E600 platform by Eberline and Thermo-Eberline “unofficial owners club”!

[equipmentguy]

Hey y'all! I'm looking for other folks who own and love their E600 platforms. In my opinion, it's kind of like using an old Ferarri a daily driver... Not the most reliable instrument and needs a lot of care, but pretty damn hard to beat when it comes to being what I opine to be the best meter I've ever used for general purposes and professionally until they went out of style and all died from electrolytic cap and HV power supply failure starting in about 2012.

My pet peeves: who the hell engineered the sound for these things? Why on earth would they put out a unit which maxes out at 10,000 CPM with the sound range? Sure, there's a software based click provider you can program, but that doesn't fix the problem. It's useless when you need audible feedback, and you can't tell the difference between 10mSv/hour and 5Sv/hour just by listening! The ESPs and SRM (desktop/bench version of the ESPs) have great sound, and the ESP-2 has DIP switches for the click divider if you're in an HDR environment!

Why are we unable to program it from the meter face? I understand that Eberline designed this to be a cash cow with calibration and proprietary connectors, but, like, come on!!! There's a ton of buttons. If they added just a hundred lines of code, we'd have triple channel analyzers and could identify isotopes in a split second basically. I mean, I understand that they didn't include that so we'd have to buy identifinders, but ugh, to have that feature would make this thing perfect.

The proprietary connectors. Even with employee discount, the serial cable was $500. The probe cables, which I have precisely three of along with 2 broken ones, are a pain. It isn't hard to install a BNC jack and use it like the ESP-2 with its three available independently programmed probe parameter channels, but ugh! Cash cows.

I feel like the HV and capacitor issues bear a second mention. Even the ceramic caps, which are plus/minus five percent tolerance (demonstrating good engineering design) are losing their tolerances. And the HV transformers just die randomly.

Locking up when calibration is due. It can be set to bypass the bricking with a press of the star key, but it rarely is programmed for that unless you have the interface like I do. I set all my E600s and probes to expire in 2050. If I was still using them professionally, it would have to be done yearly, but these aren't really appropriate for professional use with the exception of the latest models made.

The good stuff:

It's the best general purpose meter and scaler I've ever owned. I love the peak/trap function, integration mode, and the scaler which can be easily set with software for varying times.

The smart probes are so easy. I can switch from my pancake probe to a 100 square centimeter dual phosphor alpha/beta probe in seconds, with the settings automatically adapting to the probe. Same deal with the rest of my probes.

Availability of SmartPaks to make any probe im to a smart probes; this means automatic settings adjustment. I have one on my WBJ G1LE probe, my SPA-3, my PG-2, and my LEG-1. I also have one BNC SmartPak programmed to 900 volts on channel one in CPM, 900 volts in CPS on channel 2, and 450 volts on channel 3 for use with old Soviet experimental probes.

The plateau program built in to the software is amazing. Just set it in whatever voltage increment you want, starting voltage, max voltage, and count time at each voltage, and it does everything automatically. You get a pretty graph when it's done showing you optimal voltage. I use this for any probe with the SmartPaks. If someone does manual probe plateaus daily, having an E600 could change your life!

Big display.

Effective backlight.

Good software interface.

Variety of smart probes. I own the SHP-360 (same tube as the Ludlum 44-9), 330 sealed gas proportional, 380AB 100 square centimeter alpha/beta probe, and the SHP-270 energy compensated dosimetry probe (a pickle probe).

Easy to remove boards and components from the case if it needs to be fixed.

Mmmkay, I'm done for now. I'd love to hear what you folks love and hate about your E600s, whether you're a current owner or just happened to use them from about 1994-2015 or so.

Cheers,

-Ezra

[epkoncept]

Has anyone managed to take an off the shelf Analog Device( Dallas) DS1993 and make their own Smart probe adapter ?
P

[GLW]

E600 is an OBE platform.

It was very capable in it's day, an almost perfect platform for NUREG/CR-5849 and NUREG-1575 surveys, and (with enough certification) you could be licensed by Eberline to burn your own EPROMs.

But that was a long time ago, it was a bit too expensive for RP OPS requirements,...
ORISE never adopted the platform for use in confirmatory surveys thereby motivating most FSS projects to utilize Ludlum data loggers, and there was never enough niche work to keep the orders coming in.

You can fabricate your own SMARTPACS with off the shelf components, it's not a cost effective strategy for project driven data logging programs.

If somebody is paying you to tinker with and utilize OBE equipment such as the E600 platform consider yourself fortunate to get paid to tinker with cool old stuff from two generations ago.

Enjoy the day!!!!!