likely be reduced.

Once upon a time maybe at the 2 year mark I was pretty smug in my opinions about how the Explorer works. The problem was over the next 2 years the Explorer kept proving my rules of thumb wrong! lol Today I would say keep an open mind, don't be afraid to experiment the Explorer has a lot of features you can exploit. Here's an example. At one time I was convinced that the Explorer should always be run in all metal, no discrimination at all. Discrimination is sticky, the Explorer likes to latch onto iron or a shallow trash target and not let go when running discrimination. Iron and shallow trash pollute an area of ground. I found when running all metal its not nearly as sticky and I can get closer to the trash and nails and lock onto good targets that have been hiding in the shadow of trash and iron. I still feel all metal produces the most finds for me by far but the machine proved to me that this rule is 'sometimes' completely wrong.

Example: I was hunting an area that was littered with rusty bottle cap tops. I was running all metal as usual. But the rusty bottle caps were getting on my last nerve. I was running ferrous tones so bottle caps sounded low and they had that distinct 'pop' that bottle caps do when you sweep across them. I was just annoyed with listening to the racket. So I edited my screen to notch bottle caps out. A while later I get a weird signal. ID was cursor half off the screen but up from bottom caps about mid screen. Hmmm says I that's weird. So I switch to all metal and bang the cursor jumps right down to the bottle cap zone and sounds exactly like a bottle cap. I switched back to my all metal screen and walked a few steps then stopped. Wait just a darn minute here, that just sounded too good to be a bottle cap. Big Tony called this one above, TONES DON'T LIE on the Explorer. That's one of the dark arts of the Explorer level truths. So I swept it again and I could hear some silver tones mixed in there. I dug and sure enough a rusty bottle cap about 4 inches down, went in with the X1 probe and WHAMMO Walking Half! About a month later this same approach produced a Barber Half hiding directly dead center under a rusty bottle cap. The moral of the story is while a given setup or rule of thumb may be true most of the time, its not 100% of the time, there will be exception to the rules. Fast forward to present day. At a site which has produced nice old targets I will frequently hunt it in all metal then re-hunt the site using some discrimination patterns and pick off maybe another 15% of targets all metal missed.

Its been a long time since I posted this one, its perhaps the most bizarre of the dark arts of the Explorer level thing to watch out for. I have used this one to pick off pocket spills of silver. Question, will the Explorer null in all metal? No there's nothing notched out to null on what a ridiculous question. Yet one day I was hunting in all metal and the machine nulled. I was like what the hell? It nulled consistently when I swept the coil over this one spot. Dead silence in the headphones. I turned 90 degrees and investigated this area further. I found a nail on the left, a nail on the right, about 12 inches apart, the nails were pointing at each other, there was nothing in-between them. The machine easily identified these nails and their position. But when I turned back 90 degrees to my original sweep I got a solid null. So I dug a plug between these two nails pointing at each other as this null baffled me and whammo 2 silver quarters! I have seen this maybe 5 times so its pretty rare but each time it was either a spill of multiple silver coins or a large silver coin, quarter or larger. The last one was 2 silver quarters and a silver half. Here's a head scratcher for you.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Hello Charles, thanks for making that transmit/recieve make sense. That is why deep on doesn't work in trashy areas.
I like your plain truth explanation and will turn on my deep when I find some less trashy sites. Some fields and privates and some areas of parks that have little targets....
Thanks and good luck this fall...too dry now in NJ

Tony Deep On works just fine in the trash I ran it 100% of the time when hunting with Ed. The original Explorer and original coil was the best at using the Deep feature. If you swept a target and it seemed really wide you could bank on it being deep. It also loved nickels Ed was a nickel digging machine with his original Explorer. He popped a few gold rings as well. Sadly Minelab messed with the Deep setting starting with the Explorer II and later versions. They also changed the design on the coil winding. The result was the effect of Deep on was less pronounced. If a guy has doubts on this or any settings the very best method is to test the settings on a target in the field before you dig. If you dedicate an occasional hunt to field testing you will learn a LOT about the machine in your particular sites. Hunt with Deep on until you find a target then turn it off and sweep again. Then hunt with Deep off until you find a target to test and turn Deep on and sweep again.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

