I've been running a Tesoro Silver Sabre for over a year now and I have found that there is no setting that positively ID's any target. This is my opinion and I'm sticking to it....
I have learned to lower my Discrimination knob a bit and trust my gut when it comes to making the decision to dig or not to dig. I have tried with marginal success to "descrim out" trash, but it is not always proved accurate for me in some instances, and hence I don't fully trust that procedure.
I have come to "look" (with my ears) for the quality tones in my target signals. Even if they are scratchy or break up a bit, if they have a small portion of good tone at some point, I will lower and raise my settings to gain more insight. Eventually the decision to dig or not comes to play, but that's how I roll. I still dig pull tabs now and then, and most likely always will, as they can have different tones depending on the type of soil and the depth.
HDD
There is no setting, procedure, method, technique or anything else that positively ID's any target...using a Tesoro or any unit with a screen.
The only way to positively 100% know what you are swinging over is to dig the thing.
All I am saying here is that after digging tons of targets, I mean a lot, I noticed the ones that broke up a lot as I dialed down were trash more often than not, the ones that came in with very little or no noise were usually one of two things....
Either some of the 20% of the trash still left that will act this way or an actual good target.
Not all the time for either one, but enough for me to eventually change.
I dug less trash but still found more than enough great things so I like those odds, and we are all trusting our gut when we make every decision to dig or not because nobody I know has X-Ray vision.
I still dig trash at the beginning of almost every hunt especially when I am at a new site if only to find out where the most common trash seems to be coming in.
I find there are all kinds of tabs out there and they seem to "come in" at different areas at different sites...and that is only one kind of troublesome trash.
Then there are those hated freshness seals that are everywhere.
Those are one kind of trash that don't seem to hold to these rules and are solid almost every time.
On those I know that they usually come in just a hair past the N in iron so I dig a few to make sure and then continue to dig them if I have the energy and especially if I am looking for silver or gold chains, or just make the decision to leave them in the dirt if I am tired or lose patience.
I actually figured out a way to give me a pretty good idea about these things before I dig them with a success rate that satisfies me, but figuring them out takes a bit longer than actually digging them so in the case of these stupid things that is what I usually do till I am tired if it.
Once I get an idea of what trash seems to be coming in where I base all future digging decisions for the rest of the time on that hunt
on that data.
This whole hobby us a numbers game to me, it is all about percentages and trying to find ways to dig more possible good targets and spend less energy digging probable bad ones.
Digging everything 100% of the time is the best way to be sure and overall find the most I suppose, but I just don't have the time, patience or energy to do that nowadays.
What I don't dig I don't know or care about and it took some effort but eventually I stopped letting the what ifs bother me but boy they sure used to for a long time after I started.
I still seem to find way more than my share of great targets doing it this way which I guess can be called the high percentage method.
For me the numbers seem to hold up...spending my time digging a higher amount of suspected good targets vs digging everything appears to still keep me satisfied, happy and my treasure pouch filled.
This is not for everybody, this is my way.
Like I said, all hunters should figure out what they need to do to make them happy.