My advice to you is to forget the meter for the beach. Set your discrimination all the way down....fully counterclockwise. Set the notch the same way. Set the toggles to variable and disc, of course, and the sensitivity to about high noon, maybe 11 O'Clock if you want to push it. It will probably be fully stable at 12 noon and give you great depth. Now dig everything, because at the beach the gold and the aluminum trash share the same range. No machine made can tell the difference. If you want the gold, you have to dig the medium and low tones and the meter is simply a distraction. With experience you will learn what a quarter sounds like, what a penny sounds like, and what a gold ring sounds like. You will also most likely be able to tell a bottle cap with good certainty and probably aluminum foil. But the key to success at the beach with a Sovereign is learning the tones and the way to do that is to dig everything for a while and you'll get it. I used mine on the beach for a month without ever mounting the meter. I found a lot of gold rings in that time and hundreds of coins. I then put the meter on and played with that. And I found that the meter is a wonderful thing for land hunting but not worth the hassle of the risk (of damage) at the beach. I took it off after a short time and never used it for the beach but I did always use it for land hunting. The Excalibur (which I use now) is a waterproof Sovereign...virtually identical in operation. They don't have a meter...tones only. If you go meter-free and learn the tones you will be hell on wheels at the beach before you know it.
Another tip: Practice pinpointing without leaving ID mode. In other words, don't use the pinpoint switch. This is easy if you try it on surface targets that you can see first. You can raise the coil a little to simulate depth. Then try it with buried targets. Before long you will be doing a quick left-right and forward-back sweep and be right on it every time. The Elite is a great beach machine.
Also, try this: Take all the gold rings you can get your hands on, several types of coins, a few different pull tabs, bottle caps, and some aluminum trash. Lay it out on a blanket, spread out. Put the sens on Auto for this, since the stuff is visible. Sweep it all and get to know what each sounds like. See how the gold and the aluminum is alike and how it differs. Practice the pinpointing. This will all pay big dividends at the beach.
