My findings were that 'no' threshold was not for me. I need to know where targets are not as much as I need to know where they are, a threshold tells me that. Iron and trash can cast a large shadow masking good targets. Once a site has been cherry picked of easier targets picking off good targets hiding in these shadows is the game we have on at sites I hunt.
Regarding lowering the threshold tone from 5 to say 2, that is something I have not been able to test since I posted that message. I was 100% occupied with remodeling my house last year, I finished December 10th and its been frozen solid in the NE since then.
I will be testing this this year. I thought it was one of the most interesting observations anyone has made about the Explorer in quite a while. I do know that wheat cents give notoriously broken and poor signals with my normal setup. But before anyone gets too excited, I have learned that with the Explorer one has to have the discipline to test a theory both ways before taking a position that A+B=C.
So far we hear of field observations that signals that were broken with a threshold tone of 5 sound crisp and clear with a threshold tone of 2. That is encouraging however is the reverse also true? Lets say you have a clear crisp signal with your threshold tone at 5, what happens if you lower the threshold to 2? Maybe nothing, maybe its still good or maybe the signal turns to crap. It has been my observation that nothing is quite 100% with the Explorer. You make an observation with a particular setup or approach, the observation proves true perhaps most of the time but if tested long enough exceptions to the rule emerge.
Take rusty crown caps and silver quarters and half dollars. If you disc out rusty crown caps sometimes the silver will ID in its correct location with no hint of the nearby rusty crowncap. And if you switch to all metal sometimes it will lock onto the rusty crowncap so strong that there is no hint of the silver. So is the rule of thumb then to always disc out rusty crowncaps? No because sometimes the oposite is true, all metal will let you get a signal on the silver and if you disc out the crowncaps you get a null with no hint of the silver. The same can be true with rusty nails. Sometimes all metal is your friend, most of the time in fact, but there are exceptions where discriminating out iron produces a much improved signal versus all metal.
So in this case of lowering the threshold tone I advise caution. It looks promising but I have proved myself wrong too many times to jump to a conclusion and say that is the way to run the machine 100% of the time. Still its exciting to know there are still mysterious inner workings of the Explorer to chart.
Now with all that said here's something new. Someone reported to me recently that while the Explorer ID'd a silver dollar correctly, even several silver dollers correctly, it ID'd a stack of 10 silver dollars as iron, and in an air test for crying out loud. Cursor location was lower left of the screen. Go figure that one.
Charles
