Hello John,
Your feedback is appreciated in the sense that anyone is free and welcome to express their thoughts and concerns. To serve those interested and in an attempt to save some of my time, I’ve presented most of the construction and technical details on the blog page, which might cover some of your concerns: https://www.uradmonitor.com/blog
You will probably agree that the network’s main contribution comes from its ability to pinpoint trend changes and this goes above isolated absolute measurements which otherwise might require scientific accuracy. The procedure is automated using little power and ruling out most of possible human errors.
The energy compensation is achieved by the thick metallic enclosure attenuating most of any incident low energy radiation where the non-liniarity manifests its peak. But if we are to be truly rigorous about this scenario we will quickly conclude that natural sources of radiation are placed well above the non-linearity interval. Allow me to quote from a different reply (got this question several times):
“The context for what we do here is extremely important: remember that uRADMonitor measures background radiation. This background is composed of cosmic radiation, of very high energy, and three main terrestrial components of background gammas that are K-40 1462 keV, Bi-214 1760 keV from the U decay series, and Tl-206 from the Th decay series. Smaller contributions to total background come from Pb-212 239 keV, Bi-209 609 keV, Tl-208 908 keV and Bi-214 1120 keV. The most serious non-linearity of energy response in uncompensated GM tubes occurs below 150 keV – and most of that below 100 keV – so none of the background emissions listed above will be seriously affected, nor will the majority of cosmic rays.”
But regardless of such details, in the event of a nuclear contamination there will be a consistent raising trend clearly visible on multiple nodes from affected locations and that is excellent to inform us all that something is happening. I stated several times that I don’t claim any rights of absolute precision on the readings, so all those interested are free to seek out more information or ask for a second opinion.
Finally I’m not sure I understood what was your idea on the standard deviation and specifically what “quantum effects ” are you referring to? I’d point out that a geiger detector (like most of other man made tools) remains a very simple device, and it doesn’t make much sense to cover it with a veil of impenetrable complexity just to take it out of our reach.
