New station Riga, Latvia

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8 years 3 months ago #2466 by Simomax
Replied by Simomax on topic New station Riga, Latvia
Technomancer, that is indeed a nice homebrew setup you have there!

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8 years 3 months ago #2477 by mw0uzo
Replied by mw0uzo on topic New station Riga, Latvia
That is a really nice DIY geiger counter unit! :cheer:
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8 years 3 months ago - 8 years 3 months ago #2489 by Technomancer
First thing - thank You all for approval of my construction! :)
OK, there's rough bill of materials for my station. Some parts I had as leftovers from other projects, some I found in my garage so for me it did not cost that much.
STS-6 (SBM-19) tubes, 2pcs - 40Eur
Hermetic case for tubes - 7Eur
Rugged hermetic case for controller and Raspberry Pi - 20Eur
Boost convertor parts - 15Eur
Raspberry Pi model B embedded computer - 40Eur
SHT-25 temperature and humidity sensor with homemade temperature shield - 10Eur

So overall price of materials is about 130Eur.

Schematics.
I used basic boost convertor solution. My station is supplied with 23 - 29V using Power Over Ethernet (PoE) from antenna control module that's located on the same roof. Converter is based on UC3842. In my schematics can be made few improvements. First, feedback could be simplified. It works great with current solution and voltage is really steady, but I think that it would work good with simpler solutions too. Second thing is that output impedance of sensor box is pretty large, it's about 5MOhm, so it might be sensitive to EMI interference. First three weeks of my station online there were no problems, but few days ago there were enormous peak that's most likely interference from lightning or some other things. I would recommend to use pulse amplifier transistor close to GM tubes and transmit to controller already low impedance pulses over shielded cable. If there will be more interference like this one, I think that I'll try to improve my solution.
My schematics are redrawn from sketch that I used when I made it, so it's as close as possible that I can give You now. Feel free to ask additional questions if interested.
EDIT: Seems that forum resized schematics and it's a bit unreadable, so You can get unresized image HERE .

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Last edit: 8 years 3 months ago by Technomancer.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Simomax

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8 years 2 months ago - 8 years 2 months ago #2492 by Simomax
Replied by Simomax on topic New station Riga, Latvia
Technomancer, That's awesome. Many thanks for sharing! :) This is definitely something I will have a play with in the not too distant future. I'm currently building a handheld portable counter using a LND712 at the moment. It's on the breadboard, working, but needs the softwqare developing further as it just reads out to a basic LCD so far. Once that is dont I think your project will be next on the list to look at.

I'm using a simple 555 timer circuit to generate the PWM for the boost converter. It's interesting that you use the UC3842 and an optoisolater also. I haven't seen that approach in GM tube power supplies so will be very interesting to see the difference between yours and the 555 PWM circuit I am using is. Current (for more tubes), efficiency, stability? Really, very interesting. Would it be possible for you to upload/post a higher resolution photo of the power supply/detection board? One thing that jumps out at me is why use copper tube over the GM tube to filter beta? I thought that aluminium was the metal to use for blocking beta?

Thanks again Technomancer,

Simon
Last edit: 8 years 2 months ago by Simomax.

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