Hunted in iron mask!

[Anonymous]

OK here's what happened. I usually always hunt in discrimination mode. Today I went out for a couple of hours and made up my mind to hunt in IM. I set up at -12 and kept my manual sensitivity as high as I comfortably could. Around the mid 20s. I didn't pay any attention to the crosshairs I just dug by sounds. If it repeated and sounded good I dug it. Some of the stuff I dug was 6" or more up to 9". Some was shallower. My results were all clad coins and some pulltabs. No silver no wheaties no indian heads. That's OK I'm not concerned with that. It's a fairly new school and I don't think there is any silver there anyway. Here's what I want to say. After I made the decision to dig but before digging I switched to discrimination mode and every signal that I dug today (which was a couple of dollars worth of clad) sounded just as good in discrimination mode as it did in IM. In other words if I had been in discrimination mode all afternoon I would have dug every signal that I picked up and dug in iron mask. So as far as I can see as far as today was concerned there was no advantage at all to hunting in iron mask. In fact I dug some pulltabs that I wouldn't have dug in Discrimination, because I run a very tight Dis. mode that I taught the Explorer and it only includes the coins that I taught it. (I'm not interested in jewelry just coins). I'm not trying to knock iron mask because it got me quite a few coins today. I'm only saying that I would have dug every single one anyway with my tight discrimination setup and I would have saved digging the pulltabs.
I will try iron mask again but so far don't see the advantage.
HELP!!!-Chuck

 

[Anonymous]

I prefer IM and the smartscreen for digging coins at the fringes of the explorers range. That's where the signals start to bounce and a tight discrimination setting will miss coins. But a peep might get thru now and then with a tight disc setting. If targets are well within range then a tight disc setting will work fine.
You mentioned that you would have dug every single coin with a tight discrimination setup and would have saved digging the pulltabs. Remember that the process of finding coins first requires you to know that something is there, then requires IDing it. When you were double checking against your disc settings the first job was already done. IM will do a better job at letting you know something is there so it's possible that you might not have dug every coin.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Scott-What I'm saying is that every signal that I got in iron mask I got just as good in discrimination mode. and that was up to a nine inch dig that produced a clad quarter. That was about the deepest signal that I got but it was just as good in either mode. Maybe deeper signals would have come thru better in iron mask. Is that what you're saying that iron mask is deeper.
Thanks for answering-
Chuck

 

[Anonymous]

Chuck,
Like you said they were not very deep and no real trash beside them, if there would have been you may not have got many of them in your disc pattern.
For the older coins we see on these fourm most were dug in area most have worked over. Now the reason they got them is that there was trash beside them or didnt read as a normal coin would and why those using iron mask got them. A tight pattern will miss them everytime, or 2 coins in one hole will also be missed.
Now I am not one for pulltabs, so I do have a pattern I use too that has the whole top opened up with the large curror untill I get about 1/4 inch from the left side of the screen, so any coin next to a nail will be heard. Now I go to the learn mode with the medium cursor and learn in my nickles, so I will get a signal on my nickles plus any trash item that reads close to it.Just look at how the cursor act and how it responds.
I run my iron mask program and if there is too many pulltabs I will push the iron mask button and go to my pattern.
I had a tight pattern for a while and couldnt beleive how many good coins I missed that were deep, beside trash and just didnt read right as they were at angle that a tight pattern will not get. For chery picking it worked good, but never did get a older coin with a tight pattern.
Rick

 

[Anonymous]

I think he is saying that if you were in your disc pattern tp begin with you might not initially heard the target.. but being you knew it was there already you could get a lock in both modes.. a disc pattern is fine in fairly trash/iron free sites.. its when you get in high iron that the iron mask shines through the best

 

[Anonymous]

Ok guys-I have a lot of pretty trashy areas that I hunt so I'll stick with the IM and see what happens.
Thanks again for the help-Chuck

 

[Anonymous]

Chuck it didn't take me long to see the Iron Mask difference in sites with old deep coins. They are only still there because someone else missed them, and the reason they were missed is the other hunters were running discrimination patterns that nulled their machine because of near buy iron or trash. I can not tell you how many times I have dug keepers with trash in the hole or after I remove the coin and recheck the hole I then get a null. I try to run Iron Mask -13 when I can, and let the other sounds you don't like and are trying to discriminate out become like threshold to me.
Try this, it's not as good a test as in the ground reality but try it. Take a rusty nail and lay it on the ground next to a barber dime at different angles and different distances from each other. Now try Iron Mask -13 verses your discrimination pattern and report back to us.
If your looking for Clad then run your pattern and you will find it, if you are looking for the old deep stuff that others missed then you have to do something that others didn't do and the Explorer will let you do just that in Iron Mask.
Good Luck Rick

 

[Anonymous]

