terminology unmasking and descrimation

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Can anyone clarify these two terms?
With gratitude.
Tim

Hey Tim, welcome to this forum.

A mask, in metal detecting, is some metal (or emi) that hides or conceals an object from being detected. For instance, if a piece of iron is above or next to a coin in the ground, the metal detector may only detect the iron, so the iron is the mask to this coin target. To unmask, is to be able to detect this coin object in spite of the mask.

Discrimination........zero disc is when you accept all ferrous and non ferrous on your metal detector. You set it so it sees all the metal to a certain depth, to the best of it's design.

When you ground balance (another form of disc), you are canceling out the ground minerals and basically are setting the detector not to signal you to these minerals.

When you set the detector not to alert you to a certain metal, you are discriminating. Notching out is also discriminating...if your detector has this option.

Silent masking....is when objects are masked by electro-magnetic-interference (emi). This can be from many electrical devices, invisible dog fence, generators, etc, anything having electricity involved. This emi you may or may not hear through your headphones connected to your detector. It can mess with the detectors frequency (s) causing it to be silent when the coil passes over a metal object. You will not know there is a target there, hence 'silent masking'.

That's the skinny of it, anyway.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/13/2016 10:51AM by ozzie.

Good explanation.

bcgoldminer Wrote:
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> .
> Can anyone clarify these two terms?
> With gratitude.
> Tim


The term separation also fits here with unmasking,,,you will see them both talked about a lot of times in the same posts/ threads.

Excellent! Thanks guys.
Tim