East German Quartz Fiber Dosimeter

[zatoh]

Anyone have more information in this:

I found some general information in Wikipedia which I found useful. I am not sure where you charge the tube though. I think I stick the capped end onto the the blue button and depress it with that end.

Pressing on the blue button and/or turning the rheostat does not make the inspection bulb (I think) illuminate so I'm not sure the box works or not. The filament of the bulb looks to be intact but I have not done a continuity teat on it yet. The unit takes 2 D cells.

When I look through the tube I can see gradations but I am not sure what scale they are.

This was an impulse purchase from a while back that was just one of those cool gadgets from the Cold War to catch my eye. I never thought that I'd actually might have a reason to use it though.

[AJAX22]

I don't think you charge the tube.... I think you discharge the tube...

it picks up a charge based on the amount of high energy particles you encounter.

[rp55]

Those look a lot like the dosimeters we used to use on nuke subs. Non-nukes wore yellow film badges on their belt. Nukes wore black thermo-luminescent dosimeters on their belt, which is how you could tell a nuke from a nose-coner on sight. As I recall it had a weird salt tablet in the base of it in case you got a huge deadly dose then they could tell after the fact how much radiation you had received.

Pocket dosimeters like those ones we would clip on our collars for working in the reactor compartment when shutdown or when wearing anti-c's (yellow canary anti-contamination suit) there was a pocket for them on the outside. You could just pick it up and see how much you had received. I was on a sub being refueled once and had to climb down to the bottom of the reactor compartment and turn on the CRC (core removal cooling pump) and climb back out, let it run awhile and climb down and turn it off. I could watch the fiber moving across it, which you hardly ever saw otherwise. We all got burned out (received max allowable exposure for the time period) but it was still a very low amount. Those things have to be calibrated frequently as I recall and they self-discharge pretty fast. You charge them and zero them using a special battery pack. The scale was in mREM. I think 0-100 or so. They are not something you would want to depend on wearing all day to measure your exposure. Maybe there's an old USN ELT here who could expound further on those things.

[AJAX22]

Ok looks like I was wrong.... it DOES get charged... then discharges in the presence of ionizing radiation...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_fiber_dosimeter

[ElvenSoul]

Sell it to Japan...their's is broken..heard on news

[zatoh]

So I checked this thing out some more and figured out how to charge it. There's a dust cover on the side of the unit that pops off. You remove the dust cap from the dosimeter tube and insert it into the hole, lining the slot on the tip of the dosimeter tube with the stud on the inside of the hole. Once you do this the light turns on and you use the rheostat thing to zero out the dosimeter.



The unit of measure is cGy or "centigray". 1 centigray = 1 rad.

I charged them up to see if they hold a charge. If they don't then I'm either being irradiated or these things don't hold a charge.

If they do hold a charge I'll take them out Friday to see how much of a dose I get.

[zatoh]

Sell it to Japan...their's is broken..heard on news

Even if I could I don't think I could get it there. I was checking out Nukalert detectors and they stopped shipping because they are backlogged. Additionally all their shipments to Japan have been returned since carriers refuse to take them there

Those people are freaking out and I don't blame them.