What you need to know to choose a Reliable and Accurate Geiger counter

The Right Price of a Geiger Counter.

Today on the internet it is quite easy to find a for sale Geiger counter. The offer of these tools, especially economy class, has grown exponentially.

Fierce competition has thus been established, especially in the race to lower prices, however, to the detriment of the quality of the product which thus loses precision, sensitivity and reliability.

We are referring in particular to the multitude of devices that we can find on the internet and generally in the most important market places.

Furthermore, the high presence of many models of radioactivity detectors on the online market, However, it could confuse the ideas of those who are looking for a Reliable Geiger counter but he is not expert enough on the subject.

In practice except the professional user “insider”, There are very few other potential buyers who possess the necessary technical skills to be able to make an adequate decision when choosing a Geiger Counter best suited to their purposes..

The average buyer generally prefers to purchase an instrument with the lowest possible price, without worrying too much about the actual performance.

Experience, however, teaches us that at an excessively low selling price you can generally only purchase geiger counters of poor quality and with very limited performance..

The Geiger Counter Guide and Features.

What is the Geiger Counter.

Geiger counters are devices now within everyone's reach that allow us to detect radioactivity.

They can measure the radiation level of the natural background outdoors, that present in the environment, in homes and on materials of various kinds, such as building materials which are often slightly radioactive.

The operating principle of the Geiger counter It is based on the ionizing radiation detector tube, so-called: “Muller Geiger tube”. However, it must be said that not all these sensors are comparable in both reliability and performance.

The price of a Counter depends on the characteristics of the Geiger Tube Installed

The potential buyer must know that the price of these probes and consequently also of the radioactivity detectors that use them, it is directly commensurate with the intrinsic sensitivity and ability to detect various kinds of nuclear radiation.

Cheap Geiger Counters.

Economy-class Geiger counters are generally unable to detect all types of nuclear radiation, that is to say: Alfa, Beta e Gamma, because they use low quality Geiger probes, made of low-cost materials that generally cannot be penetrated by low-energy Alpha and Beta radiation. In practice they can only detect very energetic gamma and beta radiation. In the worst cases, you might come across instruments that, to keep prices down, use old, insensitive vintage tubes with questionable reliability..

About Geiger Muller Tube Installed.

Another important point that must absolutely be considered before purchasing a Geiger counter, it is the sensitivity of his “profit” to the various types of detectable radiation, that is, the minimum detectable level of activity which is generally expressed by the Geiger tube manufacturer as a function of a specific radionuclide. Another parameter that can give a generic idea is the value of the activity of the so-called natural background detected by the instrument in an open environment.

It is necessary to be able to distinguish high-performance Geiger tubes from ordinary ones

For example, there are excellent high quality Geiger tubes that detect a natural background activity of around 40-60 cpm, against the 10/20 cpm of cheap tubes.

The Guardian Ray professional geiger counter with Pancake Alfa probe, Beta, Gamma, Xray

For example ours Guardian Ray Smart Professional Geiger Counter , uses a sensitive and precise Geiger Muller Pancake LND7317 tube as a radioactivity probe, it is also equipped with special software algorithms to exacerbate the already high precision and sensitivity of these particular American-made probes.

The two main technologies used in Geiger Counters.

There are two types of Geiger counters: analogue instruments equipped with a vintage needle instrument characterized by the so-called parallax error and a summary indication of radioactivity, based not on the actual counting of particles detected by the Geiger Tube. but by an analogue process of integration of the impulses .

Digital meters are instead governed by a more or less powerful micro-controller and a modern numerical display. Il digital Geiger counter it is the latest generation, certainly much more reliable than the analogue one, he is capable of carrying out an exact count of the radioactive particles actually detected by his Geiger tube.

The Accuracy of the Geiger Counter.

The precision of a Geiger Counter is the fundamental characteristic that distinguishes a professional instrument from an economy class one.

Cheap Geiger Counters

Poor quality Geiger detectors typically have measurement error levels between 30 and 40% of the actual value of the radioactive activity measured. A reliable instrument should have at least an accuracy of between 20 and 25%.,

The professional Geiger Counter

A Geiger Counter can be defined in its own right “Professional” and reliable, first of all if it can perform in standard mode, measurements of radioactivity with a very small margin of error on the real activity of the source, i.e. with deviations between 5 and 6%, a level of error that is negligible and practically negligible.

The Professional Geiger Counters of the Guardian Ray Smart series with Pancake LND 7317

For example, our professional Geiger series made in Italy: “Guardian Ray Smart”, they broadly fall into this category of detectors with such high accuracy. At the same time they also express a very high sensitivity thanks to the particular Geiger Pancake probe with which they are equipped,

The Lat 065 Calibration Certificate “Accredit”.

If requested, these detectors can be supplied with a calibration certificate which certifies their actual precision and is valid for legal purposes because it is issued by an Italian calibration center “Accredit” legally authorized.

See for example the adjacent image which represents the outcome of the calibration check carried out on ours Contatore Geiger Guardian Ray Smart con Pancake made in USA, model LND7317.

The best geiger counters of Italian excellence.