Charles, thinking about a few past deep finds that I made I can understand your explanation - I found a deep barber quarter under a pull tab when my sensitivity was at 32 and gain at 7 but my deep/fast were off. It didn't id higher then a penny/dime but the tone was there. Then there was another larger object a belt plate - solid copper - it to id as penny/dime but again deep was off and sen was high. Both of these were found in not to trashy soils and yes at different places at different times of the season.
I can't wait to get out there now - you have given me a new thing to test on my old but terrific Exp II
Thanks and good luck with the hip

Yes the Explorer will absolutely merge co-located targets together and position the screen cursor in weird no mans land locations on the screen, that is nearly always a cue to dig. But as you discovered the Explorer tones don't lie, the cursor may lie to you but the tones wont. If you hear fluty silver or the butter of gold or the WONG of platinum mixed into the tones dig! Sensitivity 32 is pretty high, its quite rare that I run mine that high as its too hot for many of my sites. There are exceptions, beach dry sand you can run the machine flat out. There is one particular park in NJ that's also for whatever reason completely devoid of mineralization. You can run the Explorer at 32 and its rock solid stable.

Ahahaha on one occasion I did have a melt down and crank my sens to 32. Here on the west coast they have magnetic black sand, it really sucks, its hard to punch through and get depth in this stuff. I got so mad one day I cranked the machine to 32, it was going nuts with false signals like 5 false signals per second but I kept sweeping and found a few old targets when the machine would latch on to them momentarily. I lasted about 30 minutes then went home with a headache. lol

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

which lends the question....what IS the depth potential of these things? 32 would've gotten how far on a quarter? Kevin

Hunting at the absolute maximum depth of an Explorer is an iffy proposition. I would say you have to rely on the history of the site. If the site is old and known for old deep targets it might be worth digging some unknown targets. I learned this lesson from Dave Z when he dug an IH cent with a Whites DFX at a depth I found incredible. People his elbow was in the hole. My Explorer and WOT coil could not ID it. Dave was digging not based on tone or screen ID but simply on the fact that the DFX detecting something way down there, what it was neither of us new. Its not a signal I would dig or even take notice of before I saw that with my own two eyes.

Years later Joe and I dug 40 1700's Spanish 8 Reales using this approach. Again site history was key. Joe had the hot spot on the beach that day and had dug maybe 9 of these reales. I was about to leave having no luck and stopped to say hello to Joe on my way out. As Joe was not finding anything further to dig he invited me to give it a try. Like 4 feet from where we were standing I detecting something, barely, God knows what it was. The cursor was bouncing all over the screen. The tones were medium low and faint. I told Joe well I don't know what it is but there are three targets here. We dug about 15 inches of sand off that spot and stuck our coils down in the hole and whammo high screaming silver signals. 4 hours later we had pulled 40 reales out of that hole.

 

[DougF]

Good stuff in this thread, thanks, Charles. I never understood running the gain at max. My understanding of gain comes from operating a radio receiver in the USAF back in the 70s. Cranking up the gain on a weak signal just made the static worse so that the signal you were trying to tune in was lost.

 

[chipper97]

Wow! This is the kind of information from the old pro's I've been talking about. I've been stuck in a setting's rut almost since I started with my Se Pro. Had some success with it and thought it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Even though I read about people using other settings and doing great I saw no reason to change. But I'm beginning to realize(slow learner) that the Explorer's are almost infinitely versatile and can be manipulated to fit almost any ground condition, and that sticking with any one setting through thick or thin is not going to be the most efficient use of this versatile instrument. I had read one of Charles's dark arts lessons and bookmarked it a while back, thinking it was interesting. Now I'm re-reading it all. I've already experimented with manual sensitivity and raising it to as high a level as I can without feeling overwhelmed with falsing, emi, and target overload. The other day running my 10 x 12 sef as hot as possible netted me a merc, rosy and an Indian in an exhausted school yard. Now I'm going to give up the 10 max gain for 7 and see how this combo does. If anyone's gotten this far in my post I found an interesting article entitled, "Better detector finds after sunset? Here's why!" It adds a whole new wrinkle to the sensitivity discussion.

