Radiacode 110 and Zero#
A collaboration with Radiacode, sent free. Nobody reviewed this before you did.
Field report: Radiacode 110 and Zero
Gear: Radiacode 110, CsI(Tl), gamma spectrometry, 0.01 to 400 uSv/h. Radiacode Zero, plastic scintillator, no spectrometry, 0.1 to 9,000,000 uSv/h. About $698 for the pair.
From: Radiacode. Product page.
Disclosure: Provided free for testing. No conditions and no copy approval.
Running since: August 2026, Boise.
The constraint first. These see gamma, not the radon you inhale, which is the largest single piece of most people's natural exposure. Neither is a safety instrument. They tell you what changed, not whether you are safe.
Two instruments
The 110 answers what. It reads spectra, so it points at what is producing the signal: Potassium-40, Radium-226, Caesium-137, Uranium-238. That last one is why I asked. I report on uranium mining in the Southwest, where more than 500 abandoned mines sit next to people who cannot measure them.
The Zero answers how much. No spectrometry, and a ceiling of 9 Sv/h, around 22,000 times the point where the 110 runs out of scale. Nobody can tell you in advance what is in the ground at an old working. The 110 is the instrument for the story. The Zero is the instrument for me in the field.
The drive
Four days, 2,200+ km on the road. It logged to the phone over Bluetooth and paints the track by detected level.
One spot is worth reporting. A parking lot in Yellowstone, a short walk from a boardwalk with a steady line of people on it. 1.67 uSv/h against my Boise background of 0.075. Twenty two times, in a place nobody thinks about twice.
It is not dangerous and the wording matters. Geothermal water dissolves radium out of rock and leaves it in the sinter at the surface, so elevated ground there is expected physics rather than a discovery, and a rate only means something paired with how long you stand in it. What made it useful is that it was a real signal where the physics says there should be one.
What I built with them
The 110 came home and became a fixed station. Dashboard, JSON API, Prometheus metrics, Apple HomeKit bridge, history in SQLite at 1 Hz. Seventeen days in, my real background reads 0.075 uSv/h. That number is the whole exercise. Shipped thresholds are placeholders and you cannot borrow someone else's.
One rule worth stealing: when the detector goes out of range the station does not hold the last reading and it does not show zero. It says NO SIGNAL and the metrics disappear, so alerting can fire on the blindness itself. A monitor that goes quiet when it stops seeing is worse than no monitor.
Where they fall short
Neither has GPS. Position comes from the phone over Bluetooth. Walking a site that is fine. For the drone work it is the central problem, because the phone is on the ground and the detector is in the air.
One connection at a time. The station owns the radio, so the phone app cannot have it.
Bottom line
The 110 if you want to know what you are looking at. The Zero if you might be somewhere you should not stay. The pair is more useful than either alone.
The value is not the alarm. It is having months of your own background exposure on record, so the one odd afternoon is provable instead of arguable. Next is a drone mount that carries the phone up with it for GPS, and that goes in the follow-up review.
Check out the GitHub to build your own. (Link)
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