Strange anomaly this morning with station radspod_one

This is my main and oldest running counter (GC10 v1 with SBM-20). It is the only counter I have outside at the moment. It picked up two spikes early this morning, exactly 1 hour apart. The first was at 02:43:55 (UTC) and read 313 CPM, then the second was at 03:43:52 (UTC) and read 147 CPM. Really no idea why. Could be interference, or could be actually reading something. I have attached the daily log below. None of the (four) counters I have running in my office picked this up, that I am aware of. I was alerted to this by email alert, but only for the second spike. Not the first. Whilst both spikes are showing on the radmon graph, only the second high CPM is indicated in the radmon daily CSV. Quite peculiar.

17/10/2023 02:43:55  313
17/10/2023 03:43:52  147.875  

 

 

 

It seems that another smaller spike happened less than an hour ago. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to get the daily log for this from Radlog.exe. Here is the current graph as of now:

 

Was there an insect on the geiger PCB? Have you had a visit from a spider?

There shouldn't be. It's pretty well sealed up with a couple of large bags of desiccant behind the board. The last time I looked (2-3 months ago) it still looked squeaky clean inside. The graph/logs from yesterday are below. It seems there were 3 spikes and a very strange 0 CPM event. The 0 CPM is highly unusual. Possible counter failure imminent? This is a standard NetIO GC10 v1 (connected to a PC running radlog.exe) and has been running since April 2016. One of the very strange things is the timing of the spikes. All at 43 minutes past the hour. I have attached the CPM log for that day also. It should be a continuation from the log I posted yesterday.

17/10/2023 02:43:55  313
17/10/2023 03:43:52  147.875 
17/10/2023 05:44:04  0
17/10/2023 07:43:57  72.333

Strange how they all seem to be roughly half the CPM as the previous?

 

 

 

More strangeness. Background elevated slightly around 00:00 UTC. Looks as though it started to rise very slowly around 22:00 UTC and then took off a bit at midnight UTC. It's not a lot at all, only a few CPM. I've seen this kind of thing from time to time. This is probably the 4th or 5th time I have see similar since the station went live. There may be more that I have missed. I could really do with getting another counter out there beside this one.

Yes, it could possibly be the power supply. I can't even remember what it is. I think it is a good quality Chinese SMP wall wart type. But it has been running for 7.5 years. 

Here are some graphs and the log is attached at the bottom.

 

 


About an hour later I got these graphs. They are pretty much the same, but does have the trend graph.