Explorer users, check out this post on smartscreen

I sat down and did a freehand of the Smartfind screen for the Explorer XS so that I could use it to illustrate certain features. It is not exactly to scale, but it is very close. Read through the following 6 screens to learn a little bit about discrimination patterns and how to determine your target ID by crosshair position and movement.

The first pic is the Smartfind screen with an open discrimination pattern (all white) where all targets are accepted. I pictured it with sensitivity set at manual - 22 where I usually start out at, and illustrated the depth meter at about halfway (where I tend to start digging the older coins). 

The next screen shows my usual discrimination pattern I hunt in which is basically accepting everything above iron. The notch-in towards the bottom allows a little extra sensitivity to smaller gold jewelry. 

The next screen shows my typical "coins-only" discrimination pattern. It accepts from indian cents/zinc pennies on up and has a window at the bottom to accept nickels. 

The third screen shows where some typical targets will hit.......The red hit is silver quarter/half/dollar, the green hit is silver dime, the blue hit is warnickel, the purple hit at bottom is regular nickels. Notice how the silver dime/quarter/half/dollar crosshairs almost always overlap top of screen - this is a good indicator of silver. 

The next screen shows where clad coins and other things tend to hit....The red is quarter, purple is dime/penny. Notice how they almost always hit even with or below the top of the screen... this is a good way to tell clad from silver before you dig, and it is right about 80-90% of the times. Clad quarters and halves may read off top of screen like the silver ones. The green hit is typical of an indian/zinc cent and may vary side to side somewhat. The blue hits are typical of bullets, they usually overlap right side of screen. The dark blue would be large minieball type bullets, medium blue is medium size bullets, light blue is small bullets - these are bullets made of lead. Yellow shows a typical hit for large gold rings, tan would be typical medium gold rings, brown would be small, thin gold rings or "broken band rings". As always these will vary greatly depending on size, karat, etc. but you can see how most of them stay away from the pulltab area between the yellow hit and the other 2 hits. 

The last screen illustrates what happens to the crosshairs on deep, faint targets... notice how the red crosshair jumps back and forth in the indicated area - note especially how it overlaps the top and right sides of the screen on nearly every hit.... this is a good indicator of a deep silver coin, maybe Seated!!! The blue crosshair is typical of copper coins, it jumps back and forth side to side and slightly diagonal within the upper right side of the screen. Finally, the green hit shows how iron tends to hit, it may hit in extreme upper left, then the middle upper portion, then to the extreme right center. These are the 3 most favorite places for the crosshairs to hit on deep iffy iron targets... many times most of the hits will be in the extreme upper left, or on the really tough ones, it will bounce from the extreme right center to the upper middle back and forth....