RE: A once in a lifetime opportunity

[brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>]

At 02:40 11/30/97 EST, you wrote:

> one of my colleagues returned from the doctor after his. I grabbed a NaI
> detector to see if I could see the single Tc peak. I was fiddling with the
MCA
> and he was holding the detector to his chest. The spectra were all washed
out,
> no peaks visible. Then I realized that he was the most active source I had
ever
> tried to get a spectrum from and the problem was that he was so active that
> pulse pileup was destroying the spectra. I backed the detector off a
couple of
> feet and found the Tc peak as expected.
>
>
> Tim Sullivan
> sullivan@kenyon.edu

Tim has uncovered yet another of many gaps in my general knowledge,
and I would like to hear a thumbnail sketch of the instrumentation
that can (presumably) take a photomultiplier output from an iodide
scintillator and process this to a spectrum - which I assume is the 
function of an MCA (of which acronym I can only guess the A to 
represent 'analyzer'.)

 Thanks in advance.
brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK