Yeah I have hunted in that red soil, its a challenge even for an Explorer. Its going to be noisy with a fair amount of ground background noise, like traffic noise from a freeway but actual targets will sound through and higher volumes, more solid hits, and repeatable. Adjust the sensitivity to tolerable level but not noise free if you want to get any depth, ignore the noise and wait for solid hits that repeat. Those hits will seem wider as you sweep them, one of the best ways to tell a real target from a false on an Explorer, a false seems tiny as you sweep it, a target seems bigger, wider. I'd sure want to learn the Explorer in cleaner ground, learning it in red soil will take some patience to be sure. Civil war bullets are no problem even at pretty deep depths, civil war buttons are more challenging, they won't hit as solid when masked in the red soil. Watch your cursor bounce patterns, the cursor will be bouncing around, its where it bounces around that should interest you. A false will bound all over, rusty iron will bounce consistently in the rusty iron area, mini balls and buttons will bounce in the vicinity of where they hit during air tests. So you are playing a game of general vicinity, bouncing around in say a 3/4 inch square area of the screen, some sweeps bouncing outside of that but say you sweep it 6 times probably 4 of six near the area of the screen the target should hit.
One truth with the Explorer is it gives you a LOT of target information. The longer you use the machine the more information your brain will extract. Volume of the tone, shape of the tone, depth hints via tone, target size via tone. Beyond tone cursor bounce patterns. The digital display is fine for hunting gimme shallow targets, when in bad ground and/or when hunting at the depth limits of the machine then I find digital mode useless. The cursor is going to be jumping around and so the digital response will be all over the map and difficult to follow. But say you are sweeping an Indian head cent that's iffy, while the cursor may jump to some weird locations, on many sweeps the cursor will land in the general vicinity of where an Indian head cent should ID. Maybe not right on the exact location but general near there.
The Explorer tones are enough like a musical instrument that tones can have shapes, its kind of famous for what many call "round" tones. The tone sort of starts narrow as you first start to sweep over say the right edge of a coin, the tone grows wider/stronger/louder as you near the middle of the coin, then as you begin sweeping off the left edge of the coin the tone tapers off again. Its sensitive enough to tell the difference between a silver Barber dime and a silver Mercury dime, due to the Mercury dime being such a deep relief strike. Mercs sounds distinctly different from other silver dimes as you learn the machine.
Now its entirely possible to screw this all up with the wrong settings. If you set Fast ON for example its going to chop off the leading and trailing edge of the tone as you sweep. Similarly if you have your gain too high 10 for example this will boost the volume of all signals to maximum, gone are any hints at depth or size via louder vs fainter tone responses. I keep variability set to max for this reason, I use Ferrous tones to make iron sound low, I keep my gain at 7 as my goto gain, maybe 8 in good ground, maybe 6 in bad ground or due to electrical interference.
Seriously,I digress...
