SIG XX - A generation of intelligent gamma ray probes

Nowadays, the radioprotection activities are governed by the ALARA principle. To comply with, we have decided to use scintillators, due to their high efficiency. The surface mounted devices allow the design of the entire gross gamma ray measuring system into a volume of about 0.5 liters. The microcontrollers having an EPROM of 4k bytes offer the opportunity to run resident programmes dedicated to: data acquisition, local processing, data transmission, and system supervising. Such an intelligence is embedded into SIG XX probes. By designing an array of such probes, one can easily obtain a portal monitor, an area monitor and so on, each of them under the the control of a PC. A few modifications may transform an intelligent probe into a portable instrument for radioprotection. In such a case, to make the probe shorter, replacing the photomultiplier by a photodiode, is an attractive goal. To reach it, a dedicated charge preamplifier has to be developed. The works and results on SIG XX probes and charge preamplifier are reported. (authors)