I use a little dongle from FTLAB that I plug into my iPhone.
About $30 and works fine.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/0...tion-detector-for-android-or-ios-smartphones/
Have you compared it's reading with a dedicated counter?
The reviews on Amazon don't sound promising
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Geiger-..._next_5?reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=5
(Nearly all the positive reviews seem to come from people who have never used a geiger counter; the people who tried calibrating with a known source were mostly dissatisfied)
I'm not monitoring my continual exposure or conducting experiments to record data, or looking for lost nucular weapons.
Does a watch have radium or not? That's all I need to know.
I put it near a watch with known radium on the dial and it goes nuts.
I put it near a watch with no radium/lume on the dial and it does nothing (except background levels).
That's good enough for me.
Well I got the Radex RD1212-BT Outdoor edition - obviously so I can take it off roading in a hurricane. Actually it was nominally more expensive than the base model but offered with next day Amazon Prime delivery.
Radium 226 emits alpha.
Several of its decay products emit beta.
A couple of its short-lived isotopes emit beta.
Nothing in the decay chain emits gamma.
So are you saying the Radex 1212 will not detect radium lume?
^^OK, there are maybe forty different isotopes of Radium and a very few go through "Isomeric Decay" that may emit a high-energy photon (gamma emission) but these isotopes have half lives in the milliseconds. You ain't gonna find many of them.
Alpha particles can't get through the layer of dead skin we all wear. I really doubt it can get through the case of that detector.
OP, why don't you PM it to me. I have some old watches and aircraft instruments that are guaranteed to contain radium. Can't say I need one bad enough to spend a couple hundred on it tho...
The reason I mentioned radium 226 is that's the isotope in the decay chain for U238, the most abundant form of Uranium. That's where most of the radium in the crust came from. Interesting, the half-life of U238 is 4.5GY. But it's had plenty of time to decay.
Well I got the Radex RD1212-BT Outdoor edition - obviously so I can take it off roading in a hurricane. Actually it was nominally more expensive than the base model but offered with next day Amazon Prime delivery.
Fired it up and tested it on my suspect dial...nothing. Nothing at all. Well, it did indicate 0.10 background radiation. I suppose that's good but part of me was hoping it would indicate Radium just so I could see it work.
But this poses a question for me - this particular device only detects Beta, Gamma, and X-Ray. NOT Alpha. I'm no nuclear scientist so here comes my dumb question: do I need a geiger counter that detects Alpha particles to determine if I have a Radium dial?
