Patent ID: 8164048

Claim:
A method for calibrating a nuclear gauge, the method comprising: (a) providing a nuclear gauge comprising a radiation source and a computing system with a machine readable program stored thereon containing a calibration routine; (b) prompting of an operator of the nuclear gauge by the program on the nuclear gauge to obtain a standard count on the nuclear gauge for calibrating the nuclear gauge; (c) prompting of the operator by the program on the nuclear gauge to place the gauge on one or more specified blocks, to adjust the source within each block to one or more specified positions and to initiate counts; (d) automatically detecting by the program on the nuclear gauge that the source is at each position before each count begins; (e) adjusting the counting times before each count begins by the program on the nuclear gauge based on each position of the source to obtain calibration information; (f) obtaining counts at each position; (g) storing the counts within the computing system of the nuclear gauge; and (h) calculating for each position calibration coefficients.