A novel procedure and apparatus for measuring the radon concentration in air

Abstract

An intelligent apparatus for measuring very low concentrations of radon in air is presented in this paper. It is composed of a special ionization chamber and an analogue/digital processing unit based on a microcontroller. Besides radon detection, this detector is capable of emitting an alarm signal (in case of high radon concentrations) and of transmitting the measurement data to a remote location along with the geographic position of the detector through a GPS/GPRS modem. Because of the synchronous operation (based on the GPS clock) the detector can work in a network covering a large geological fault, displaying measured data locally or over the Internet. With a simple firmware update the detector can also be used with other ionizing particles.