Excellent work, Joe! A round of applause, y'all
That'll get me started down the right road -- let's not enrich the journal rip-off guys any more than required (instead, cultivate some college students and get them to download them - most of the ones we used to have have since graduated, rats). Now I wish I hadn't given Richard all those super high value Victoreen resistors (which he's now selling at high prices, even though he barely acknowledged the gift... I guess he knows now I wasn't giving him trash). But mere tens of megs, not so big a deal, and not so hard to come up with. I suspected that from the start, because any of these gas tubes get real messed up if there's a lot of current available - they tend to devolve into an arc (negative resistance at some point) -- it's just a matter of where on the curve that happens. The 3He tubes from the same place are also listed like this, but he says they are 3He + argon -- so should work in the normal proportional mode too. It's only the more modern tubes of any kind that can hack low series resistance values.
I almost wonder how you'd even see a particle in the presence of a large (25 uA is what one listing says) corona current. Coronas tend to be more than a bit noisy, and that's a ton of power compared to a single few-MeV event. In corona, you'd think most of the gas was ionized already, so what would change? That's interesting from a merely intellectual point of view, of course.
I note they were also mentioning 100's of millivolts signal -- maybe that's a reason to run the weird mode, so they don't need as nifty an amp. For that matter, I've run most gas "proportional" tubes right up at the edge of geiger mode to get big signals without that complication (5v pulses across 3 megs from a 3He tube run right at the limit). And of course, nowadays, a preamp is a cheap chip away, so maybe we don't need the fancy and dodgy mode to get the job done. After all, they all have gas in them, and are proportional counters if set up that way -- physics is physics, and a label can't change that. The fact that it has low pressure gas and a B10 lining are all we really need, no matter the mode we run them in. These are simple enough we were discussing making them ourselves, but at this price? No reason to bother.
In fact, in my own looking, I did find some places where regular tubes were called corona tubes, but weren't -- most of the "real" corona tubes I found were those old shunt regulators they used in geiger counters as power supply parts. And as you surely know, tons of garbage that has nothing to do with this topic -- gotta get my google-fu up to better speed.
FWIW, the translation at this link (which is otherwise interesting) would convince some people that this is all a translation issue. Not that it is, but evidently not everyone "gets it" if it isn't.
http://www.electropedia.org/iev/iev.nsf ... m&part=394 corona counter tube
counter tube in which a corona discharge effect is maintained by a passing ionizing particle which produces a sharp current change
So the corona is only maintained by the passing of an ionizing particle? Whaaa? Guess we'll just have to see, I tend to trust the data sheet Joe found a lot more than this.
My guess is that the other R and C are also crucial here. The C and low R would provide an avalanche current to make a really nice pulse, once triggered -- and then that extra current would go away as the cap charged again, in time to keep from frying the tube. Cute.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.