Geiger Counters

The Chamber. I wasn't actually going to look into the chamber more, but a radmon.org user was curious, and curiosity got the better of me, so I dug into it - and I'm glad I did! Quite interesting. A little, but not actually quite as I expected. (I have added the high resolution images of this post to the download in the first post of the AEGTest Hound-3699 series.) Under the little metal cap on the underside of the chamber there are more discrete electronics and in the center a long gold plated pin that runs into the chamber. All the markings have been removed like the rest of the ICs. It

AEGTest Hound-3699 Radon Monitor Accessing the 'Admin' menu. The manual states: “Admin: Technician access only (Note: Do Not Click.)” Do not click? On something I bought? Something I own? Really? Give me a big red button that says 'do not press,' and I’m going to press it. If it’s locked behind a PIN code, I’m going to try and guess it. And you, AEG Test — you’ve just fuelled me with the absolute determination to click things, crack things, push buttons and tear them to pieces. That said — I still think this is a decent little unit. So everyone deserves access to the admin menu. If you follow

AEGTest Hound-3699 Radon Monitor Review & Teardown Many high resolution images of the teardown are here. I have been getting to know Radon quite a bit more of late. I manage a couple of sites at work and these are in Radon areas. I have used the Airthings Corentium and also fitted an Airthings View Radon 2989 in the basement of one of the sites. Monitoring is ongoing. I have also been experimenting with Radon a little too – discovering it’s progeny. I have also discovered that many (all?) of my U-238 sources also emit small amounts of Radon, local to their storage and I want to keep an

I couldn't wait to tinker with this so I decided to mod this in lieu of getting the ESP-12 modules and programmer. Using a scope I found the connection points I needed, Soldered some wires on. Soldered a Wemos D1 Mini clone on the other end, installed ESPGeiger 0.7.0, and boom! Literally as simple as that. Using the scope I checked the ribbon cable pins one by one and found the pulse coming from the PSU board. I didn't want to solder right on the ribbon, it looks janky already, so probed about and found that it is connected to L12. The MCU side of the inductor is where I soldered the pulse

Yaorea YRG01 I bought another cheap Chinese counter from Aliexpress and I am impressed, especially for the price of £27 shipped to my door. Despite its cheap appearance it actually offers a lot of bang for buck. I haven't looked into it closely, but there seems to be a lot of attention to detail, and I reckon whoever designed this really gave a damn about it. 😄 It came up in suggested products on Aliexpress and I wouldn't have bothered about it if not for the fact that someone reviewed it and posted pictures of its insides. "Okay, a glass tube... Ooh a separate PSU board with a big hunking

SI-19BG (M) | SI19BGM | СИ19БГМ - Tiny end-window Geiger Muller Tube I received this today after waiting for it to arrive for a couple of weeks. Purchased from Ukraine (via eBay). Not only is it tiny, it is the most expensive GM tube I have bought yet per gram of weight! And it appears to work okay. Sensitive to Gamma and Beta. This tube really is remarkably small. The end window must be no larger than 6mm diameter and the whole thing is only 20mm in length. It's not sensitive and for the couple of minutes I had it on test, the background was about 4cpm and it went nuts with Am-241 being held

*** Please note: Working with lithium batteries can potentially be hazardous. Damaging the battery can potentially cause fire or explosion. Learn and understand the risks before performing such a repair. *** I had to replace the battery in my Radiacode 101 as it was becoming potentially dangerous. I noticed the main button on the Radiacode wasn't pressing in properly and was sticking at times, so I popped the unit open and found the battery had expanded and was putting pressure on the circuit board, and thus making the button tight. The battery hadn't expanded like other LiPo's I have had,

I was asked by Gissio to try and download the original firmware from my HFS-P3, so I tried. Alas, no joy so far. ☹️ Under the battery (stuck down with sticky tape) is a pin header. Probably designed to have a pogo pin connector connect to it as there is no room to solder on an actual pin header. I just soldered wires to it directly. I managed to work out the pins by tracing the circuit, but I had to use my microscope as the connections on the MCU really are that small! I took photos of both sides and flipped one then overlaied one over the other so I could line up the vias on the board. You

A member (of radmon.org) asked me if the Gamma Scout would/could work with radmon.org using the USB and software the counter came with. The answer to that is a simple, no, not out of the box, but it could be done with a quick hack. Simply add a couple of wires and connect them straight to an ESP8266 or similar MCU. This guide only covers the 'Alert' model. There may be differences with other Gamma Scout models. Here is how: Open up the Gamma Scout and locate the small transistor at the top left of the board, right above the pin header. There we are going to solder on a wire to the middle pin

I have seen these kicking around the usual suspects (Ebay, Amazon, Aliexpress etc.) for a little while now and after watching (a not very informative YouTube video) I decided to get one and see just what it is and is it any good. TLDR; You get what you pay for. I paid about £32 for this from Aliexpress.com but have seen them for as little as £25 on Aliexpress.com and as high as £60 on Ebay and Amazon. The unit is very small and packs a tiny 150mAh LiPo cell, 48mm x 7mm (external dimensions) HH614 GM Tube, tiny OLED screen, a massive overkill ARM Cortex-M0 FM33LC043N MCU from Fudan Micro and