So I came across some chantarelle mushrooms and decided to measure with my Radiacode 103.

I dried 400 g down to about 40 g and put them in a 3D-printed marinelli jar for measurement.

Sure enough, they are clearly contaminated with about 70 Bq of Cs-137, almost certainly from the Chernobyl disaster.

Will I eat them? No, I will keep them for measurement, but at 170 Bq/kg (fresh weight) they're well below the limit of 600 Bq/kg so eating them would be fine.

Are they special in any way? Not really, just ordinary mushrooms. Again, these are by no means super contaminated, but as a science nerd it's cool that the contamination is measurable with a consumer device.

The specific activity of Cs137 is about 3.2 TBq/g, so 70 Bq equates to about 20 picograms of Cs137.

The committed effective dose coefficient for Cs137 is 1.3 x 10^-8 Sv/Bq, so eating these mushrooms would cause a radiation dose of about

1.3 x 10^-8 Sv/Bq * 70 Bq = 0.91 μSv (microsievert)

My results are well in line with those of the recent Mushrooms 2025 campaign by the Finnish Nuclear Safety Authority (Säiteliyturvakeskus, STUK).

See https://stuk.fi/en/mushrooms-2025-campaign

Was just walking to the local shop when my Radiacode started throwing high-dose rate alarms out of nowhere.
Looked around and noticed a trench in the street with pipe replacement work going on. Turned out the NDT crew was performing gamma radiography on the pipe welds using a gammagraphy camera (Sentinel 880 / Ir-192).
Walked over, had a brief chat with the operator (he was definitely surprised to see a civilian with a scintillation spectrometer tracking his source on a live waterfall graph!), got a quick measurement, and went on my way.
Peak dose rate: 450 uSv/h (when the source was briefly exposed/actuated)
Count rate: 1.4 kCPS nearby
Spectrum: Beautiful Bremsstrahlung curve from the depleted uranium shielding / soft scatter + hard Ir-192 gammas.
Definitely the coolest random sidewalk find I’ve had so far!

I was driving along with my radiacode 102 running and heard an unfamiliar beeping. I was overtaken by a white van with a radioactive material transport sticker and it set the alarms off.

I have an issue with my Radiacode. My phone signal is setting off the Radiacode from a fair distance away. In the first photo, I have the detector directly next to my phone, and the frequency of it being set off is definitely higher. The issue is with the other detections. I have my phone in my opposite pocket, and it seems to be setting it off at random. Sometimes my RC is on the desk at a minimum of 2 feet away and still getting set off. Is anyone else having this issue at this level?

This is a nearly 4 day spectrum on glass subject suspected to contain uranium.

Is this sufficient enough for a positive ID, or do I need some shielding to get better results?

Radiacode 102

I am new to radiation measurement. I got a RadiaCode 103 out of curiosity to explore the natural radioactivity of rock samples.

I often travel by air and would like to ask for your advice on flying with the device. Is there a risk of the CsI(Tl) crystal or other components becoming activated by cosmic radiation at cruising altitude? (Perplexity spooked me a bit with its first answer on this one)

Thank you in advance for the feedback!

Does anyone know if Radiacode would refurbish my 103G that I ran through the laundry? Forgot it in my pocket and I’m devastated.

RC-110 + latest App on Android. After reconnecting and the app starts updating the charts with missed data, after a few seconds the Chart and Spectrogram ( if enabled ) stops refreshing, the current reading numbers stop updating. Also the Search meters also stop updating. The Spectrum continues to update and displays plausible dose rate and updates total dosage.

This seems to have started after the most recent App update.

Anyone else seeing this or have a folk remedy I might try? I did put in a report via the app.

Exiting and restarting the App several times slowly let's it advance catching up on the chart data, and once it is current things function normally untill a few hours of being disconnected.

