Ferrous vs. Conductive
When we are talking about Ferrous vs. Conductive, we are referring to the “sounds” setting for the Minelab SE. This is an extremely useful setting, especially if you’re hunting in “all metal” mode.
By default, the detector is set with conductive sounds turned on. What this means is that items that are showing as highly conductive will have the same tone. This is great, but you will encounter possible falsing, especially with nails, since some nails and rusted objects will emit a high conductive reading. You can control this by applying discrimination or iron mask. But by applying discrimmination you may be missing targets. I personally prefer ferrous tones.
Ferrous tones will sound off based on their ferrous content vs their conductive properties. To understand this better, view the SmartFind screen. If you split the screen in half (left and right), the left would be high ferrous, and the right would be low ferrous. If you split the screen in half (top and bottom), the top would be high conductive and the bottom is low conductive.
By selecting ferrous tones all items in the right side will have “good” higher pitched tone, while everything in the ferrous left, will produce low tones or thuds. When coupled with “all metal”, the benefits of using ferrous will really present themselves.
The primary benefit is the ability to run in “all metal” (iron mask 32). I’ll be discussing this tip specifically, but being able to hunt in “all metal” will drastically increase your finds. Nulling is your enemy, since it can possibly mask good targets. The Minelab SE is a faster machine than other Explorers, but overall it still takes time to recover. “All Metal” will let you hear everything, get better depth, and separate targets.
The second benefit is the ability to hear “quality” high tones. When I was using conductive, I got extremely tired of digging small rusted objects. They do have a tendency to bounce top left to top right, but in conductive, you’d get a good high pitch signal for both. In ferrous, I’d get a thud then a high tone. By hearing the thud, I know the possibility of iron is there without looking at the cursor. With ferrous you do get “false” signals (extreme bottom right in SmartFind). These are usually screw caps, and are easily avoidable.
One thing take note, your ears are hard to train, do NOT go bouncing back and forth. Stick with conductive OR ferrous. The transition from conductive to ferrous was a hard one for me and it took committment to bridge the gap. If you want to increase your finds, give ferrous and all metal a try.