Radioactive Junk

I buy the odd piece of interesting junk now and again, and I've been a bit wary of some of them maybe being around radioactive materials. So, I have finally got hold of a Geiger counter. Well, bought a kit and assembled it.

The kit is one from this site:

https://sites.google.com/site/diygeigercounter/home

I got a GK-B5, which for now lives in a temporary case, namely the cardboard box that it came in:

The Geiger Muller tube is an SBM20 and has about 500V across it, but it's not dangerous as the supply has a very high output impedance. The kit works well, and registers a count of about 25 per minute for background radiation.

Have I found anything radioactive? Well, yes, but I was deliberately looking for something so I scanned a couple of local junk shops. I found four pieces of uranium glassware. It's a pale green glass, the pieces I found were in the form of a jug, two bottles and a tray. So did I find any of the junk I had bought to be radioactive? Well, no, none of the bits I had concerns were radioactive. But, I did find that one of the objectives I had bought for my microscope had a count that was similar to the uranium glass I found. I suspect that it may have been used to look at uranium ore and a piece has lodged in the objective. It's not too concerning but at least the Geiger counter has served it's purpose.