First Neutrons!

[chad ramey]

Disclaimer: I would again like to thank everyone here for putting up with me for so long. I would not be able to say what I am about to without the help of so many of you. On the other hand, I must ask for your forgiveness once again. The post I am about to present is in no way, shape, or form as organized, pretty, or normalized as I would like it to be. The results I will present are very strange and I acknowledge the need for improvement and am working towards it. But, I can't help myself, I am overwhelmed with sheer excitement because, I have (I think) achieved first neutrons.

It all began a few weeks ago when my father and I took a trip up to C-Lab (for those of you [most likely n3wbs] who are unfamiliar with the terminology, Doug Coulter's Lab) where Doug helped me get some of the final touches put on my reactor. We constructed a new (and uniquely shaped) grid, verified that my B10 tube and Ludlum counter were operating correctly, and made a gas system for my Deuterium. We set up my entire reactor in his lab, only managed to get it down to about 80microns, and crossed our fingers. Doug and I both agreed that I probably got a few neutrons by sheer luck but it is nothing worth using as a "Neutron Club" request.

Today however, I have much better results:

I have managed to get my chamber (with deuterium atmosphere) down to 58-60micron range with 10Kv on the main grid. While testing to see how much voltage I could get into the chamber, I noticed the neutron counter rising. Within 15 seconds the count had gone from 2 to 243, so I stepped back to enjoy and made a video.

The video is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxFPNjg5Dv8


If you don't watch the video, here is the raw data that is somewhat presented in it.

Run Length: ~2 minutes
Voltage: 10Kv
Pressure: 58-63microns (using only a welch 1400 mechanical pump)
Detector: B10 tube/Ludlum Model 2000 Counter
Background Count: 2.5 counts per minute
Neutron Count:
1st Count-245 (first minute and a half)
2nd Count-53 (last 30 seconds)
Total-298

(I also ran several short runs where I removed the B10 tube from the moderator. When I did this, I found that when removed from the paraffin, the tube quit counting. As soon as I put the tube back in, the count began to soar again)

So, the results I achieved are in reality pretty pitiful but, they seem significant enough to request for admission to the neutron club. If there are any concerns considering my admission, let me know, and I'll work my hardest to try and correct them. I believe my reactor should be added as the smallest; it is a 2.75" (1.5" inner diameter) 5-way cross.

I'll try and post some pictures of the star mode and some information on my grid as soon as I find the time.

-Chad Ramey

[Carl Willis]

Hi Chad,

Congratulations on a nice working setup, and welcome to the Neutron Club (well, I'm not the final arbiter on that, but your experiment sure looks like it meets the grade).

What do you think accounts for the 241 counts you got in 15 seconds, versus the 245 counts you got in the "1st Count" 90-sec run? I suppose I'd still be a little skeptical about noise immunity in the detector. The B-lined counters are hot, but they're not as easy to use as gas-filled counters.

What kind of current are you running? It looks like the needle is off the 5-mA scale. You have to watch out for the rectifiers in those supplies.

Good work!

-Carl

[chad ramey]

Concerning the difference in the two runs- The first run was with a relatively cool chamber, I started it up and it stayed around 58microns for all of about 30seconds. I then reset the counter and by the time all of this had occurred, I checked the temperature gauge and the external walls of the chamber were at 150*F. I suspect that when the chamber walls got that hot it began to outgas, because I took a look at the vacuum gauge and the pressure was fluctuating between 65-63 microns. I believe the culprits were:
a) The nasty gases and water (not to mention the probably insane amounts of electrons being produced via thermionic emission) coming from the walls of the hot chamber.
b) The rise in pressure (and the resulting decrease in voltage and increase in current)

Upon further measurement this morning, (I was able to get a reading on the current output of the supply) it seemed to be floating in the 7mA range. I don't care to push the supply this much, seems to be a little too high for comfort in my opinion. I have elected to not run the reactor again until I can get into the lower pressure ranges (soon to be supplied via my new turbo pump) and not push the supply beyond it's limits.

Thanks for the 'congrats, I'm certainly proud, but in retrospect, I've got a 'heckofa 'lotta work to do on the thing.

-Chad Ramey

[Starfire]

Congrats Chad - what is the back-ground with the fusor switched off? - is that the 2.5/min - do you use a gamma blocker on the count tube?

