AMCT-500

The AMCT-500 is a transportable multichannel analyser designed at IFA and made at FAN [1]. Its design began in 1987, when the experimental model and the prototype were built; a zero series of three followed in 1988, and in 1989–1990 FAN made more than 20, bought by the county environmental monitoring agencies [1]. It was used to check the environment and food products, to analyse the elemental composition of materials by detecting the gamma radiation induced by particle activation, and to measure gear wear by radioactive marking [1]. It has four modes – pulse-height analysis with incrementing or decrementing, multiscaler and cyclic multiscaler – a built-in Wilkinson analogue-to-digital converter with a 20 MHz clock (the book gives 2156/512 channels), with the option of an external converter of up to 4096 channels, a Z80 microprocessor with 16 kB of program memory and 64 kB of RAM, magnetic tape storage and two RS232 interfaces [1]. The electronics fit in a 440 × 420 × 221.5 mm case, used with a 12-inch monitor, a printer, a cassette recorder on request, a detection probe and its pulse amplifier [1].