Low-priced, time-saving, reliable and stable LR-115 counting system

• Semiautomatic, uncomplicated procedure was proposed to count the amount of alpha tracks.
• Freely available software on the Internet used as alpha tracks counting system for LR-115.
• LR-115 detectors used to measure radon concentration and radon exhalation rate.

Nuclear alpha particles leave etches (tracks) when they hit the surface of a LR-115 detector. The density of these tracks is used to measure radon concentration. Counting these tracks by human sense is tedious and time-consuming procedure and may introduce counting error, whereas most available automatic and semiautomatic counting systems are expensive or complex. An uncomplicated, robust, reliable and stable counting system using freely available on the Internet software as Digimizer™ and PhotoScape was developed and proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed procedure was evaluated by comparing the amount of tracks counted by software with the amount of tracks counted manually for 223 detectors. The percentage error for each analysed detector was obtained as a difference between automatic and manual counts divided by manual count. For more than 97% of detectors, the percentage errors oscillated between −3% and 3%.