[Doug Coulter]

Congrats Chad! Yay! We've seen some neutrons at that low a voltage, but it really goes up fast after that here. Remember, that tube is not the most sensitive, so a good reading there really means something indeed.

Chad didn't say, but he is running this in a very small 2.75" conflat cross so all the numbers for Paschen's law are way different than for most of us -- his ID is only about 1.5" on his setup.
(you're probably going to need a good fan on that thing, not much surface area to take the heat off)

Due to the long arms on this cross, he may be getting light-off easier (too easy) -- that PxD thing in the law.

So, Chad, you might want to try putting in some metal screen on the arms off the main chamber to limit that and see what changes -- you might be able to go higher in volts that way at this pressure without needing such a high current -- but no one else has really done this, so you're doing science right now -- research we've mostly not done here yet.

Good going! Glad I could help, I enjoyed the visit. If I had a neutron club, you'd be in it.

Edit:

John, I set up his tube so a very hot rock (torbermite ore, 20k cpm++ on a geiger) didn't count it at all, and neither did yellowcake or a Po alpha source. It counted fast on my fusor (over 1m neuts/second). I think that tube is telling the truth here.

We got a couple counts/minute on cosmic rays here. The B10-lined type tube is real numb to gammas, particularly 10kv range ones (numb-er to gammas than a BF3 by far). When tested on my fusor, there was indeed a lead shield interposed so it wasn't counting my gammas either, except the remote possibility of the high MeV ones from that extremely rare "perfect" fusion reaction where all the energy comes out as a gamma.

Doug

[Mike Beauford]

My congratulations also, nice work.

Mike Beauford

[chad ramey]

Thanks for all of the positive feedback! It's hearing positive things from the people I learned it all from that makes me proud to be apart of this awesome community.

Like I said, they're clearly a large number of things that I need to do in order to advance onwards from this point. But, I believe those will be addressed in my posts later this week. (both on fusor.net and Coulter's forum).

-Chad

[Steven Sesselmann]

Chad, well done, always a nice milestone to pass.

Steven

[Dustin]

Great work Chad,
If you have neutrons at 10KV it will be interesting to see what you get when you start cranking it up.
Best of luck
Steve.

[Linda Haile]

Very impressive, Chad. It is tiny. Quite an accomplishment.

It's good to see devices that are different to the normal 6 inch diameter or 't' standard.

Steve, cranking up the volts on a device this small is not that straightforward.due to the obvious limitations on the size of feedthrough, etcthis device will never break any records for N/sec., but it does break records for being the smallest/ lowest power device to achieve fusion .

Congratulations, Chad.

[Dustin]

Smallest, lowest powered fusion currently rests with lithium tantalate,

But Chad here is pushing the envelope of what is now no longer impossible.
Go Chad,
Don't let anyone tell you what can't be done.
Steve

[Linda Haile]

Pyroelectric fusion is a new one on me Steve. Thanks for bringing it up.

Chad's fusor is still a record breaker, though.

[Richard Hull]

I am with Carl on this. The pressure is rather high and the voltage a bit low. I worry about electronic noise at operation within the proportional preamp. The B-10 lined tube is not the best and is known to detect a lot of stuff other than neutrons. A 1/16 inch lead sheath around the tube within the moderator would help a bit save for the problem of possible electronic noise. Others have suggested this as well.

Presenting a formal data stream would be preferred with run currents, etc. Operating with air or argon would be good to help eliminate the noise issue.

All the above being said, I am, again, with Carl and might offer the benefit of the doubt while remaining doubtful.

It would be great to have a real neutron source to help setup the tube and counter. You might note the type of preamp and windowed SCA type steup you have feeding your counter.

I will place you in the neutron club. Keep up the work and continue letting us know how the effort proceeds.

Richard Hull

[Doug Coulter]

Richard, FWIW, we tested his detector here with and without D in the system, and with no D it stayed on background count levels. Running my fusor with it a couple feet away, and with 1/4" lead interposed, it counts real fast (almost 10k/second while the main power was still ramping up). Here we used a 6.5" diameter piece of HDPE as moderator, and I sent him home with a bunch of wax to make his.

I believe he's counting the real thing here. No D, no counts, add D, get some counts.

We also set it up as in Carl's video demo, using "hot rocks" as gamma sources to make sure it wasn't falsing on those, and set the threshold conservatively (which strangely was right about where the manual said to set it for this tube type . If I was going to harp on his gear, it'd be that pressure gage -- I didn't get a good feeling about that one, but like us all, he's got to go with what he's got, and it did seem repeatable anyway.