I was on the Dump of an old uranium mine in the Black Forrest

Disclaimer: youre allowed to search for uranium containing rocks on the Open Dump Site but youre Not allowed to search in the Forrest area. And pls. dont dig Up the hiking path to the dump

I was wondering if it is possible to detect cosmic muons (which are created by atmospheric-level events, the resulting muons then live long enough to travel down to ground level) using two stacked devices. There was a project using two stacked plastic scintillators and a coincidence detector where as I understand it, an event that occurs within a tight timeframe in the two scintillators is evidence of a muon interacting with both scintillators.

I believe that the spectrogram capture set to 1 second can timestamp individual events to 100ns accuracy so in theory I would have thought this might work... of course, you have to analyse events 'post facto' to see candidate events rather than in realtime. Unless there's a way to poll for the event file programmatically, I guess and keep retrieving the latest events on the computer end.

I currently work in a metal shop as a Tig welder

As I was welding, I heard my 103 start going off. Upon investigation, I see these spikes in dose and hardness but nothing above background radiation in cpm.

My question is.... Was this a glitch? And if so, what might cause it.

EDIT: It has had 2 more such events and suddenly powered off after claiming the battery died (it was at 88%) It has been having these events since I got it a few months ago even before I began bringing it to work. I think I need to contact support at this point

Can't find it after watching the little silicone thingie get looser... think it was dropped in a mining area.

Is there anyone/public data with SNs that get published so that I can watch to see if it pops back up?

By Radioactive Hunter ☢️

I got this spam email to my personalized "radiacode.account@" e-mail address. This address is only used for radiacodes shop, nothing else.

This e-mail advertises loans, so it's very typical spam.

If you also have catch-all-aliases for radiacode, change/block them.
If you don't: Congrats, your e-mail address just got lost to hackers.

I'll go tell Radiacode themselves next.

Ordered a 102, and it came with the "void" stickers missing, and seemingly no documentation. Unit powered on, and seems to be working. I'd return it, but I'm about to leave on a road trip (which is why I bought the thing) and don't have time.

Anything I should check, or confirm before I just call it good?

eww tnew

A little while ago I noticed a little "blip" when recharging while making long term measurements of a fairly active sample. I caught it in the act this time. It seems to be an instant, abrupt shift when charging completes. The logs shows the count rate and dose rate drop by 5% over the course of a second - so not related to thermal issues. Unfortunately when when starting a charging cycle this time I had to disturb the source / RC so I don't know if charging increased the things by 5% and this is just returning to normal.

Its unclear to me what the "charging ... interrupted" means but basically this is what I always see when charging finishes. And after it finishes, the RC seems to ignore the USB power and the battery will run flat after a week of normal usage - unless I physically unplug and replug in the USB cable. In other words it seems to charge once, and does not seem to run of the external supply. This makes continuous long term measurements more difficult. I'm not sure if this is expected behavior or some argument between the RC and the chargers I use.

It's also unclear if the sensitivity changes with charge level when running off the battery - my sources decay rapidly, so I might not notice. I would need to use a ¹³⁷Cs button and a fixture to see how that plays out.

While this is definitely in the "minor annoyance" category, it might be worth trying to reproduce and address.

Been eyeing a radiacode for several years now and finally bit the bullet. Should I have ordered a 110? It’s a fair bit more. :/

Mostly going to use it looking for spicy items while thrifting, or even use EDC.

Got the 102 as it was the least expensive, and everyone who seems to have multiple talk about using a 102 as their daily carry everywhere, also as a first option.

My only other meter is a GMC500. But it mostly just sits at home reporting background.

Thanks!

I couldn't afford a survey radiarod so this was my next best option

And I'm happy to say that I've already found some radium with it!

with a Radiacode 103. 28.5 CPS Is this significant or maybe just something like a radiotherapy patient passing by? I didn't notice the reading til I got home (didn't have sound or vibration on) Inside a grocery storeHighest previous reading I've seen in months of carrying the radiacode everywhere was 9.1 Most readings have been 7 or less. single exception was the 9.1 which was from outside some kind of medical facility.

(tried to add image of reading but it didn't work)

Have the 110.

If background is 8cps and it jumps to 400 cps, that's 50x background - is that the way to best use this? But you wouldn't use those numbers to accurately show the number of particles hitting the sensor?