Hey Eric,
I almost always hunt with ferrous sounds with a wide open screen (no discrimination or iron mask). Most of the places I hunt are very trashy, mainly iron. With any iron discrimination (left side of screen) the detector is almost constantly in a null, which leaves me lonely and frightened. Seriously, there is alot of information to be gleaned from the target icon. If you get a hit that falls in a discriminated out area the icon doesn't move from the last hit and you lose alot of information about the target.
With a wide open screen and conductive sounds most of the iron will sound of like copper and silver, in ferrous the iron is low tones and the good stuff, crown caps excepted, sound high.
In some parks that have more pulltabs and screwcaps than iron I will often use conductive.
I think most people get comfortable with certain settings and find it difficult to change once they become accustomed to operating the explorer, it more a matter of personal preference.
Recently I started using the USER A/USER B settings. One of the biggest problems with experimenting with the explorer is that changing several setting can be a pain in the ass. User settings allow you make some fairly radical changes to the operation of you machine with only a few button presses, instead of putzing through several layers of menus for each change. I currently have one USER profile set up to the settings that Mike Moutry published on the forum a few weeks back (iron mask -10, conductive sounds, etc.) and the other USER my normal settings, (open screen, ferrous, etc.)
This makes it much easier to try a different setups in different conditions, or quickly compare and contrast responses on the same target before I dig.
So many options, so much to learn.
Hope this helps
Chris
Good luck
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