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Iron Bias Fe Versus Fe2


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I did some testing today at a site with lots of rusted crown bottle caps that totally drive my Deus nuts. It and I are able to correctly identify those crown bottle caps less than 50% of the time. Ugh....... I took the Equinox 800 using Park 2 with -4 to 40 accepted, 5 tones (with volume and pitch adjusted to my liking) and F2= 0. I copied these same settings into my User Profile except I changed F2 to 5.

I can usually identify a crown bottle cap on the Equinox about 75% of the time even with F2=0 just by the often jumpy numbers and generally bigger audio profile if it isn't too deep. There are those pesky newer ones that will false tone almost identical to a US nickel at 12,13 and add some aluminum foil (thanks Modelo) and the real fun begins.

I went ahead and dug any target that I thought was a crown bottle cap using both search profiles. I mostly used my User Profile to make sure. I dug 15 bottle caps and correctly identified 13 before digging them. One was actually next to a US nickel which confused me and the Nox 800. The other was next to shallower pull tab and created the same confusion. Otherwise, this strategy of double checking with two different F2 settings worked very well and did not take long to execute. Most of the crown bottle caps were 1 to 4" deep. One was about 6" deep but gave a strong iron response using F2=5. 

Next tests will be to hit a nail bed. The real test will come with the old narrow gauge railroad right of way project where the smallest iron so far is a 2.5" by 1" nut for some 4" to 6" X 1" bolts and spikes which are 8" to 18" or so deep. I will definitely have my Deus with me to grid the area after using the Nox just to make sure I haven't missed any good non-ferrous targets.

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43 minutes ago, Steve Herschbach said:

For me I was surprised FE2 kicked in so quickly. FE has no effect run to the extremes. FE2 has an effect almost immediately, with the ferrous breaking up significantly at only FE2-2 The control is more aggressive than I anticipated.

Am thinking that I have not used the FE2 function.  I have been off the machine a while.  Can someone answer: Does one function mute the other? Or are you still able to run both settings? As in FE and FE2 at the same time? 

Thanks.  

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To put it simply, FE02 is a lot more aggressive at blanking a mixed iron signal, so undoubtedly some masking can occur given the right target cluster. 

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1 hour ago, midalake said:

Am thinking that I have not used the FE2 function.  I have been off the machine a while.  Can someone answer: Does one function mute the other? Or are you still able to run both settings? As in FE and FE2 at the same time? 

Thanks.  

Only one can be active - you are either in FE or FE2

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11 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

The part I do not show? There are good items that will do the same, and I need to try and find one. In theory there is a good item that will give a false ferrous if this setting is too high.

some examples:

A US dime placed on a US nickel...or a dime placed on top of an aluminum square tab.

In other words, 2 non-ferrous targets which will read as ferrous if you increase the iron bias...it’s been quite some time since I ran this test (and I only did it with FE IB), but I think the Nox 800 only registers a ferrous response on the above two scenarios at the max setting of FE 09.

Maybe someone can try this with F2 IB also...I’ll run a test tomorrow, if nobody reports back before I do.

I’ve only been using my 800 for a few months now, and originally started using a low FE bias at 2 or 3, then switched over to F2-4, and felt I could just set F2 to 0 a few hunts later with no extra/excessive digging of ferrous targets, and in return gain an improved response of deeper non-ferrous targets next to ferrous targets. (Before my 800 purchase, I was using an FBS machine (Explorer SE) for 13 years in conductive tones with just a smidgeon of Iron discriminated out, and so I feel very comfortable at being able to ascertain ferrous from non-ferrous at the F2-0 setting on my 800).  I hunt mostly old, trashy parks, with quite a bit of deep iron (Mostly rusty nails/bolts (i.e. “chicken bone“ type iron in them)).

 

Steve, I remember you, some months ago, uploading an image comprised of FE and F2 Iron Biases, where you had stated that FE-0  was equivalent to F2-4, and the entire FE Iron Bias range (0-9) falls within an F2 Iron Bias range between 4 and 6, inclusive.  Does this pic still have meaning after your tests you ran today??  ....  F2-4 in your test above didn’t produce the same result as FE-0 did.....Also, along those same lines of questioning, is F2-0  still considered “less” Iron bias than FE-0 ??? 🤔

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5 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

That, of course, is dependent on search mode, ground conditions (e.g., mineralization), ferrous and non-ferrous junk density, and the primary targets of interest (gold vs. jewelry vs. coins vs. relics, mid-conductors vs. high conductors...) and their depth.  I guess that takes me back to my preferred middle-of-the-road IB setting of F2 = 4 to 6 as a good starting point.

Chase,

I'm quite like you on my beaches.  I don't want to mask. (B1, 23, 6, FE2 0)  I dig just about everything and if I see a -3 or -4 and it is deep I've had the numbers move up as I get the target out. (A -2 is nearly always a hair pin.)  Sometimes it will be a corroded penny at 10+ inches.  I can't think of a specific valuable target now that was negative and became valuable but just by practice I think it happens frequently.  I'd have to video my hunts.  Simon and I used to talk about the negative first numbers and Steve has addressed that.

So the FE and FE2 are only audio controls.  It doesn't change anything in the display.

A target that fools my 800 is a bent tent spike.  My 3030 would make it sing out loud and clear but the Nox garbles it like a chain.

One variable you did not list from above was the coil size.  Is everyone on these tests using the 11" coil?

