Currently 9:13 am CST and I see on the weather radar that Wisconsin has a band of weather crossing through its Southern half. It looks like it will soon reach Northern Illinois, which is where I am located. A quick look at NETC for the EPA stations around me, I see there has been no government data available from those sites recently and the last data they received were RADCON 1 level. Until new data is available, these stations will remain on RADCON 1 level. It is because of this that everyone needs to make sure they check the "Last updated" time stamp off NETC for each station. To a newbie, a quick look at the NETC map makes things in my area look good, but in fact the radiation is currently elevated. I know this to be the fact because my outside station shows a 10 minute average of 28 CPM when 23 CPM is my normal average as seen below:

Station ID 1:EB5A139C Beloit, WI, US
CPM: current 22 Low 7 High 46
Average 23, Average over last 10 minutes: 28

Please do not misunderstand me, I am not saying this current elevated level is concern enough to evacuate or anything. I will avoid being outside right now though. I just want to point out tips to help others better make sense of the information available to them. As long as I do not see any rain or snow, my morning radiation reading should decrease. My weather forecast shows a chance of snow today and the band I see on radar from Wisconsin might just cause the snow to happen.

We need more private radiation stations setup, please!

I thought todays screen shot would be worth sharing, not to alarm people but to prove again that this network does work GREAT! Anyone who has studied radiation knows that it is very likely to receive radiation with rain, some of that natural radon washout and of course some of it might be Fukushima so please STAY OUT OF THE RAIN!

I just changed my HEPA filter on the outside unit. I did not shut off the geiger counter during the change so I expect to see a drop reflected on the graph. I will take a screen shot and post it here to point out the drop in the CPM, but this quick drop will not skew my readings/averages so it is no big deal.

Edit: Sorry, never got around to doing a screen shot of the drop. No big deal anyway.

South Beloit Illinois - RADCON 4, no rain but my outside radiation monitoring station (GMC-200 on an air purifier for better detections) shows a clear rise. It is NOT normal for me to see a climb at this time in the afternoon unless it is due to a storm. I do see a storm in Southern Illinois. Looking currently at my inside pancake unit, I see that the rise seen outside is mostly beta. Go figure, my nearest EPA beta monitoring station has not updated its data since 5:56am CST. I will try to update more later.

do you have a means of testing collected rain water

I have an InspectorEXP and a Postmaster 1703MO-1B which I have used many times to test rain samples.

These readings today were with NO rain present.

Here is a screen shot pointing out the rise I spoke of in my previous post here.

Feel free to share the picture below using this link:
http://s23.postimg.org/bhm26ldej/NETC_South_Beloit_Illinois_11_24_2013_1241pm_CST.jpg

Yesterday my outside monitoring station had its first NETC network ALERT status without a storm since I started the station in April of 2013.

Please feel free to share this graphic with others:
http://s23.postimg.org/sdhlk47m3/NETC_South_Beloit_Illinois_11_30_2013_1123am_CST.jpg

9:50 a.m. CST started running geiger counter on internal battery only, testing battery. Note that the original power supply is still connected to the geiger counter unit, I just removed the AC plug from the wall so nothing moved the geiger counter at all. Due to the power that is leaked back to the green LED on the power supply, the GMC-200 internal battery will likely not run on battery as long as it would if I had unplugged the power cord at the geiger counter.

If you are a NETC "Chart Member" please compare the patterns you see on this Seattle WA site and my outside HEPA air purifier radiation monitoring station. Make both graphs "two week 1 hour average" when you compare the patterns and tell me if you see the same patterns as I do.

http://netc.com/chart/view.php?n=5%3A908 --Chart Members Only-- Seattle, WA
http://netc.com/chart/view.php?n=1%3AEB5A139C --Chart Members Only-- South Beloit, IL
Here are the two graphs mentioned above:



Please feel free to share this with everyone:
http://s21.postimg.org/dldxuddyf/NETC_Compare_Seattle_WA_to_South_Beloit_Illinois.jpg