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mickif
USA
6 Posts |
 Posted - 04/15/2012 : 07:57:43
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Ok, I RMAd my unit and have had the repaired unit for about a week. Everything appears to be working as expected. I have no obvious radioactive sources to check, but background radiation seems to hover between 7 to 30 cpm, depending on where I am.
Last night the thing went nuts. Woke me up with the alarm and a reading of 1098 cpm. It dropped rather quickly, 590, 240, and eventually background levels. I was sleepy, but I think it ranged that in about 5 secs. After a couple of minutes it freaked out again with an alarm and a reading of 998 cpm. It dropped to about 600 and lasted about 20 secs, slowly returning to background. After that I turned the unit off and decided to investigate the saved data.
Here is my problem. I can't find in the viewer these events! I'm not sure the software is working properly. I open the correct com port 4, downloaded the data, I get a progress bar, it claims it is saving .bin and .csv (although I never see a .csv file just a 65KB file with no extension.), and apparently the data is loaded into the viewer.
I'm going to make some wild, uninformed assumptions here. Correct me if I'm wrong. The peaks and valleys of the graph don't really seem to be an accurate indication of what is happening with the unit when the data was logged? Or they mean completely something else that is lost upon me. Scrolling seems problematic. Forward works, but in order to go back I have to drag. That makes it hard to get to a specific time. I certainly understand that these issues may be only happening with this machine (Win 7 64bit), but my hope is there is an easy fix.
By using total I THINK I found the event. I have my gmc-300 set to log every minute. The viewer says at the top, "04-15-2012 02:15:59". There is 60 secs(or is it minutes if set to every min?)of data being displayed. I have a bunch of numbers, ranging from 7 to 31. Then there is a 121, then a 159, 15, 27, 19, 56, and 190. The ACPM at the top reads 26. Uh... Shouldn't that be higher???? Am I not understanding or using the software correctly?
During the second event the unit was lighting up. I assume that is normal? Like the tube flashing.
Also was that some high radiation or did the unit over react to background radiation? Are these events normal? Unit was just sitting on top of my blu ray player.
Thanks for taking the time to answer these! |
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| Reply #1
mickif
USA
6 Posts |
Posted - 04/15/2012 : 11:05:50
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Ugh! Ok, so today everything seems normal and apparently around 12:30 it starts getting some hits, over 1000cpm, but i didn't notice because I was listening to the radio. However, I'm about to pull over at a truckstop and it starts screaming, 6000 cpm and I believe it topped out at about 15000 cpm. I think it was 49 microsieverts/hour.
In my other post the unit didn't seem to be reading background radiation, was at zero most of the time. I sent it back and they returned it apparently fixed. Seems to be reading background radiation fine. Could they have fixed it to be too sensitive or is a 15000 cpm spike in the wild the norm? Broken again??? |
Edited by - mickif on 04/15/2012 11:11:06 |
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| Reply #2
ZLM
1261 Posts |
Posted - 04/15/2012 : 21:09:21
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It is not normal if the background more than 100 CPM. The 100 is the default alarm threshold.
"During the second event the unit was lighting up. " Are you sure the light came from the tube? not the LCD display? If this is the case, then it seems hardware related. The unit may need to be checked.
Just let it run a few days and see if the problem still there. If it happened again, contact support@gqelectronicsllc.com
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| Reply #3
mickif
USA
6 Posts |
Posted - 04/17/2012 : 13:33:43
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So over 100 is not normal?!
Yesterday morning it peaked over 25,000 cpm (75.37 uSv/h)outside in a parking lot and avg 9k-10k for 5 mins.
This morning it was 2,000 to 4,000 cpm for quite a long time.
What would cause it to work 23 hours out of everyday, but go crazy in the early morning?
Right now it seems to be working great. 14 cpm background and when placed on a large pink/gray boulder (it might be granite) it goes up to 45. I just know tomorrow morning it will shoot back up to about 5k before sunrise.
Could a waterproof enclosure be causing the trouble? I have it in an otterbox, but that is just polycarbonate or similar
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| Reply #4
ZLM
1261 Posts |
Posted - 04/17/2012 : 20:45:27
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| waterproof enclosure should not be a problem. If this happened every day or two, then you may need to contact support@gqelectronicsllc.com to check it. |
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Alarm event! Where is it in log?
