The Bicron Analyst ist unquestionably my favorite survey meter. I own this unit for about a half year now and I am very impressed. The deeper you go into the details of its build, the more fascinated you will be.
This post is about the Bicron Analyst, not the Bicron Micro Analyst which is very similar but has an integrated scintillation detector meaning the case is much taller and the device is heavier in total.
The Bicron Analyst is more than just a simple measuring instrument for radioactivity, which also supports scintillation detectors in addition to geiger-müller tubes.
This means that you can not only measure if something is radiating, but you can also find out how high the energies of the gamma quanta are. Although it is not possible to determine the exact energies as with gamma spectroscopy, one can find out very quickly whether the energies of the gamma quanta lie in or above a set window and can thus roughly say whether the radiation is of natural or artificial origin.
The way it works is that the attached scintillation detector emits an electrical pulse per detected gamma quantum, the energy of which is proportional to the energy of the gamma quantum. This energy is filtered in the device and you can choose at a selector lever if you want to count all pulses, only the pulses in the energy window or only the pulses above the energy window. And if you know where the energy window is, you can tell approximately which isotope is emitting there.