 

[chipper97]

I forgot to add that along with manual sensitivity as high as possible and gain at 7 I'll have deep ON fast OFF.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

You can spend years learning new things about the Explorer it really is that versatile. Don't make the mistake I made in the early years thinking there was just one best setup. Are there times when you should bump your gain to 8? You bet your ass IF the conditions allow it. If the soil is mild and there isn't much falsing bump it. I was hunting a favorite site once that is known for deep targets. I managed to take several steps past something that had blipped in the faint false low volume range I typically ignored before what I heard registered in my brain. I went back and found it, it was the faintest deep silver tone I had ever heard. You could barely hear it with the gain on 7, just a whisper. So I bumped my gain to 8 and man it raised the volume up to a level where there was no doubt it was a must dig target. I lowered my gain to 6 and the target vanished. This is why its important sometimes not to get in such a hurry to dig a target, finding it was the hard part so don't waste the opportunity to fine tune your settings and learn something. But if you bump your gain to 8 and now the falses are driving you nuts and wasting a lot of your time re-sweeping a false that falses once and doesn't repeat, bump the gain back down to 7. This is why I say I fine tune my settings to the site on the given day. Sites change with the seasons and weather and sometimes you need to adjust with them.

Conductive tones vs Ferrous tones was something else that was hotly debated years ago, I don't know maybe that's still true. I was in the ferrous camp and stupidly thought everyone should always run ferrous tones until when doing some field testing I found that's not true. Its possible that Conductive tones give you more depth, in theory, at least on higher conductive metals like silver. The conductivity of a target may be more powerful than the ferrous content of a target, hence you may here this in the headphones as the machine has more information or stronger information based on the conductivity than the ferrous content. This is an unproven theory to me, I just have not done enough field testing to prove this theory true but there's something I see that suggests this is true. Do targets vary up/down on the screen along the conductivity axis? No, I mean on the vast majority of targets the cursor ID on the conductivity axis is rock solid stable. Its the ferrous axis left and right where the Explorer is less sure of a target and so you see targets bouncing left and right. This suggests to me that the Explorer gets stronger information about the conductivity of a target than its ferrous content. NOW lets go deep, really deep towards the edge of detectability where the Explorer starts making educated guesses about what a target is. Visually I have great information from the Explorer on both the conductivity of a target and its ferrous content, even on these deep iffy targets. I can see visually bounce patters where over multiple sweeps the cursor is sometimes but reliably hitting in certain areas of the screen that suggest I should dig. The big question is sound and tones and what I would hear in my headphones running Conductive tones vs Ferrous tones. Because I don't detect staring down at the screen right, first a tone needs to get my attention then I go to the screen. So if Conductive tones based on the conductivity of a iffy target gives me a more solid tone than Ferrous tones and gets my attention is it possible you can get more depth on silver using Conductive tones? I'd say yeah its possible. I would couple that with some reports of what people who run Conductive tones are saying about how much depth they are getting on silver. Frequently its deeper than I dig running Ferrous tones.

The Conductive tones gotcha...rusty iron will have the same high pitch as silver which means you can't hunt in all metal you will have to notch out the iron which means now you have to deal with the sticky nulls and the Explorer not wanting to let go of those nulls which means there goes the targets hiding in the iron null shadow. But there's hope, for a site that has produce well running Ferrous tones but seems played out there's no reason not to notch out iron and switch to conductive tones and hunt it again!

 

[chipper97]

Um, pardon me while I read this a few dozen times. Information packed post there! Thanks Charles! It's obvious that with the options on the explorer that you can work and re-work a site with settings aimed at probing every nuance of ground, how much trash or what type trash, interaction with targets etc., all the while learning more about the capabilities of the machine. That's definitely something to keep you motivated! I've never run in ferrous tones but I'll have to give it a try and learn how it can be utilized in particular situations.

 

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

The primary advantage of ferrous tones is being able to run in all metal with no discrimination. Learning to run in all metal takes some getting used to. Don't be afraid to hunt normally as you do now and hunt in all metal for say 30 minutes then switch back for a few weeks until you get used to it. It depends on the amount of rusty nails and iron in your areas. Also a good trick is after you find a target using your current setup, switch to all metal with no discrimination and ferrous tones and sweep the target again, the difference can be significant in terms of clarity and sharpness. It took me God several weeks to get used to ignoring the low iron tones in Ferrous all metal mode, it was kind of brutal. After a while though I didn't even notice the low iron tones it was like my threshold. lol