ANSI N42.34 Testing of Canberra Hand-Held Identifiers

Canberra Industries recently developed a new hand-held gamma spectrometer for Homeland Security applications for the detection and identification of radionuclides. This instrument, the Inspector 1000, uses Sodium Iodide probes. The performance requirements for hand-held identifiers for Homeland Security applications are defined in Standard N42.34, recently issued by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Based on a draft of this new standard, a test plan was developed to evaluate the performance of the Inspector 1000 with respect to the indicated criteria. The results of the subsequent measurements and analyses are presented. Challenges encountered during the evaluation are discussed.