New Site/Data Uploader Southwest Michigan.

Hi All!

Below is info on my detector.
I have two nuclear power plants one 14 miles north (Palisades) and one 15.4 miles to the south west. (Cook)
The wind direction which you can see on my webpage is currently from the north and my normal background has gone from 9-18 cpm to 15-30 today.
The alarm normally set just above background at 20cpm is going off for the first time in many years without a test source like fiesta wear..
YouTube video of detector on uranium plate glaze is here:


Webpage: http://www.kevinspage.com
Weather Station: https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KMIBENTO1

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:42.117859,-86.336182
GQ GMC-300re 2.30
M4011

Hi Kevin
Every alarm is interesting. Looking at graphs of nearby sites on radioactiveathome.org and Netc.com, I can see a small spike on the morning of the 14th (~6:00 am) at Bloomingdale, but nothing unusual at the EPA gamma stations at Grand Rapids or Fort Wayne (they are normally very variable and small blips are lost in the noise) or the Beta site at Fort Wayne. 20 cpm doesn't seem very high compared to other detectors on this site (some are also GMC-300). I'm not saying nothing is blowing by from Palisades; there very well could have been a SCRAM or refueling cycle ( the NRC reports site is not yet updated for Saturday or Sunday). We just need more sensors! Any chance to connect yours to Radmon for real-time logging on the map?

Interesting page, by the way. I heard hammering and voices along with the birds and wind chimes from the live mic feed (and what seemed like a tree falling down just now at 4:07).

Hi Burt490!
When I bought the radiation detector in 2012 I set it to 20 cycles per minute as the alarm level.
It's never set the alarm off unless exposed to a test source. Yesterday for the first time it was going off all day and I had levels as high as 30 cycles per minute.

Interestingly enough I looked at Google Earth and found the direction to Palisades. I compared it to the wind direction and they matched.
Today the wind is from the south and my readings are back to normal. I'm waiting for Radmon.Org to get back with me with the password that I selected so I can start uploading data.
I have a server dedicated to uploading weather data and the stereo yard sounds coming from the microphone I built to mimic a human head.
It’s bungee corded to a tree on the south end of the house it's just a piece of PVC pipe about the width of a human head with a microphone in each end and some PVC cups to collect sound.
I have two instances of VLC running one streaming a stereo mp3 stream and one feeding and OGG feed, that and some simple HTML5 code allows me to play stereo yard sound audio on the web.
It's interesting because I actually get more information about what's going on in the yard from the sounds than I do from the cameras lots of times,
The cameras, even though I have quite a few of them never seem to be pointed where the action is.
The sound you heard of the tree crashing was actually that……. there was about a 3 foot diameter Oak that broke loose in the Ravine and fell across the stream.
The root structure was not sufficient enough in the wet soil to support the weight of the tree. A piece of trunk about 16 feet long and 3 feet in diameter broke loose from the rest of the tree and is resting on the ground in the ravine.
We have a couple other trees that we thought might have fallen, an Oak in the back got Wilt disease and died very quickly a couple years ago. It's been propped up against another tree and we're just waiting for it to fall. We thought it was that tree.
The tree in the ravine made a huge rat nest of limbs across the stream.
Thanks for the link to the NRC report site I'll definitely be checking that out and hopefully you'll see my data up on the map here soon.
We used to do media support for Cook and Palisades at a corporate conferencing center near the center of the two plants they would do mock emergency planning basically a dry run of what they would do if there was a major nuclear accident we even used our cameras to pretend that we were the media asking questions.
I pulled a large map with circles on it out of the trash that they used in the training.
They had a huge phone bridge setup for communications and a whole bunch of plans in place on how to evacuate people I find the whole radiation thing very fascinating especially some of the early experiments when they talked about using a screwdriver to hold two parts of the nuclear components apart that slipped and everyone in the room got a lethal dose.
I've collected some cool things off eBay for testing sources I've got a bunch of green marbles and buttons from Czechoslovakia but nothing is as hot as the Fiestaware plates. I’ve tested old glazed tile and marble countertops but haven't found too much.
I'm excited to get the detector data uploaded so I can have some long-term monitoring data.
I'm going to have to see if I can find a way to correlate the wind direction in the same graph with the radiation data.
Next time we go for a drive or go to the state park by Palisades I'm definitely taking my detector. I'll have to buy another one so I don't have to take the first one offline.
~Kevin

For wind directions, the weather modelling site linked below is nice, I think it is accurate due to the GOES satellite data input. Your weather page can be a cross-check for accuracy.
Surface winds for nearby effects,
Jet Stream for international effects.
This model can be dialed back in time to past dates, and it has been used to show correlation of higher readings in the US with jet stream directions from forest fires or from trans-Pacific locations.
There may be other wind direction sites I am not aware of.

Many spikes seem to be associated with rain and these often seem to be related to natural Radon, but it's not consistent, which makes life difficult for us citizen watchdogs. But sustained elevated levels across multiple detectors cannot be denied. Government monitoring procedures build in delays and averaging which masks this but that also delays official reaction to real emission events (plus some unexplained outages and a tendency to not jeopardize the status quo).

BTW, the directional stereo audio feed from your site is effective; I heard a truck drive by and I felt like I was actually there.
--Bert

Also this wind map, similar to above, but less cpu use. I see a lot of news sites now using this wind graphic: http://hint.fm/wind/