I took a peek inside the Ludlum he got on ebay -- I like that thing and wouldn't mind having one myself. Well designed, well built, all parts you can get, all the right stuff for a piece of "surplus".

[Tyler Christensen]

Were you really getting 10k/sec on that tube from feet away? Do you perhaps mean 10k/min?

By my rough calibration data on that tube, 10k/sec from several feet away would mean hundreds of millions of neutrons per second from the reactor... Do you have some unpublished records here?

[Doug Coulter]

Well, we were using Chad's Ludlum (it doesn't have a timer, it just counts till manual reset), my moderator (which is real good) and any of the 3 b10 tubes we had between us.

We had just run a "real" fusor run which got silver to the 800 cpm region in a timed 5 min, so that's about where my fusor was at -- I had doubled that the night before with more care in running it -- this run was 100% hands-off the entire time while we looked and talked.

To test the tubes, we put the moderator up on a shelf near the business end of things, and slapped the HV "on" button. I was seeing counts in the 4th digit, a 9 there, in the time it took the Spellman to ramp to full voltage (maybe 3-4 seconds?), then slapping it back off. I'd have to get a tape measure out and get the exact distance center grid to center tube, but the moderator closest edge to the grid was around a foot away from grid center. So maybe about 15-18 inches total. That UMHW HDPE is one great moderator, I should add. VERY hard to machine, however. The moderator for the B10 was where we had previously identified a hot spot via the BTI's, so that may have affected results.

No, I don't think I've ever made more than a few million neuts/second. Maybe 2-3 million max in the mode it was running then. I get some more in pulse mode, but that's generally with *much* lower average power input (5-10 watts) -- the advantage there (so far) shows up in Q mainly as I've not yet gotten control of the rep rate to speed up the pulses and get more sheer output. My guess though is I easily beat all but JonR here, in both output and Q, at this point.

This should not be considered a boast -- I work more hours on it (as though it were a normal job, for the last few years) and spend more money than most all others, so it's just natural that hard work pays off. I'd be embarrassed if it didn't after all this input of time and money and sweat equity. So if I get a couple times better results than Richard, but with much more than 10 times the effort and bucks....well, that says it all, doesn't it? He might be kicking my butt when he gets his new rig going, which I hope is soon.

But not lethal-zillions amounts of neutrons, just enough to get silver and indium real hot in a timed run, which has become my standard -- if my other counters don't scale to that, it's the silver I put my trust in and start looking for what went wrong with the counters -- we are doing real well on EMI here now, cured at the various sources, mainly -- all is 100% shielded with careful control of ground loops and good isolation. In a good run, we see 1536 and more cpm on the silver (25 sec delay to count) and around 1/10 that on the indium. If we run a lot (like several 5 min runs in a day) the In gets a lot hotter, as its half life is long enough to integrate that. BTI's as we all know, have a pretty short cycle life, but I suppose I should now make a run with all the counters and activations and BTI's going and report all the numbers for those who like to calculate that stuff. For now, relative measurements are getting the job I want done.

We were really pretty surprised that all 3 tubes seemed to be that sensitive, actually, and that they seemed to match pretty closely, too. We set them on the 650v you recommended (and measured that accurately) and the 2mv threshold Ludlum recommended, plus a little fudge to where they didn't count at all on my hottest samples of various things -- U, torbermite, thorium, Po and such all laying on the tube on the bench.

Firing up the fusor made the low three digits of the ludlum turn into a blur. Wound up at about 2.5 mv threshold (referred to input, but the Ludlum actually applies more volts after a preamp stage and back-calibrates that to the preamp gain) The lead we had in between is only thick enough to really stop power supply energy gammas, not the truly hot stuff from fusion (or some neutron captures), in case that matters.

A geiger counter at about the same range behind thicker lead goes about 1100-1500 cpm during a run, where 40 something is normal background. That's either scatter off some leak in the shielding, or some really hot stuff that can burrow through 2" thick lead.

I have set my 3He tube so numb it will only count multiple hits in one "tube response time" and it wasn't counting as fast as the B10 which was setup like the book said, with a little extra threshold tossed in for conservatism. For the 3He tube, I determined threshold as in Carl's nice video, then !tripled! that for use so I only see bursting, which is what I'm studying right now. If I set that up the "normal" way it just goes "sssssssss" and you can't tell by ear if you made a tuning improvement.
It's basically much too sensitive for what I'm doing now so I numb-ed it down a lot. Next step is I'm going to move it farther away, it's really taking a pounding where it is, even in a crummy wax/pvc moderator. I mainly use that for real time feedback for tuning, it's the activations I trust.

