Chapter 1)
Hard to believe 20 years went by since the US Gov't started scrapping CDV-700s.
A few passed through my shop.
Most were ENi's (Electro Neutronics inc." the last versions, CDV-700 6B. built around 1964.
They came in original Civil Defense individual boxes, within a larger shipping box or crate of 10, most even still had the original black and white stripped carbon D cells, made by Burgess. I can't remember how many of those long dead dry cells I stripped for their Zinc cans and carbon rod element. for projects (and much later for Zn and Mn element XRF calibration targets).
Most of these were headed to scrap dumps, when some were gobbled up by early Junkers/sellers on eBay. One fellow in Alabama I think,?had a warehouse full, and wanted to empty the warehouse for other storage. I was glad to oblige and helped the poor fellow out. We would get regular shipments or 5 or 10 crates, once in a while 20 crates, each crate with 10 gleaming as-new ENi CDV-700, individually boxed with all accessories and manuals (2 each box!).
Back in those days, eBay did not allow pictures on their site, but you could post a link to pictures, which was rather a difficult prospect at the time, as anyone who would host them for you charged an arm and a leg. Remember 28k dial up modems? Anyone else remember when eBay was all text? Description's ran into the pages. I remember watching the originator being interviewed by the Business Channel host that I watched by satellite in 1998, and they ripped him up pretty good, basically saying it wouldn't work!
In those days, my hobbies were Ham Radio, Electronics, Machine Shop, and Microscopes. In
1991 (correction- 2001) when the first plane hit I got out of the stock market before the second plane hit, and went full bore Geiger Counters. Thankfully Tom Harmon had the CDV700CLUB up and running, that was a great help getting started.?
With all these Geiger Counters lying around, it occurred to me that they could be modified into more interesting instruments. This did not sit well with some members of CDV700Club, saying they should be left pristine, warts and all.
So around 1993 I started my own brand of GC group called GeigerCounterEnthusiasts@YahooGroups. At it's peak we had 2000+ members and it was the most popular Yahoo Group in the "Physics" category, and it was private not public.. By the time we ran out of Yahoo memory, there were 50,000 posts on the "first page" as it wound up being. The PAGE-2 version and others followed, with specialty groups for Gamma Spectrometry and later XRF.
