While I got an Arduino setup and intend to read the 5v pulses from my Inspector Alert to save the data, I have been monitoring the air for over a year now. This morning and last night were a bit startling, normally it hovers around 70-90cpm while on the air intake and around 20-30cpm while off by itself in the same area.

Last night it hit 300 and it still seems to be climbing, this was just taken this morning.

http://imgur.com/N8azQFc

Here is the counter moved just off to the side for a few minutes. When I put it back, it jumped back up to the high 300s. Nabbed an energetic bit of dust, it seems. Will see how long it takes to decay.

http://imgur.com/8WqlSXr

As a very rough way of trying to determine what type of radiation it was (alpha, beta, gamma), I tried putting a piece of paper between the detector and the filter. There was little change. A CD did the trick though due to it's aluminum coating. Readings went back to normal when I put a CD between the filter and the counter, then back up when I removed it. Once I find a way to line my lungs with CDs I should be good to go.

Here's why I was doing that:
http://gakuran.com/eng/wp-content/uploa ... iation.png

It would appear that the radionuclide(s) I am detecting is/are emitting primarily beta radiation.

Still seeing 2-4x the norm of around 90 cpm, might have to change my filter.

Thanks for the update.

As of about 6 hours ago I'm reading back down to the double digits. Curious if it could be related to the solar flare.

And back to 60cpm today.

I am a couple hundred miles S of you and watched a 30% increase in cpm's for a period of time, without explanation.
Then I considered it might be caused by that solar flare thingy...
Heck! I dunno!

Basking in the Socal sunlight!
rc

I thought about this as well, but how could an air filter be capturing particles of a solar flare, and why is the reading normal away from the filter? We got a whiff of something energetic, gotta wonder how much of it made its way into my lungs. There was a spike near San Diego reported, around the time the USS Reagan pulled into port. If you recall, this was the aircraft carrier that was heavily irradiated by fallout right after the reactors at Fuku started melting down/blowing up, and initially they were refused access to port almost anywhere.

Until I can get my Inspector Alert online, will just post when I see unusually high readings just to get a date and timestamp. There are images of my setup at the top so the context of the readings should be pretty plain. Just crossed 300cpm this morning, after several days of 60-90cpm.