If you want to work with radioactive material, a cheap Geiger counter isn’t really what you want. According to [Project 326], you need a gamma ray spectrometer. The video below reviews the Radiacode 110. The channel has reviewed other Radiacode products, and they haven’t always been pleased with them, apparently. Is the 110 better?
The little spectrometer uses a scintillation crystal and performs a spectrogram on the result. It has a large library of materials so, at least for radioactive materials, you can point it at something and tell what kind of material you are dealing with and how radioactive it is.
While the smartphone app seems well done, the Windows application left something to be desired. Even still, it was able to identify several isotopes. The device can even pick up some alpha emitters that don’t directly register. However, it can identify some materials by different decomposition products. Unlike some earlier models, this device is supposed to be highly sensitive and high-resolution.
To confirm this, [Project 326] built a lead shielding structure and read a reference sample. Crunching some numbers confirmed that the claimed performance was accurate. It could even read very low-energy sources, though there were some limitations. The ergonomics of the device could be better, apparently, but it does deliver on performance.
Do you need a gamma ray spectrometer? We don’t know, but we suspect if you do, you don’t need us to tell you.
Excellent device, great value for the money, amazing features.
+1 Bought a RadioCode 103 back in May 2025. The app and the website, RadiaVerse are also excellent, IMHO.
Excellent device,I bought mine (version 101) in 2021.
In these years they drastically improve software.
I prefer Windows version for spectrum analyses….
I believe they started in Russia and moved to Cyprus:
https://www.radiacode.com/
Super cool. I want a gamma ray spectrometer. I don’t want to pay more than 200 US for it though. Mostly because I have no real need for one beyond “wouldn’t that be cool”. I guess I’ll have to diy it one day.
with an xray source and expanded reference table, it should be possible to convert this to a full XRF gun that usually go for 10s of thousands. see https://physicsopenlab.org/2016/02/24/diy-xrf-spectrometry/ fir example
That would be cool! Shame dealing with x-ray emitters is so rough. I heard some xrfs use nuclear emitters now days. Like americurium from a smoke detector. Maybe that would be a safer way forward for most people? Not sure what the sensitivity is for the scintillator here is, but if I were going to try for it, that’s what I’d do.
Iirc from an old applied science video, one source of xrays happens to be generated by sticking and unsticking tape together. Basically letting the static charge build up on one side as you peel the tape down. Kind of like a can de Graff generator if I’m not mistaken. But then at the end, somehow tape plus static equals xrays. He was explaining this in the video about his own commercial xrf gun.
Can it detect a banana or my potassium supplement pill?
Given enough time, yes it will pick up a potassium peak
K-40 has a peak at 1460 keV at 10.3% decay probability. A average banana has contains approximately 7.5 x 10^19 potassium-40 atoms with a half-life of about 1.248 billion years. So approximately136 gamma rays per be second. They would radiate in all directions so only a fraction of that would pass through the volume of the Caesium Iodide (doped with Thallium) crystal in the scintillator. And only a fraction of them will be generate light. So factoring everything that I can think of you are probably talking about 0.2 1.46 MeV gamma rays being detected per second, or ~12 a minute or ~720 an hour or ~17280 a day or ~120960 a week.
If I eat enough bananas, will the radiation give me superpowers?
Your body is amazing and keeps a near constant amount of potassium in your body ~140g and of that about 0.0165 grams is potassium-40. It is not clustered in one area of the body but distributed throughout the entire body. Sleeping next to someone will expose your to ~50% of the gamma rays dose received by eating a single banana. So once you factor that in a mosh pit is probably your best bet for gaining superpowers. And as far as I know there have been no punks or metalheads who have gained superpowers (yet).
I have both the 110 and 103G. Excellent devices except it has encouraged me to go down a road I never thought I would go. I now have several different radioactive sources including radioactive minerals, manmade sources, and calibration sources. It is fun to build a library of spectra from the various specimens I have collected. I have captured both the Thorium-232 and Uranium-238 decay chains from various natural and man-made sources. Captured Cs-137, Co-60, K-40, Am-241, and Lu-176 spectra as well. Radiacode is a great company and I am very pleased with their products.
I have also made my 103G into a “remote detector” configuration using 10-pin FFC cables and some extenders. This makes it easier to use in a smaller lead castle/cave (using a lead pig).
Did you find any documentation on extending the photodiode/scintillator assembly, or just did trial&error? I would think extending the FFC would couple noise into the super sensitive preamplifier.
Found an excellent world map for my Radiacode 110 – radiaverse.com and pelora.org (opensource).
I ordered one, found a 10% discount code that worked after one search. The discount code was from YouTube video about, well not about but it did use a Radiacode 103 in the video using an orange Uranium glazed plate to X-ray things.
FYI the code that worked for me should not have: THOUGHTEMPORIUM
Just watched the abode video DOH “Project 326”