With all of the back and forth over North Korea and nukes, I thought it might be a good idea to address radiation as my first steemit article for the Prepping 101 series. Many of you may know GunsAmerica as a place to buy and sell guns, but you may not have seen our editorial side. Our Monday GunsAmerica Digest and Friday GunsAmerica This Week are the largest firearm industry publication in the world. This Prepping 101 column has been a labor of love for me, because I hope some of us make it. If you take the time to pay attention, you'll find that my prepping material is better than everything else online and in print combined.
I'll save the fake EMP threat for another topic, because today I'd like to explain something far more important, being able to measure high level radiation. If you have a standard Geiger counter, a PIN diode device for your phone, or even a CDV-700 machine, none of those will help you in a serious nuclear emergency, including a plan meltdown or a nuclear bomb, both of which could potentially involved in the collapse in a big way.
Geiger-Mueller tubes generally crap out around the millirad range, or milli-Roentgen. The tube saturates, and the meter generally locks up, or shuts itself off. So if you have a meter that is showing you background radiation right now in the .1 uSv range (micro-Sieverts), that isn't going to work in a nuclear emergency at all. (One Sievert is 100 Roentgen/Rads)
There are two fairly inexpensive ways to buy a meter that can handle high level radiation. One is to find a NukAlert keychain for sale ($150), or if you have the cash, buy a NukeAlert ER. The former is simply a beeper system that will beep when it senses high level radiation. The more radiation, the more frequent the beeps.
The ER model is $750, and it will measure from very low to very high radiation, up to 1000 Rads/hr.
The cheaper solution is to buy a surplus "Survey Meter" from Ebay, and have it calibrated. Search on CDV-715 and CDV-717. They go from $20-$75, and the only difference is that the 717 has a remote sensor chamber with a 15' cord. Both of these meters take one D battery.
Calibration is up to you. I have purchased about 50 of these meters over the last 20 years, and I've had about a dozen calibrated. Some are almost perfect. Some have been outright broken, including four CDV-717s I recently got from a guy on Ebay who claims to have 400 of them.
The only place to calibrate them is in Texas by Shane Connor at KI4U.com. He has the only civilian calibration machine in the US, and he is the one who has developed the NukAlert products as well, tested and calibrated in the same machines.
The full article with product links is here, but I have enough above to get you going, plus the video. Remember, ten years too early is better than one minute too late.