After a few minutes of testing we where surprised by the inaccuracy of the data and the lack of features.

Lately there has come to market by others radiation monitoring systems including software that at first glance appear to offer some of the features offered by Aware Electronics radiation monitors and software so we decided to test one of these packages. Within minutes the crude nature of the software became apparent. The software includes an error prone method of recording data per unit time. Example test: When set to record counts once per second the software would report and record to the text file counts with time periods ranging anywhere from one second to several tens of seconds for each point reported. In addition to the generated text file, the included graph rapidly became highly inaccurate as regards x-axis and its relation to the number of seconds passed. Within minutes the crude graph was reporting 500 seconds as the maximum x-axis value when in actuality 1500 seconds had passed. This defect became much worse if any other program was started and illuminates the very basic method of tracking time by the program.

As regards the text file generated by the program (the only method offered to record data), besides the highly inaccurate data the text file was next to useless for importing into other programs. The one time stamp offered is unusable by any standard spreadsheet, math program or database program. In addition, when opening the text file with Excel we found that as long as we observed the data with Excel, the radiation program discarded all additional points from then on, until we closed Excel. A look at the text file revealed a large chunk of missing data lasting as long as Excel was looking at the file.

All additional features of Aware Electronics software are completely missing and not offered. Our testing of the software was cut short in that without a reboot of the PC the software refused to load, instead within a second it issued a series of obscure error message boxes, popping up one after the other until the PC's desktop was filled with these error message boxes. Even a fresh unzipping of the program from the zip file would not cure the problem until a reboot indicating that even after shutting the program down the program leaves in memory some aspect of itself, a looping piece of code perhaps, that then places a new launch of the program into an error loop of some sort. Our conclusion is for anything but the most basic toy-like monitoring of radiation there really is only one choice.

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