IRON MASK

[pan]

i need help with iron mask,what is it and how dose it work

 

[cachenut]

Well I am learning my machine too. With the more popular, complicated machines most people stop way short of learning to get the best from their machines and as soon as they can get it to find a few coins and relics they think they know all they need too. Not only do you need to master the basic stuff eventually you need to learn more advanced skills. As with the Whites line it is important to learn how to recognize what a deep coin sounds like as opposed to junk and to dig those. To get there you also need to maximize the detector for depth and sensitivity without getting lot of false positives or losing the depth. This is what I am trying to do now.

I am guessing iron mask is the same or similar with the XS. Most detectors have several modes of operations and they have different names for them. There is usually an all metal mode and different forms of a discrimination mode. In the explorer II they call the all metal mode the pinpoint mode. There are also discriminate modes called smartfind, advanced, quick, and iron mask modes.

Iron mask is a discriminate mode which allows you to set the amount of iron you want to use to discriminate out targets. The default is 6. Anything 6 or less gets discriminated out (goes silent) and anything more you hear a beep. You can move the limit up and down to allow more or less iron. If you have a manual or have visited some websites you know that some targets have a lot of iron in them and some very little. Low iron targets are more "coin like" and targets with a lot of iron are "less coins like" and more relic like. So you can set iron mask to eliminate all but silver coins or to include almost everything.

In all detectors I've used more discrimination means less depth because it takes a lot of signal strength to determine what the target is, coin or junk or relic. So using less iron mask means the weaker targets can get through and show up on the screen. Weaker targets are often weak because they are deep and deep often means old. This is why we reduce iron mask in order to find the deep old targets. Some people hunt with it set at -16, the lowest possible setting. This brings in the weakest targets but also everything else too. It varies, some use less and some more. Some use -16 but eliminate bottle caps and nails.

In my Exp II I have a iron mask edit screen, iron mask smartfind, and iron mask digital screen. With iron mask edit I can slide the value up and down from -16 to 16, ironmask smartfind is just like the regular smartfind with the little cross hair that shows up on the screen and iron mask digital has the two numbers for the target found.

If you look at the factory supplied discrim pattern for coins it is pretty easy to just draw a line up the screen that gets you much the same result as the custom coin pattern. It is so much simpler this is what a lot of people do. Just set it at -6 and go. Forget all that hooey about discrim patterns and learn and edit mode. They can still use smart find or digital.

Others set it at -16 and look at and listen to every target and decide to dig or not. Not good for trashy areas for sure.

Others use it to check out odd sounding, iffy targets. They set it at -16 and then come back to iron mask mode when they find a target and want more info on it to decide to dig or not to dig. I've been doing this. Using the custom discrim pattern. You can use it in a trashy area, just not all the time.

This is about all I know. I recall someone once said the Exp XS did not have all the screens the Exp II did. Perhaps the iron mask digital is missing? Also I am not so sure the iron mask set at -16 is the same as the all metal mode. There may be a difference because it runs thru a discrim circuit as opposed to none at all. But people will say it is.

Joe.

 

[cachenut]

Okay that is -6 as the default, not 6. Also digital and smartfind are the same thing just a little different in what gets displayed. So quickstart, advanced, ironmask and pinpoint are the different modes. You can have smartfind and digital in both quickstart, advanced, and iron mask.

There may be more mistakes so please point them out if you see some.

Joe.

 

[pan]

your a good explaner im working a very trashy park,ive pulled 3 sliver coins out of there,one a merc dime,they were 7in deep each coin was badly worn on one side,and i was using factroy settings,,,,,,,happy hunting