Grand Forks Background Radiation

A web-based experiment

This page was last modified on November 2, 2003.

This page has links to data files being generated in real-time by an Aware Electronics RM-60 Geiger counter. The counter is located in a 4th floor office in Odegard Hall in the Aerospace complex at the University of North Dakota.

Location of sensor:

Latitude: 47 degrees, 55 minutes, 19.3 seconds North

Longitude: 97 degrees, 5 minutes, 7.8 seconds West

Altitude: ~250 meters above Sea Level

Most recent 72 hours of raw data

Most recent 72 hours of hourly averages

Plots generated via Ploticus.

Minute Data lists the number of counts detected per minute. This is a text file containing a Universal Time date/time stamp, followed by the counts for that minute. With this particular counter, you can convert counts per minute to microroentgens/hour by dividing by 1.05.

Hourly Averages lists the averages for each hour in the minute-by-minute file.

Hourly Totals lists the total counts per hour summed over the entire database (note: this is NOT for a single 24 hour period).

These files are updated once per hour.

Why: The purpose of this project is to provide control data to compare against Geiger data captured by our high altitude balloons, and because it looked like an interesting project to do. I make no promises about the accuracy and/or availability of this data, it provided as-is.

Status: September 8, 2003
The counter seems to be working fine with its microcontroller inteface. The entire system was moved from a counter near a window to a desktop in the middle of the same room, due to the counter space being needed for another project. If this will affect the counts remains to be seen.

Status: October 28, 2002
Back online! The RM-60 counter was sent back to Aware and tested, where it worked perfectly (of course). The problem may have been environmental (the counter didn't like the outdoor mount), or more likely, the computer I had it hooked to wasn't working quite right. The cable I built to connect the unit may have been too long as well. In any case, I decided to ditch the old computer and hook the counter to a unix box. Trying to replicate the software tricks Aware does to run the counter off a comm port proved rather problematic, so I decided to connect the counter to a microcontroller ( Parallax Basic Stamp II). The controller does the actual pulse counting, and sends the counts per second out on a standard RS-232 serial stream. This I hooked to a comm port on a unix box, hacked my data ingest software a bit, and everything's back up and running.

Note: I have moved the counter from the outdoor water-proof mount to indoors, on a desk by a window. This was necessary due to the new computer hookup layout (counter -> microcontroller -> unix computer), and I thought it would be better for the counter than exposing it to the bitter cold of a North Dakota winter. It also means I don't have to worry about a lightning strike on the outdoor mount frying my computer and local area network.

I have started new data files with the new setup. The old data files are still online here: old minute data, old hourly data. These data files were collected with the RM-60 mounted in a housing made from PVC pipe, which was located on the roof of the building. I've calculated an hourly totals file from the old outdoor data.