teardown

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

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

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

This is one of my latest Geiger counters and it is in fantastic condition. To say this is probably more than 60 years old, it has really faired well. It wasn't working when I got it as one of the battery terminals had some corrosion to it. After a quick but very awkward clean up of the terminal it came to life. What really attracted me to this, besides it's condition, is the fact the meter is in CPS (counts per second.) I thought it unusual for a small counter of this era to be in CPS. Being CPS would mean it would be sensitive, which it is, fairly so. The unit is complete as far as I can

I have managed to power this up and it does work! 😊 I have also started reverse engineering it a little. I removed the two (brass?) strips and replaced them with wires so I can flatten the board out properly. The two strips were connecting the ground and VCC on the boards together. I haven't yet translated the manual, but I will in due time as I can't find a single thing about this counter on the internet at all and the info may be of use to others' too. In all it seems like a very basic counter with a quirky display. If I knew what the ICs actually were I could maybe replicate this on a

I found this on ebay priced at £12.52 delivered and couldn't resist at that price so I bought one for shits and giggles! Probably the most bizarre counter I have bought yet. (Apologies for the camera focus - new camera, very complicated... 😯 ) I haven't powered it on yet as I have no idea what battery it should be, if it should be a battery at all. It has US mains plug pins on one end but there is nothing wired to it, nor is there a battery cover. The only way to put a battery in is to disassemble the unit, which is rather cumbersome. It looks to be a flashlight made into a counter, but comes

Well, I managed to destroy my second SBT-10A. The first destroyed itself as far as I am concerned as I took it out of it's box one day, and it was toast - post here . This one was my fault. I dropped a polarizing filter on the mica window (only from about 4cm) but it hit it and went with a proper loud bang, right in my face and showered my microscope and desk with bits of mica, then the black bits on the inside of the mica just turned to a yellow schmoo in the air atmosphere. It would have been a nice experiment had I actually planned it, but I did manage to get some video of the black

As the title suggests. A video by DextersTechLab on YouTube. This is well worth a watch if you are interested in scintillation. Archived from radmon.org - originally posted 18/08/2019