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18 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I go to FE2 and show that increasing the setting rapidly shifts from a non-ferrous reading to a ferrous reading. At 0 it's clean non-ferrous. Just going up to 2 makes it a mixed ferrous and nonferrous reading, at 3 it's mostly ferrous with some high tone mixed in, and at higher settings it is a solid ferrous reading of -7.

 

11 hours ago, Jeff McClendon said:

I took the Equinox 800 using Park 2 with -4 to 40 accepted, 5 tones (with volume and pitch adjusted to my liking) and F2= 0. I copied these same settings into my User Profile except I changed F2 to 5.

First off, Steve, I'm glad you started this thread.  Here's one from July where I included links to three others (so we're at least up to five 😁) but although there was good info in those, from my viewpoint the subject remained murky at best.  This one so far is clearing things up for me, but hopefully more to come.  When I last posted on this subject (July) I said I was experimenting and would report what I found.  Last week I decided I was done messing around with iron bias as I wanted to change my focus to recovery speed (and now Chase says the two are correlated :ohmy:).

What I did the last month or so was use my standard Park 1, Multifreq, no discrim, custom 5 tone, recovery speed = 5, gain = 22.  In the main program I set F2 = 0 (minimum) and in User Profile I set F2 = 9 (maximum).  When I got a non-ferrous tone that sounded like it might be a ferrous target I would switch to User Profile and see if the tone changed to iron grunt.

The first thing I found was that partially rusted crown caps (about the only kind I find) would often sound sweet nickel at F2 = 0 but switch to almost pure ferrous grunt at F2 = 9.  But that was about as much as I was able to conclude.  Unfortunately (for this study, but fortunately otherwise) I wasn't finding hardly any nails which showed clean non-ferrous at F2 = 0.  There were quite a few iron hits in some spots of my park (probably where buildings were razed long ago) but they just grunted enough -- usually at least one direction -- to reveal themselves.  That was my conclusion anyway as I didn't dig them.

I had previously mentioned that deep high conductor coins would sometimes give iron hints with FE2 set in the middle of its range but not at F2 = 0.  During my experimentation, most of the time a non-ferrous target would sound the same at either extreme of F2.

Basically what you two (Steve and Jeff) report (two quotes I attached above) are consistent with what I was experiencing.  I've decided (not because of this thread, but the busy holiday) to today do more testing in my worst iron location.  I hope to play around with Park vs. Field, different IB settings and different Recovery Speed settings -- probably just 2 of each so 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 combinations.

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10 hours ago, Raphis said:

A US dime placed on a US nickel...or a dime placed on top of an aluminum square tab.

In other words, 2 non-ferrous targets which will read as ferrous

Personally I’m looking more for real world stuff, not contrived mixes. There was the stacked nickel thing.... I’m not worried about missing stacks of nickels. For me specifically I will be looking to locate a gold nugget in the clear, no adjacent targets. Just the nugget and the ground. If the nugget is found using my normal zero setting, how high a setting will flip it to a ferrous reading?

Or a nickel buried to where it barely reads non-ferrous at a setting of zero. How much if any iron bias must be applied, if any, to flip it to ferrous? If a nugget reads nonferrous at a FE2 setting of zero and flips to ferrous at a FE2 setting of 2, that’s something worth knowing.

Virtually all the statements I have seen regarding this control, mineralization effects, and depth, seem speculative, based on what common sense would imply. Actual data on real world targets in mineralized ground is very thin to non-existent.

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10 hours ago, Raphis said:

Steve, I remember you, some months ago, uploading an image comprised of FE and F2 Iron Biases, where you had stated that FE-0  was equivalent to F2-4, and the entire FE Iron Bias range (0-9) falls within an F2 Iron Bias range between 4 and 6, inclusive.  Does this pic still have meaning after your tests you ran today??  ....  F2-4 in your test above didn’t produce the same result as FE-0 did.....Also, along those same lines of questioning, is F2-0  still considered “less” Iron bias than FE-0 ??? 🤔

The chart was originally posted here created from information Tom Dankowski posted based on what he thinks he knows about the control. I’d say based on my simple test that the information is now suspect.

minelab-equinox-800-iron-bias-fe-vs-new-f2-settings.jpg

Tom said the new FE2 vastly expands the control range both higher and lower, with the original FE setting spanning the middle of the new range. Tom is equating Iron Bias 0 with the F2 setting of 4 and Iron Bias of 9 with F2 setting of 6. 

However, in my video you can see that a FE2 setting as low as 1 has more effect that a FE setting of 9. The FE2 setting of 2 makes it very obvious. Based on my simple test it looks like a FE setting of 9 is more like a FE2 setting of 0.9

So is FE2 setting of zero actually applying less bias than the FE setting of zero? Tom says so, but my current answer is “I don’t know” until I create a scenario that proves it. That would mean a FE2 setting of zero would have to produce a nonferrous reading on a target that the regular FE setting of zero called ferrous. Right now that seems a poor bet since all FE settings appear to fall in the FE2 region between 0 and 1.

Based purely in my video the FE settings of 0 - 9 appear to equate to FE2 settings of 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, all the way to 0.9

Or another way to look at it is that if the original FE setting tops out at FE9, then the FE2 setting of 1 would be the equivalent of FE10.

None of this information about how FE and FE2 relate to each other is anything other than speculative and should be taken with a huge grain of salt. The only thing I know for sure is the FE2 range is far more aggressive than the original and kicks in earlier than I thought based on what Tom had said.

 

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Everyone here is using the latest update?

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