Yep, thats what I was trying to say. It's something I think about when people with different detectors compare signals and come to the conclusion that the detectors are essentially "equal" - if one guy already found the signal then you can't really say the other guy would have also just because his detector makes a beep over the target.
Regarding the IM mode, there has always been alot of confusion about the iron mask mode. Perhaps myself included. As far as I can tell it's not some top secret special program, instead, it was possible because of the ferrous/conductive screen layout and the odd (but brilliant) position of some targets on this screen. It appears that Minelab simply placed (might be a bad choice of words) small iron in the top left corner of the 2D screen rather than at the bottom like a conventional conductivity detector. So coins masked by iron or iron minerals jump around the top of the screen, rather than up and down the whole conductivity scale. If you are in a low iron/low mineral environment then using the iron mask mode becomes less important.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Rick-Reading all your posts it is sinking in why I should be running in IM and I definetely will be. I'll give your rusty nail test a try. Two questions. Ferrous or conductive and fast or deep or both.
Thanks-Chuck

 

[Anonymous]

Boy thats a good question Chuck, I have heard good arguments for using all the options you just listed and almost any combination. I'm not sure that it's not a matter of personal preference. I run Deep On and Fast On in Conductive with Manual Sen as high as stability will allow. I hunted with, and got killed by Golddiger last weekend (He is the Man!) and he runs Iron Mask -10 With Auto Sen. at 29, I'm not sure about his Fast/Deep Settings.
Wish I could give you a definitive answer about the settings but I am not sure there is one, at least we have the choices with the Explorer. I am sure about the advantages of Iron Mask for finding targets in and around Iron or rusty ground. I have seen it too often to have any question in my mind. One year ago I had an Explorer, a DFX, and a Garrett 2500 all at the same time. Not only did the Iron Mask find targets in Iron Mask the other detectors could not see with varying levels of discrimination, but it saw targets in Iron Mask that it could not see running it's own discrimination patterns created in the select screen.
You can duplicate the Iron Mask pattern in the edit screen and then add additional discrimination to it but be careful if you discriminate too much you will start to loose the target next to junk.
Try to familiarize yourself with with the tones, the good ones and the bad ones, it takes time but it is what makes the Explorer so extraordinary. Once you have the faint but de-stint sound of deep silver in your head you will go in search of it and all those other sounds that you are trying to discriminate out will become like a threshold to you. You hear a lot of sounds and you will even get information from it but it's in the background of your mind, like a threshold there, but not troubling, your looking for something else and when you hear a hint of it your coil will go back to it almost automatic.
Try not to get frustrated Chuck I know exactly how you feel. I have hunted with the Explorer for almost three years but feel like I learn new things almost every I go out. In the end it is a measure of the true potential of this machine that their is so much information it provides that it challenges us to learn it's language. The more you let it talk to you and the more you learn what it is saying the more you will find where others have failed. I go back to my own "hunted out sites" all the time and make finds because I now know what I didn't realize about the machine the last time I was there, and I am excited about trying them again.
I posted that exact thing on the Explorer Forum yesterday. I have a old Church site I have hunted to death and it was cleaned out when I found it. I had found several shield Nickles and just know they have to of missed a Seated coin there somewhere. I worked the grass parking lot and had a high tone that warbled and marked below a penny on the screen. It repeated from 90* but the tone changed to lower. I dug and found a weird pull tab at 4" but when I rechecked the hole there was a strong silver lock on tone. 4" more and out came the Walking Lib Half. It was straight under the big tab, can't say what it would have done with a discrimination pattern but it was there in Iron Mask.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Rick-I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post and I got a lot out of it. Like you I've had my Explorer for about 3 years and use it almost exclusively even though I have 3 other detectors. I do love it but I have always hunted it in discrimination mode. I am stricly a coinshooter except at the beach where I dig everything. I have no desire to relic hunt and I never have. I've been hunting for about 20 years now. But the time has come for Iron Mask and that's all there is to it. I live about 5 minutes away from an old World War 2 German Bund camp and that's where I'll try it. I have made some terrific finds there but I'm sure there is still a lot to be had. Thanks again for getting me motivated and if anything really great comes out of the ground I'll post it.
Chuck

 

[Anonymous]

Then you remember those analog machines. You know though the bad thing was some of them could go pretty deep and we dug everything, so several of the better sites where I am were vacuumed by them. My first machine was a Heath Kit, my neighbor and I put it together on my kitchen table over the course of a week. All metal one tone nail digging and bottle cap finding fool I was boy, but we found a lot of good stuff to. That thing would go 6 or 7" on a dime and 30 years ago there were a lot of good coins at 6".
Thanks Chuck, I've enjoyed posting with you. Rick

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Rick- I've enjoyed it too!!! Hope we do it again sometime.-Chuck