GQGMC-500 Geiger Counter Nuclear Radiation Detector Beta Gamma X-Ray Dosimeter

I purchased two of these radiation detectors for a project and they worked perfectly. Good quality and value for your money.

Found this product to be more effective than I had even imagine before I purchased it. It’s rare these days to get a product that does more than you expected it to do. The unit is logically pretty well laid out, getting through the menus tends to make sense. The directions that are supplied with this our microscopically, small, and difficult to understand I seriously considered knocking a star off for the directions, however, the menus in the device actually made enough sense that you could mostly ignore the directions, and with a good magnifying glass and a magnifying copier it was workable. I was really impressed that it was easy to set up uploading your data to a map. I just meant you could monitor it when your remote and it also archive the data so you could see trends. The unit itself measures in counts per minute, sieverts per hour and roentgen per hour. You can then upload this to a free server which place is it on Map, without the need of a separate computer, the unit directly connects to the Internet through your Wi-Fi.This is not a unit to go out and rapidly measure the radiation of an object, this is more to sit in the background and record the averages and try to show you trends. Unlike a traditional geiger counter with a analog needle that goes flying up when it gets close to a radioactive source, this is slower to react because of the accounting method of the software, I don’t think that it’s actually sensitivity, but the way the display smoothies out the information. It seems ideal for background monitoring, but less ideal for holding a rock up to it and determining instantly how reactive it is. It will get there it’s just gonna take it a few minutes but when you’re doing background monitoring, averaging out those peaks and valleys really helps you get a good idea of exactly what the trends are and if it takes 40 seconds for that average to happen it’s an advantage not a disadvantage.It have an interesting feature that is there to monitor food which I have not used, but it appears to try to look at the food as an average background to see if it’s been irradiated or something.You can set up the unit to run with the ticks every time it does a count so it sounds like a geiger counter, or you can turn all of that to silent, and only does it spring to life when it goes over the high threshold, and it beeps, in addition to letting you hear the ruckus of the ticks.This makes it ideal for those of us who live down wind of power plants, and navy bases. If it’s silent in the corner, it’s no problem.

Unit charges from USB cable. Works well. Battery is still at 94% after being idle for several months. USB cable included, but you will need a charger block for Type A cable. Battery is removable.

I bought this for my 4 year old son, who LOVES it... (results will probably vary on that front, but he loved reporting how many "beeps" were in various locations). I also used it to ensure that I didnt have any "hot" items in my house, parents house, or relatives house. You never know, and it's nice to know that the houses are below the 'background' level for the area. It ships with a card sized map of typical background levels, which is a nice reference.Battery life is rather good, more than a couple of days, and it is rechargeable.

The geiger counter works quite well. Response is a bit slower than other counters I have used but that won't be a problem. The software download wasn't easy and it isn't very useful so I won't be using that. I didn't buy the meter for the software so that isn't all that disappointing.

I wish it was way more weatherproof, like at all. Seems pretty expensive for capability vs radiascan 701 or similar spectrometer, probably $50 of materials in its actual construction. The rest is to R&D and shipping and profit I guess. Not at all sealed, no mark where the actual sensing tube is, not great with weak betas, has an overall fragile feel so I've been real careful to not drop it but I expect it'll die if I do, saturates in strong but not ridiculously strong fields (my PDR-27 keeps right on going after this thing has bricked). Better than nothing if the hard rain falls, but could be a looooot better for the price.

Got this just in case of the “end of the world party”. Does great with detecting background radiation, but I hope I don’t need to see how well it works at higher levels. Simple to use, and rechargeable battery seems to last forever.

Works exactly how advertised and gets counts right with my items. Great bang for the buck, especially for beginners interested in radiation.