Nice ring. It looks like the bottom of the band has a crack in it. That will some times cause a ring to give a really bad signal on any machine. The conductivity of the target as no solid pathway through it, hence a broken signal.
As good as the Sovereign is at hunting rough ground (the best), there are still going to be a few sites that have even it's number. Really bad spots may require 3:30 or even lower manual settings. Often I find that when it's real bad Auto will smooth the machine out where no static manual setting seems to work well due to the constantly changing ground content. In that way I look at Auto like a form of automatic ground tracking. Still, next time you are there I'd stick a coin 6 or 7" deep and then try auto over it. Now flip over to the lowest manual setting and see if either one gets it better. Some times the lowest manual setting will still be deeper than Auto, while other times the highest stable manual setting is not as deep as Auto and will not run as smooth. Again, I attribute this to fastly changing ground conditions were manual can't adjust to hotter/colder ground patches, among other things. Put it this way. Find how low in manual you have to go to keep the threshold from nulling out all the time, then compare that setting to Auto. Find out which is deeper on a buried target and use that mode. Sometimes for me it's Auto, some times it's manual. All depends. I've already hit the reverse of this. Certain sites where Auto won't keep things table, while a certain low manual setting would. That's more rare than the reverse of that, though. Normally in the worst of grounds due to specific conditions Auto is stable while manual isn't, or at least Auto gives me more depth than the highest stable manual setting.
You might also want to try throwing Iron Mask OFF. I think Crazyman reports less falsing in higher mineral sites when doing that. The next step after that would be to hunt in Silent Search. It will calm down a few of the random chirps or break throughs. After that discrimination gets involved. Try noticing the VDI number when you hit a false signal or chirp. If it's only bouncing up to say the 70's 80's 90's, or perhaps 120 or 130 or so then slowly raise the discrimination until it just kills that false while sweeping over it.
Which coil are you using? In ground that bad at certain sites going to say an 8" coil might clean up target signals and give you much more depth. Sounds like the minerals or bad ground content is so drastic that the machine is choking on the ground load. Even if you go down to say 4PM or even the lowest manual setting you'll still be getting deeper than most machines on the market. Regardless, think of it this way...Most other machines on the market couldn't probably even do nearly as well at a spot like that than the Sovereign. If the Sovereign can't handle it then NOTHING will. I bet your Explorer would have done even worse. Mine did in my soil.
I see you got rid of the Explorer. Welcome to the club. Three Explorers later I finally decided I wasn't going to go back to those. In my ground on silver/copper they couldn't manage any better depth than my QXT Pro, which up until now has been the deepest silver/copper machine I've ever used. It was either the Etrac or GT, and I initially thought I'd just buy a used GT as a stepping stone on my way to an Etrac. After all, these Sovereigns hold their re-sale value well, and when I decided I wasn't happy with it I could get my money back and put it towards the Etrac. So far the old girl has given me every reason to see that it's not a stepping stone, but rather I am standing on the peak of the mountain already.
