[dividedbyzero]

Hypothetically speaking, how useful would something like that be in a nuclear weapon fallout scenario? Can such a contraption detect the important isotopes and give the user an accurate idea of the level of danger they're in, does that change over time as isotope composition changes through decay?

[9dev]

Are you willing to bet your life on it?

[dividedbyzero]

No, I'd be dead anyway. Still curious what these things can do, seeing as some people buy them for that purpose.

[BetterGeiger]

tl;dr not useful. To make a long story short, max range is very important and these cheap tubes saturate easily, and they don't give energy-corrected dose rate. They also cannot do gamma spec (isotope identification), but that is not needed for a fallout scenario because fallout contains basically every isotope under the sun, no need to do any gamma spec. I have a very long detailed video about this topic on my youtube channel BetterGeiger