The pulse mode might just set a world record for fusor Q, but so far it's flakey and not trivial to reproduce (I can, but no one else seems to have yet), but I am making progress on that front, sometimes getting it up pretty good on a neuts/second basis, still with very low average power draw, using a second grid to trigger the pulses. Which is what I'm mainly working on right now.
I like to have real solid data and good replication before I make such radical claims....note the qualifying language above.

That and good data aq. We now have the counters, the PS voltages and currents, audio recording, and scope capture from the 4ch 1 ghz DSO going into a mysql database as we run - all accurately time-stamped. We're still working on adding a 10 ch digital audio workstation (96khz, 24 bit), and a labjack UE6 to this. Then we will write some drop-dead-cool data-mining software....All in good time. We gotta get the captures down rock-solid with all the inputs we want first, then we can analyze at leisure. We plan to use a pulse stretcher and the DAW to record pulses from various things so we can do a software PHA after the fact on everything and also see any EMI which is pretty obvious usually on a "scope" as it doesn't look the same as a real counter pulse does.

For a plain DC fusor, I think (note the qualifier) I might be doing about a couple X's better than Richard did last year, which I attribute to (much) more precision in the grid geometry, and purer D, which we tested, and it does matter a *lot* -- if you have another way to be stable -- some ion source helps a lot and we've been improving on that too. A little impurity helps stability, but messes up net output badly, here. The good ion sources we now use let us run lower pressures and this seems to help too, for reasons I can only guess at right now. We're running low enough that turning the ion sources off stops the fusor completely.

My main grid doesn't get glowing even at 400-500w input now, and I think that might be due to the better geometry and design I can get on a cylinder vs a sphere, and using some good machine shop technique to just build a better grid than you can do with just wire bending. I never use the 2.5kw I have, as that makes the tank so hot so fast other issues arise...and my ballast gets kinda too hot.

I do note that in this case we'd left the D and reaction products in there from 4 previous runs, and we have found that when doing that the output goes up with running. But not zillions, just somewhat better, so far.

So that's what I (think I) know -- the rest is guessing.

I'm pretty sure at any rate that Chad made it -- we even got some counts on it here, when it was really dirty and not set up right. Not many, but fusion for sure -- barely. He's got some work ahead to work with his strange geometry, but I think he'll be up there with the rest of us pretty soon.

And hey, this is Chad's celebration thread, not mine -- I'm just backing up his claim because I helped set the stuff up, and have touched it and run it myself -- so I know it works. Yes, he needs to do a more organized and disciplined run and report, but that should show decent results too.

[Carl Willis]

Hi Chad, Doug:

Doug, according to the most conservative figures from your reported B-lined tube usage, (9000 cps, 15") the TIER would be between 1.5 and 2 million n / s, IF the tube-moderator combo were 100% efficient, which of course it's not. A high-pressure He-3 tube, ideally moderated, runs in the 30% neighborhood for likely geometries. The ideally-moderated B-lined tube in my experience is ballpark 5%. That would put your fusor's output in the range of 30-40 million per second, minimum--the hottest known amateur effort, hotter than your other estimates by an order of magnitude, hotter than Jon R's fusor by a factor of several, and your efficiency would be better than his by a factor around 15. Those would be the kind of numbers you'd get for this experiment, IF you were satisfied that the B-lined job were detecting only neutrons.

I'm not satisfied that either of you guys are looking mostly at neutrons, however.

In Chad's video at the 1:06 mark, you can see the counter gain 10 counts instantly (from 4 to 14), while the other observable counts come in a more sedate rhythm of about 1 / sec. That jump is a telltale sign of electrical noise, not consistent with the statistical time distribution of real counts. I feel that many of the observed counts are neutrons, but I'm also confident that many are not neutrons.

