The Ben Heck Show

Pripyat - DIY Geiger Counter (8x26)

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Matt Eargle shares his love for cold war technology by building a homebrew Geiger counter using an old Soviet surplus Geiger tube he happened to have lying around. Embracing a cold war mentality, once completed, his Geiger counter will resemble the CDV 700 series models that were in production from 1954 until 1974, and allow him to conquer his fears with a radiation detector. Matt Eargle is a cold war nut who loves historical technologies. He just happens to have some old Soviet surplus Geiger tube sitting around. He’ll use it to build his own take on a Geiger counter. It will be something like an updated CDV 700 series. The original CDV-700 Series models were in production from 1954 until 1974. Later XXX series models were produced well into the 1980s. In order to build a homebrew version of a Geiger counter, he’ll need a couple of components in addition to his Geiger tube. A Geiger tube has a sealed vial inside a sealed glass tube containing an inert gas. You take that and apply a really high potential, the one he’s using is about 400 volts. When your particle comes in and strikes the nucleus of the gas inside, it temporarily ionizes that gas, just enough to allow some of that voltage through that it can be measured. He’ll need a high voltage source to feed his tube. The cathode of the tube will run into an Arduino. Running the high voltage source through batteries will require a transformer. The transformer will require an AC current. The easiest way to create an AC current would be to create a little oscillator with 555 timers and run that into an inductor. The 555 timer will set up in astable mode to produce an alternating signal at 60 Hz that will get amplified by a MOSFET before running into the transformer. The current from the transformer will go into a diode laddering system which will drive the GM tube. The signal from the Geiger tube will run into an NPN transistor. The output pulse of the tube is around 200V, so it needs to h