OUT AND ABOUT WITH WHITE'S PRIZM 6T

By  B.T (Prizm 6T - discontinued)

Over the last year or two I have certainly come to respect the White’s Prizm 6T range of detectors as I reckon they are among the best iron discriminating machines on the market. Seriously, they don’t look at a fraction of the iron many other discriminating detectors will pick up and yet they work in just about any ground type you may encounter.

The more iron-rubbish infested the site is, the more these little beauties shine. So, with these facts in mind as well as the new s that White’s was about to introduce a new Prizm to the stable, I was hanging out to see what they would dish up.

With the release of the auto-tracking 6T, White’s decided to drop the Prizm 2 and the series now ranges from the Prizm 3 up to the 6T, or Tracker, as the ‘T’ would imply.

The Prizm 3 to the Prizm 5 run on two 9-volt batteries but the 6T operates on eight AAs which are housed in a very neat battery pack located under the armrest.

The Prizm 6T incorporates a backlight that can be switched on and off so naturally a higher battery power life to power this and the auto tracking was necessary.  The features on this machine are easy to use and offer serious coin and treasure hunters and those who like to hit the beaches a few more options over the other Prizms.

The 6T sports fully selectable notch discrimination, depth readout, expanded multi-tone ID, backlight, auto tracking, VCO pinpointing, beach mode, large bold VDI target numbers and White’s new 9-inch spider web concentric coil.

The author's first keeper with the White's Prizm 6T was this old matchbox case.

The disc range has also been enhanced at the lower end of the scale to satisfy relic hunters searching for ferrous-type artefacts that might have been discriminated out by the single ferrous disc range found on the other Prizms. In other words, you can disc out trash such as nails and tin and still detect and accept objects such as horseshoes and other desirable ferrous artefacts.

First up I was a bit surprised at how loud the audio was through the internal speaker but was told that this was for beach hunters who don’t like to use headphones and need to hear the signals over the wave action. I prefer headphones so this was never going to be an issue with me.

Turning the detector on initially sees it power up to the factory present settings of 50% sensitivity, tracking on and the bottom two sections of the disc range selected. This is a good average starting point which should see the 6T operational just about anywhere it is taken.  From this point the user can select the backlight for low light or night hunting conditions, beach mode or tone ID if required as well as other adjustments such as sensitivity and discrimination.

Tracking can be locked into fixed position, which is represented with a ‘padlock’ icon on the display panel when lock is selected.

Other finds from the testing fields

My first trip out with the 6T was near Dunolly to a couple of small gold rush home sites and I was impressed with its performance from the outset. It handled all ground types it was trialled over and in pinpoint or all-metal mode it worked a treat without any annoying ground noise or falsing in bad ground.

I always like to try a new machine in ground I’m familiar because I know exactly what to expect from the ground conditions themselves and this gives me an immediate indication as to how good or bad the machine being tested is.

The spot is right next to the diggings and a fair bit of junk has been disposed of in both the mullock heaps holes and surrounding bottle dumps that dot the area. It had been hit hard on numerous occasions by plenty of operators better than me so I knew that finding anything was going to be a bonus and a hard test for the 6T.

The White's Prizm 6T is versatile and easy to use

I must have been hunting for over an hour with nothing more than the occasional old Long John button turning up when I finally got a good repeating signal that locked onto a medium to high tone. About five inches down out cam an old metal hinged-lid match box with almost its entire original contents of old matches still inside.

Having come out from amongst some pretty thick junk, I was suitably impressed with this terrific little find. I noticed that often junk signals would cascade through the tones and bounce about indiscriminately on the visual ID scale whereas keepers would give clean, single audio signals and rock solid visuals.

Very occasionally a good target would do a slight shift but this was always when it lay right beside or was buried with some junk.  This soon became easy to determine once you realised what to listen for. I also noticed the new spider web design coils punched deeper that the Prizms previous standard-issue coils.

Other finds here included the usual buttons, square brass nails and the odd musket ball along with an Australian $2 coin which has me going for a minute or two until I unearthed it. I can only surmise that it was buried at the 6-inch depth I recovered it from by someone using it as a tester because it was deep in the compact clay.

After going over the old home sites I decided to give the 6T a run over the diggings to see how it would fare on really bad ground.  The diggings were your usual mix of ironstone gravels, red and orange clays and other typical central Victorian goldfields ground types. I had no illusions of actually finding gold as it is a pretty popular haunt and has been well and truly hammered by all types of pulse induction units as well as A-grade VLF gold detectors.

The Prizm 6T's control box interface.

The 6T is designed predominantly as a coin and relic hunting machine and I loathe the false representation of such detectors as anything else however, because many people do buy detectors such as this to work the junk areas on goldfields in conjunction with their PI detectors, often finding some decent gold at times, I thought it would be a good thing to try.

In fact, just a few weeks prior to writing this article, a bloke in Dunolly brought himself a Prizm 5 for this very purpose and within days nailed a nice 27-gram nugget which well and truly paid for the machine.

To cut a long story short, the 6T cruised over it all and handled the worst of it with ease. The auto tracking did a great job tracking into any ground changes without hesitation. Reports from beach hunters is that the 6T also works great with its expanded ground balance range in beach mode and tracking doing a great job handling the salty environment.

I’m tempted to go into more detail with this detector but suffice to say the Prizm 6T takes no time at all to get to know and does exactly what it is designed to do, namely, find you treasure in the hardest-to-hunt environments.