[sdiy] Alpha Particle detectors

[Happy Harry]

The photocells from smoke detectors are of little use...
they are designed to respond to almost pitch black conditions...
they will saturate with very little light, and may take
several hours to recover...

found out the hard way trying to repair one... once....

H^)  harry


>From: CHoaglin at aol.com
>To: grichter at asapnet.net, owner-synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl, ka4hjh at gte.net
>CC: john.l.marshall at gte.net, synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
>Subject: Re: [sdiy] Alpha Particle detectors
>Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 18:15:04 EDT
>
>In a message dated 07/24/2001 9:05:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
>grichter at asapnet.net writes:
>
>
> > Which is probably a photodiode internally doped with an alpha emitter.
> > Smoke detectors contain Americium 241 and are easy to get:
> >
>
>Just make sure it's not one of the photo-electric types, those won't do you 
>a
>bit of good..although I suppose one could use a photoelectric sensor and
>smoke for some sort of control purpose.
>
>-Chris


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