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From my observations it also seems to vary a lot depending on how the person recording behaves. Some people just walk around logging reading along the way. Others go out of the way to find interesting above background level radioactive objects and place the measurement equipment right next to those. Like finding 2 pieces of granite having 6x the background level in a giant pile of other rocks.

Another interesting pattern I saw while browsing around was increased level next to every fancy cast iron light fixture along a specific bridge. The bridge was made mid 20th century so I don't think they are old enough to have used thorium gas light mantles.

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I wonder why colorado has so many red areas around hiking trails. Is it just one guy with a bad device who loves to hike or is it because there's bits of radioactive ore on the trails or something?
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> From my observations it also seems to vary a lot depending on how the person recording behaves. Some people just walk around logging reading along the way.

I think if this is only what they allowed it would be a useful since it would measure real world exposure.

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Yeah, and I was hoping that you could still look at high-level averaging over a country ("maybe the bad data will average out") but when I looked at a few hotspots it appears that those all came down to a couple uncalibrated-looking devices.

Not very useful or interesting in its current form, unfortunately.

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Yeah I checked some tracks and it basically looked like the longer someone spent in a place, the higher the readings got. Maybe when the device doesn't get a lot of ventilation it starts to misread.
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Or they zeroed in on something interesting, since finding interesting radioactive bits is the primary use of the device. One I saw in CA was confirmed to be a uranium deposit, by geological survey, on a random trail near some houses.

If you don't believe any of this naturally occurring phenomenon for some reason, there are several YouTube channels that check out these places, and try to find their own high activity areas/objects. There also subreddits dedicated to it,'and even a map where you can find places! ;)

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I wonder if this explains why many of the higher radioactivity sites in my state are hotels.
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Pretty much, there are no shortage of ways to merge such data badly.

Many devices, uncalibrated and drifting, poor time normalisation to address counts accumulating when lingering, ... ffs they probably don't even adjust for cosmic or radon ...

( TBF the last two are pretty picky objections unless you're going hardcore geophysical professional )

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Your general point is true, but in this case the devices are not really sensitive enough for radon to matter and the same is usually true for cosmic radiation.

When capturing open-air terrestrial tracks they are more or less uranium and thorium detectors.

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If only I'd had the foresight to indicate that cosmic & radon removal weren't something to fuss about on handheld consumer click counters <doh> - thank you for chipping that in.

Might be worth pointing out the principle reason preventing radon removal from a click counter, no matter how sensitive, is the lack of a channeled spectrum bucketing counts by energy level, and the main reason cosmic cannot be removed is the lack of channeled stacked height descent readings allowing a ground level current cosmic estimate.

> When capturing open-air terrestrial tracks they are more or less uranium and thorium detectors.

and Potassium also- just all bundled together as a total count with no discernment.

Still, perhaps one day in the future, just as modern GPS carry a coarse ground / ellipsoid separation model in order to return 0 elevation at the seashore, perhaps rad counters will carry a coarse global radiation background model to focus on counts over and above the expected.

( again, unlikely due to lack of real sensitivity and channel bucketing )

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