Minelab explorer xs help

thatmetalguy said:

Hi I have been using the explorer for about a month now and love it. I use a coiltek 12x8 coil on it. I need help because I can't figure out the iron discrimination. What level should I have it at. Should I have it on ? Also what about the noise cancel? Should I have that on also? And if any one has some tips on the discrimination that would help also. I usually accept (coins, FE coins, jewlery) then reject the rest. If anyone can help me that would be a big help. Thanks and HH

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I use to Iron disc low, I guess it all depends on the site. Obviously the higher you set it the less iron you get but I was always afraid of losing depth with setting it too high and since most of my detecting is really old sites, I liked to dig everything. Or are you talking about iron mask? I usually hunt with it off. Noise cancel isn't needed all the time, if you're getting interference you can use it to select a quieter frequency.

thatmetalguy said:

...can't figure out the iron discrimination. What level should I have it at. Should I have it on ?

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If you want to use iron disc., then tune the machine to the object that you want to discriminate. For example, take a bobby pin and bury it flat at 4" depth. Increase the iron discrimination until the unit ignores the target. Wha-lah!

I hunt with no discrimination and no iron mask. In trashy areas, I often dig everything until I'm reasonably sure that one sound or crosshair-location is always the same target. Then I may ignore digging that sound or crosshair.

The problem with discrimination is that many objects are mixed with alloys and cause variations in the target id. This is in your operators manual, and better explained in the Andy Sabisch book that comes with many explorers. My Exp-XS, II, & Se-Pro have shown quarters and nickles as coins, jewelry, foil, & pull-tabs. 10-14k gold can show up and sound like coins, jewelry, and occasionally junk iron.

Best advice yet....... Take a bunch of test targets (gold, silver, new & old coins, etc) to the area you want to hunt. Bury each of them at 4-6" deep to see how the detector reacts.
- Listen to the sound each target makes
- Watch the cross hair location for each target
- Then see how fast or slow you can swing the coil & still recognize the target.

A full sweep is usually about 4 seconds. Trashy, mineralized, or salt-water areas might want to slow down to 6 seconds. Areas with relics might want to slow down even more.

Thanks

Thank you guys for the information. Now I understand. Thanks for the help and HH

BTW, You really have a great machine that can hunt in just about any soil condition around the globe. Although the XS is an older model, it is certainly not out of the game. It has 28 frequencies for compensation and ID'g targets, which give it abilities no single frequency detector has, no matter how new it is. Then consider depth (with no discrimination) and I found in my own experiences the XS, II, Pro, Safari, and Etrac are all about the same.

Remember, you need to have some time logged in to really understand the machine. After you find a few hundred targets, you'll start recognizing the sounds, and the little tricks that make the most of your machines capabilities.

If anything else comes up, just ask!

-David