Trashy Area Operation

[Anonymous]

Hey Guys,
My questions are:
1. Should I reduce the amount of iron mask discrimination while I am in trashy areas?
I have been using iron mask -10 the whole time. Even when I reduce the manual sensitivity in areas, I may still get nulls everywhere and almost no threshold. Is this the situation where I should change iron mask to -15 to get some of my threshold back? Would decreasing iron mask increase my depth capability because it would get some of my threshold tone back? What do you guys think?
2. What is the advantage of using Ferrous Tones instead of Conductive Tones for iron-rich areas?
I have been using Conductive Tones in trashy areas. I am theorizing that if I reduce iron mask to let's say -15, I will have to deal with a bunch more high pitches coming from iron. I am also theorizing that if I then switch to Ferrous Tones, many of the extra high iron tones I would have to listen to in conductive mode with IM=-15 will then be transformed into lower tones in Ferrous Mode. Is this right?
So it seems like if I am in ground that has a bunch of null due to rusty nails, I can give myself the ability to look in between those rusty nails if I can reduce the null effect by lower the iron mask. Doing this should let me hear things inbetween nails more?? The consequence of doing this would be to let in more confusing high tones. Then to counteract this increased amount of high confusing tones would be to switch to Ferrous Tones. Using ferrous tones will transform many of the confusing high iron tones into low tones with the exception of falsie iron signals coming from rusty nails. These falsie iron signals will still pose a problem because they will still sound like coin hits. But then maybe the confusion over falsie tones could be reduced if a person were to confirm that the falsie coin hits actually grade into low tones, which would confirm that the good sounding coin hit was actually a rusty nail. Do you guys think this is correct?
I don't have much experience with using Ferrous Tones in trashy areas where there are large amounts of rusty nails, but I do have some ideas on that type of operation as listed above. I would like to know what you guys think about all this. Are my ideas a bunch of BS?
Mike

 

[Anonymous]

Hey Mike,
I'll take a stab at your ?
In iron trash I always use ferrous, usually a wide open screen with bottle caps in the lower right discriminated out. If you are using a wide open screen or IM-14 to IM-16 you almost have to run ferrous sounds, as iron usually hits high left. In conductive that will sound like good stuff. If you switch to ferrous most MOST iron will sound low and it is easier to distinguish the higher toned good signals. Nickels will also be relatively high toned and easier to hear than in conductive. However, iron falsing hits high right and that sounds good in both ferrous and conductive. That is were we all get fooled and just something you have to learn to tell the difference. The real trick is to learn pure iron falsing from a coin buried next to iron.
Some coins buried next to iron (and sounds like where you are detecting EVERYTHING will be next to iron) will hit pretty close to the upper left side. If you have more discrim than IM-13 or so you may miss these. In ferrous these signals may give a couple of high chirps or even better a kind of growly sound, but the icon will still hit pretty far left with perhaps a bounce or two to the right.
That is one good reason for less disc, the other I can't prove but seems to me the explorer responds faster with less discrimination and this allows you to pick up signals in heavy trash easier. The explorer will detect just as deep with lots of discrimination as with none, but in trash, trash and target averaging means most things will hit in the disc'ed out area and that means a null and that means you'll most likely miss anything buried deeper than that peice of trash.
And the simple things: Make sure FAST is on, try using different size coils, (smaller is normally better but have found the WOT can often pull a few from heavy trash), make sure you hit the area from many different directions, go slow, eat your vegatables. Also try running at different sensitivities and try both auto and manual. In high trash it is really a crap shoot whether you or the next guy will get the target. Play around with some rusty nails and coins, you'll be amazed that we find anything in the ground at all.
That said many do well in trash with conductive and quite a bit of disc. Personally constant nulling bugs me but that is probably because I'm mainly use open screen and am used to all the low pitched noise. So far your brain is better than any electronic discrimination method and opening up the screen lets the explorer tell you more.
Hope this helps
chris

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for that expert info and thanks for taking the time to help me out!! I guess it is time for me to plunge back into the learning curve associated with a different sound spectrum--Ferrous. So it will be back to my coin/junk garden where I even have some awesome rusty nail examples with classic iron falsie tones grading into a pure null (on my old settings). I will try to learn the different Ferrous sounds with emphasis on identifying falsies.
Mike