MightyOhm.com

First I want to say what an enjoyable kit this was to assemble! I kept thinking that every aspect of the board, parts and instructions had been very well thought out to make assembly easy. Super job, Jeff!

I'm new to Geiger counters. I read that G-M tubes have a finite life of about 1E8 events.

Since my intent is to leave the counter running continuously, I was wondering what other folks' experience was WRT tube life, when I should plan to replace the tube, etc.

Thanks!!

I don't have much lifetime data on the SBM-20, but this datasheet states that it is rated at 2e10 pulses:
http://www.gstube.com/data/3019/

That might be an optimistic figure, but I have never seen one "wear out" and I think it's unlikely that you will ever see a failure, even with the tube running 24x7.

Ooh, embarrassed, missed that on the datasheet. Thanks!

I'm designing a logger for the Geiger counter that will log data to GroveStreams. The logger will also control power to the GC. Right now I'm thinking three modes, (1) Log continuously, i.e. once/minute, (2) Log every 10 minutes, (3) Log every 60 minutes. For the last two modes, the logger board will just turn on the GC for a minute at a time to collect data.

How do you like Grovestreams? It looks like xively/cosm/pachube but with more sophisticated data analysis (a feature I have wanted in the past).

GroveStreams is excellent. Very robust feature set, good reliability and performance (which were lacking with a couple other such services I've tried). I've found one or two nit-picky little issues and they were responsive to getting them fixed. I've communicated a bit with Mike Mills, the founder. He really knows what he's about and is glad to have input. GroveStreams is not free, but the prices seem very reasonable to me even as a hobbyist. Actually up to 20 data streams and 10,000 transactions per month will not cost anything. Email notifications are free. I'd much rather pay a little and have a service that I can count on. I'll post here once I get the logger running.

That sounds really cool. I'd love to check out your stream once you get it up. Please post a link!