Overview
So Long - Been Good to Know You:
The first "DIY Geiger Kits" were produced in 2011, shortly after the Fukushima disaster. The goal was to have a low cost solution for the sudden interest in radiation detection. It was one of the first Geiger counter kits available. Since then there were severial models and many improvements.
But now after 13 years it's time to call it a day and retire the three models of Geiger kit.
(I will still carry the RadMon Plus kit a while longer.)
I came to this decision for severial reasons. A few are:
Over the years, the price and availability of several components and GM tubes became an issue.
You can buy something already assembled cheaper with many of the features and design I had.
I've grown tired of keeping up with having all those parts in stock.
My heart is no longer in it and I'm beginning to forget details of what I designed.
I need to lighten up the ship.
I've sold almost 3000 kits since 2011. It's really been a lot of fun designing, making, and selling them. I will miss the contact with a lot of great customers from all over the world, however, now is a good time to call it a day.
As I mentioned I will still carry the RadMon Plus kit (see below) for a while - at least until I run out of major parts for it.
Speaking of parts! I will now have a lot of parts I will likely never use. This even goes beyond the parts that make up the kits. I'm trying to figure out what to do with them, so if anyone has any idea, please let me know.
Like the parts, there is a bunch of information on this site that will no longer apply. I will be working to decide what to keep, what to archive, and what to remove. In the meantime, there will be a lot of information on this site that is no longer applicable.
This kit is a dedicated radiation monitoring station. Add a GM tube, and it sends its readings to monitoring and IOT websites like Radmon.org, ThingSpeak and MQTT brokers. This is an ESP8266 based kit that uses WiFi to connect to your local network.
The network and site credentials are entered through screens using the browser on your phone or notebook. The ESP8266 comes pre-programmed and ready to go.
The PCB is sized to fit a larger weatherproof case.
You can use solar power to power this kit giving you a totally wireless monitoring system.
There are more details on this kit on the RadMon Plus page.
RadMon Plus
solar powered
Plugging another product!
I found it interesting that I would buy a radiation detector from someone else. So did my wife! However this is a different breed of cat!
The Radiacode devise is a small scintillation detector and and spectrum analyser that interfaces to your mobile phone.
Here are some images from their website:
In the past I spent a lot of time working with Gamma Spectrometry. I found it to be very interesting. However, I found that rolling my own devices sometimes left me uncertain about my results - in part due to the amount of variables involved. In addition, it could be expensive, and was, at times, tedious for me.
So one of the things that drew me to the Radiacode (103) was that it provides Gamma Spectrometry as turnkey solution.
It also has many other features such as mapping, an energy compensated dose rate, small size, and a great user interface.
I do not mean this to be a review - it's just my opinion - but I will say that I found the hardware, software, documentation, and features to be top notch. (I bought my Radiacode through Amazon but they are available on the Radiacode website.)
It's an investment for sure, but it's worth checking out, in my opinion.