A portable, sensitive, low power, analog Geiger counter (2025)
ludens.clI've wanted to build a geiger counter in the past but I've always been discouraged because it seems unlikely that I would be able to use it for anything other than maybe testing one or two things in my house like smoke detectors.
You won't get much from the americium in smoke detectors. They're alpha emitters, and ordinary Geiger counters will not detect alphas.
You can build an alpha detector.[1] Even a sheet of paper or a modest distance in air will stop alpha particles, so the detector has to be exposed and the emitter has to be close. A detector inside a glass tube gets nothing from alphas.
[1] https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/detecting-alpha-particles-us...
Can I just say this website is great. It's an old-web rabbit hole of little experiments that are occasionally on the dangerous side, life commentary and the comforting lack of any significant CSS. Recommend going to the site map and wandering around. https://ludens.cl/sitemap.htm
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