MineLab iron discrimination

[Nathanj]

Hello,
Recently we purchased a Minelab 2100 at a local dealership here in Montana.
The owner helped convince us to buy the 2100 vs. the 2200v2 on the basis the iron discrimination was useless, sometimes misses gold and that it is just a gimmick to get more people to buy the higher end Minelab products. The owner uses a Minelab 4000 (which we could not afford). After months of fruitless searches in nugget know areas and finding in thousands of square nails and tons of other iron pieces we are back at the same question… Does the 2200v2 (and others) iron discrimination feature potentially filter out gold and just a gimmick?
Yours truly,
Nathan Johnson

[minersright]

minelab iron discrimination

Nathan, the minelab discrimination on the SD and Gp series detectors can not be relied on to be accurate. They will in some cases reject gold with ironstone attached to it and sometimes hackly gold.The discriminating feature only partially works on very shallow or surface targets using a double d coil not a mono. I have seen to much large gold rejected to convine me to use this feature, in other words dig every noise, So I would say your detector dealer was quite honest and correct in his advise.

Regards Minersright in oz.

[Nathanj]

iron discrim

Thanks a bunch. I guess the trick then is that we need to get to areas that are not so saturated with iron junk.
Maybe a different coil? We have heard that a Coiltek Wallaby DD is a much better coil than the stock 2100 coil.

We have found some dredge piles that are cleaner yet have not yielded anything. The miners here in Montana loved to throw garbage around and seemed to do a fine job cleaning up the gold.

So you are saying that the GP4000 is also limited in its iron discrim also?

[minersright]

minelab iron discrimination

Nathan, the coiltec wallaby dd coil will not discriminate any better than the standard minelab coil in my opinion and yes the 4000 is not reliable in the discrimination area as well, but the 4000 is a very powerfull detector when used as a gold detector digging every noise.
regards Minersright in oz.

[Nathanj]

Other questions

Thanks again for your help!
Do you have any suggestions to help us improve sensitivity and removing ghost signals? We have heard a Coiltek pocket rocket can help.
We recently dug a 3 foot whole on a soft signal that panned out to be nothing even after sifting through the pile several times. This type of thing has happened before. We will get a signal and then it will disappear.
-Nathan in MT

[minersright]

minelab iron discrimination

Sounds like your detector was not ground balanced correctly. A good method to help eliminate this problem is to scrape the surface over the target, check the scraped area for signal, if still there, ground balance detector over the material that you scraped away,NOT on target area if signal is still there repeat again . Sometimes mineralisation will cause this problem.

minersright in oz