What Geiger Counter is best for this?

[DEvens]

TL;DR

I want to go to antique shops looking for Uranium glass. What Geiger Counter is minimal?

There are several "antique" shops near my home. Mostly it's junk people have pulled from their attics and put up for sale. I like to cruise through looking for interesting things. One display had some interesting orange plates. I suspected they were just recent purchases from Wally World (to avoid the brand name) but they just possibly might have been Uranium glazed. Maybe just possibly not necessarily. There were also several glass items of an interesting green color.

What kind of Geiger counter would I need to be able to tell? Prefer something I can keep in my pocket. Would a small blacklight be useful? Or would there be some other simple method to prefer to those? I can handle the items if required since they are just sitting on a shelf.

 

[Alex A]

When I wanted a Geiger Counter I found that anything even slightly professional, anything calibrated, anything trustworthy and anything made in the UK or USA to be eye wateringly expensive. The classic LND712 mica window tube by itself is typically well over 100 USD when you can find it for sale, but most people don't need alpha sensitivity anyway.

Consider a radiacode. I do not own one, but I see people that have these like them a lot. They have a small scintillation crystal and when linked to a phone will produce a gamma spectrum with quite respectable resolution, so you can tell what is making the radiation. This is a pocket sized device and in the $200-$300 USD range works out cheaper than something like a gamma scout, which just has a GM tube.

If you are after something cheaper then I would check Ebay for something Eastern European. Be aware a lot of junk on Ebay uses the bare PIN diode trick and is labeled 'Geiger'.

I own and like the Dosimeter Pripyat RKS-20.03 which once upon a time saw me in a university library with a Russian to English dictionary trying to figure out the 1 sheet manual. They are a bit rare, the technology is 1980's and I don't know I'd recommend them unless they are cheap.

 

[Rive]

As far as I know uranium glass has really minimal radiation => if the background is high or variable then hard to distinguish, even with good equipment.
Maybe the best way to recognize it is by its signature green glow for UV illumination.
So what you need first is likely not a GM counter, but an UV banknote checker.

 

[Alex A]

Here has some numbers. Background is usually about 0.3 µSv/hr, so the green glass bowl is over ten times background and the Fiestaware plate is around three hundred times above background. Health wise, this is not significant. It is my understanding that Fiestaware does not glow under long wave UV. So a banknote checker would not help. Google search results suggest Fiestaware does glow under shortwave UV, but I don't know what colour. The results are facebook I can't access without an account and I don't do facebook. I don't know about Vaseline glass, because it doesn't look green I've always just assumed it doesn't glow green under UV. Early (pre war) Fiestaware has the reputation of being the hottest, with the original glaze containing some of the radium in the ore, but it all has a reputation of being hotter than the green glass.

 

[davenn]

As far as I know uranium glass has really minimal radiation => if the background is high or variable then hard to distinguish, even with good equipment.

Incorrect .....
Old products with Uranium and Radium cause even a basic counter ticking very well.
Many guys also chase after old watches, aeroplane dials etc as they are an even better source

Dave