alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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ipdashc • today at 4:17 AM
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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...