I appreciate the efforts that have gone into using the equipment, including setting up the counter at Doug's lab, doing a moderator-removal experiment, etc. Even so, it's probably worth noting that Chad's fusor setup is a different electrical environment than Doug's, and I think the issues facing him on the noise front are likely situation-dependent. The use of an MCA would be illustrative. A properly set-up B-lined tube, reacting only to neutrons, should give a fairly even distribution of pulses between the LLD and the knee corresponding to maximum energy (inwardly-directed alpha particles from shallowly-deposited boron). The free software that Steven Sesselmann found for using a sound card as an MCA works great with proportional tubes; in fact I think that's the most ideal use for it.

-Carl

[Richard Hull]

I'll second, again, Carl's noise argument. I noticed the instantaneous jump in numbers as well on the video, but noticed much of the remainder fell in line with expected counts. Still, I think there is a noise issue.

I have set up and fiddled with my boron lined tube and didn't like what I found all that much. While completlely servicable, they can be a bear to adjust and the operating voltage range seemed a bit narrow for my tastes. Also, hot radium or U ore near the tube tended to advance the background to varying degrees. The secret, from my point of view was to drop the voltage as low as possible to still detect neutrons from a quiet source. This yielded an acceptable immunity to other radiations.

I used primo nim components for this so that I could isolate issues easily between sectional portions of the setup, using a scope to view the waveforms and pulse heights between different sources. I think mine responded best around 500 volts, but with the ancient age and variable histories of these tubes, I don't think an idealized, normal voltage spec is possible. The lower voltage means more preamp gain which opens up the noise issues.

The old GE boron lined tubes just need a special effort to make them truly servicable as neutron-only detectors.

Richard Hull

[Doug Coulter]

Yes, as I said above, no way I'm making orders of magnitude more than a million neuts/second, ever.
Pretty sure I'm not besting JonR on anything but _maybe_ Q.

Yet. Working on that one, of course.

How about the chance that 10 count jump was a cosmic shower? The Ludlum is fast, and I see things like that on geiger tubes in that case. The setup is tight, and the cable new with 100% shield coverage.

I am going by silver activations here, using them as relative measurements on 5 min timed runs, but I'm not seeing gonzo activations 10+ times higher than Richard, for example, so I assume I'm not doing 10 times better. I think we all trust the silver, anyway? Seems reasonable. I am using a counter identical to Richard's, not some fancy super sensitive scintillator or anything like that (which all read far higher in our tests). Just a pancake geiger tube -- we bought some from Geo when he was selling them.

They average 42 cpm long term (days average) facing up counting shop background -- all cosmics as far as I can tell.

Only about 3x (something under 2k cpm on silver) on a good day for a 5 min run here vs Richard's 480 something in ~20 min there, which I don't think quite scales directly (or even much at all) due to silver's real-short half life. In fact, I'd not been factoring in the run time difference at all in my estimates -- because I didn't have Richard's time on a stopwatch anyway, so that's just a guess. His log might have a better number for the runtime -- but again, maybe that's not real important to the short half life in Ag.

Someone else would have to calculate that using *all* the various metastable Ag states and halflives of each and so forth -- my CRC book lists quite a daunting number of them. I just made up a standard time and stick to it for reliable relative measurements for my own uses. It's probably not good to more than one decimal place, but surely not off by any large integer factor either.

Pretty sure something is wrong with either the calcs or the data here. I don't think we can assume which at this point with so much missing info.

Chad, you need to make a much better movie that shows more! Try to go over your setup first, and group things so we can see more at a time. A bit more patience and thoroughness would be good.

Having not been to Chad's lab, I have no idea if he's making enough EMI for that to be a problem, but your sharp eyes seem to have detected that in the count rate, and I agree that it may be an issue there -- how can anyone know? I know it wasn't here, where I keep a scope probe floating near things so as to get a warning about noises, and a radio running on a weak station, it's been a real handy trick, and here Chad's was running off a very quiet power supply (Spellman ptv200) and all shielded wire in the HV up to as close as we could get to the FT on his tank (Accel ignition wire inside braid from RG-8). Basically, with his vac system, he was never getting into a range of other than a stable glow discharge with some dark space, no pulsing was observed. He's cleaned things up since and may be doing better on vacuum now. For my fusor, I have an antenna *inside* the HV screening on the back near the ballast R to pick up noise, as that's something I am working with and a slick way to pick up things that happen in that pulse mode, which *isn't* what I was running then -- that takes very different conditions (much lower pressure and an inductive ballast the right size, etc).

Yeah, in pulse mode the thing is a real radio transmitter, but not in stable DC mode -- it's very quiet then, not even corona noise due to the full coverage shielding on my fusor for EMI. But even then I need an antenna *inside* the shielding to pick up the EMI.

