Houston we got a problem
I had the geiger counter running 24/7 for a hundred days, logging time and ticks to a file.
It does not say much when you look at the file output, but I did see a few peaks that made me curious every night around 4.25 hours, expected some interference, but nothing happens here at that time.
So time to have a look at the data.
Made an array with 24 * 60 positions (it takes one measurement every minute), and read in the data, just added ticks.
So it is just all ticks at a given minute of a day _summed_.
Ran it in gnu-plot. Mouth fell open... HUH????
Left, zero is midnight. it stays about flat when dark, then it starts a decent at 600 minutes = 10 o'clock in the morning, At 1100 = 18:00 hours it start rizing linear again..
There is indeed a peak around 300 (5 in the morning) that triggered my curiosity.
It is an old GM mil counter tube with the mica window open. Not very sensitive at all, stabilized 480 V voltage.
From the point of view of daylight affecting the GM tube, what would be a logical thing perhaps, you would expect a dip or peak at midday, at noon, at 12 * 60 = 720, there is something there, but that is not really a major thing,
Distinct minimum at 1099 = 19:00 hours....
144524 datapoints = minutes 144524 / 60 = 2408.73 hours 100 days.Just grabbed an old log (never really analyse those...) then here is end 2013 to feb 2014: # cat ggm_log1.old_tube.txt | ./test66 > q1
112079 cmp lines read, 77 days gnuplot> plot "q1" with linessigh. theories about room temperature. theories about room light.
Seems the ramp has changed a few hours. clock is synced to PC and set every morning from NIST.
The non-scientific way is to stop logging and forget about it. An other way is to attribute it to
Sure beats me.
Peculiar that there are minutes in a day where there is much less activity... and some minutes in a day where there are more...
I would have expected to average that out.