[Milsurplus] TBY-8 batteries

[Ray Fantini]

If you try to dispose of it legally, the authorities are going to
> want to know from where it came, and if they ever find out about
> the radium paint on the TBY, God himself help you, because
> you'll need His intervention to deal with the hurricane of
> stupidity that will follow.
> Regards,
> D.S.


Back at last years MRCA get together I brought along a Geiger counter with a Alpha sensing head and have to say that the TBY sets that were their were by far the most radioactive set their, was getting readings from the face of the TBY ten feet away from the radio and off scale readings up next to it in comparison to the labeled R-390 meters that produced only small indications with the probe located within a couple inches. don't know for certain but would propose that the TBY may hold a title as the hottest emitter of Alpha radiation, maybe eight to ten times as much as any other radio. do not remember the exact number but is way more then other radios or the standard stuff like aircraft instruments and the like. remember that just because the paint no longer glows don't mean the radium is not their, think the radium isotope they used for the stuff back then had a half life of about fifteen hundred years where the stuff they used in the sixties and beyond was something like a tritium oxide that has a half life of about thirty. I have a couple sixties aircraft instruments that no longer have a active reading now. 
Ray Fantini KA3EKH