My fusor runs off a Spellman SL2Kw 50kv monster supply, 100% shielded end to end. Our ballast is inside an 8" diameter copper screen clamped to the tank flange the FT goes in, and covered with pvc pipe around the R to keep corona down with forced air through that to keep the heat down. No unshielded HV power is exposed at all.

It could be those gammas that are getting through 2" lead bricks and still counting my geiger counter too.

They might count the B10 tube just fine (with better QE than it has for neutrons) as they are tons hotter at ~16 MeV than anything I used to set the threshold -- All I had for that were "hot rocks" and pure U and Th, and we set threshold on those and then a little higher than the point at which it stopped counting the rocks (but it still saw cosmics, at about the same rate the shop geiger does).

Even though that DD->He reaction is rare, it's still happening some. I hear numbers all over the place on the relative rarity, and have one book that says it's more like 1::26,000 -- a lot less rare than Richard quoted elsewhere -- and who knows which book is correct? Or what conditions might affect the reaction path ratios? Not I, for sure. The number I'm quoting here (from a recent astrophysical journal for thermalized systems) jives well with the geiger count rate when the entire tank is shielded with 3/16" lead (which was a very hard job -- days of snipping and soldering overlapped seams, and finding the leaks with a geiger and fixing them all), except for the window which is 2 of 3/8" pyrex with a 1/2" lead glass behind it (and with feet of overlap), and the counter behind 2" thick lead bricks behind that on the table below the window.

I don't think 50kv x rays are bouncing off the wood ceiling and back into the counter! They'd have to get out of the tank first, and they don't. And this has been tested running in non fuel gas (He and Ar were tried) and it doesn't happen then.

And I know that at least here, a 10 meg open scope probe wasn't showing me more than ~50mv of noise during either fusor running, most of that from the house power line -- 60hz, and a little of a strong local AM radio station. That's lower than at most places because I thought about that when building this place and ran the wires right to cut down emissions from them.
My lab wiring is proximate to a grounded copper pipe that carries compressed air, and circles the shop at the ceiling (a big shorted turn), so it doesn't radiate much at all. Nice that my guitar amps don't hum etc.

But no, if the B10 says I'm making 10 million neuts a second or more, it's wrong or the silver is -- and I know which one *I* trust more. Under identical conditions I got silver to about 800-something cpm in 5 minutes (about an hour earlier), which isn't that great for here, and I have no reason to think that on startup it's magically many times better from any other indicator I have (3He, BF3, B10, Pancake Geiger, BTI). Now that would be news indeed, but I'm not saying that because I don't think it's the case. I don't hear the 3He tube go wild on audio then -- I'd have noticed that I think. Nor does it go dead (which would be a sign it's saturated) either, it just comes up along with the main power.

Having said that, when counting very slow sources, bursts aren't that uncommon either, something I've had to teach several people writing software for instrumentation around here, it's hard for them to understand the real randomness of radiation production, and with a low QE counter, how often things can get "lucky". It's not all that rare for something making 40 cpm long term average to have 5-10 counts in one second or less for example, in a completely noise free situation...I believe Carl did a little tutorial on that math here earlier. I have that same math, from both Strong, and Haliday, and yep, it's correct.

FWIW, I did look at the pulses from the tube pre-threshold (on my preamp), and they seem to group around 2 peak heights -- one if the alpha got into the tube gas, the other if the Li got in there -- only one or the other usually makes it into the tube from the reaction, sometimes neither.

I gave Chad an old boat-anchor Tek 503 scope so he can look for things like that if he wants to.

Like Richard, I really like the audio thing, augmented with a scope on at least one of the detectors.
(preferably between preamp and threshold) EMI just sounds and looks different, it's an instant giveaway that something isn't right.

I'll agree to disagree about using the word "primo" and "nim" in the same sentence.

I did peek into that Ludlum Chad has, and I give it my seal of approval though -- it's modern, best of breed electronics inside all the way, and excellent design.

I've never seen anything in a nim so well designed and built. Not even close. Could be I just don't have enough experience with two full racks + of nim stuff, or that we got burned on each and every single piece from various ebay and fusor forum sellers, I suppose. I don't use it at all any more, it's too flakey and noisy for me all by itself before other errors add in. But again, maybe we are on some tail of the distribution and there's some out there that is really good -- we just haven't ever seen it here.