I can give a real example. At work we were testing pulse shaping amplifiers for Geiger Muller tubes. They take a pulse in, shape it to get a pulse with a height proportional to the charge collected, and output a histogram of the frequency of pulse heights, with each bin representing how many pulses have a given amount of charge.
Ideally, of all components are the same, there is no jitter, and if you feed in a test signal from a generator with exactly the same area per pulse, you should see a histogram where every count is in a single bin.
In real life, components have tolerances, and readouts have jitter, so the counts spread out and you might see, with the same input, one device with, say, 100 counts in bin 60, while a comparably performing device might have 33 each in bins 58, 59, and 60.
This can be hard to compare visually as a PDF, but if you compare CDF's, you see S-curves with rising edges that only differ slightly in slope and position, making the test more intuitive.
A couple people had some great comments that should get you started; I'd just like to add that you don't need to do everything at once either and your workflow can be flexible. When I'm making a board with weird parts, I like to first just go into the symbol editor, make a new project library, and draw out whatever I need for my project with the correct pin assignments. Then at least you can focus on copying the schematic over and getting the ball rolling.
Once you are happy with the schematic, and parts are roughly placed where you want them on the board, you can go ahead and jump into the footprint editor, make a project library in there with the same name, and draw the physical copper layout for your tubes or whatever else to attach to based on datasheets or caliper measurements. Then you run footprint assignment to match up all the symbols with their corresponding footprint, and update the PCB to populate it with parts to lay out. Once the parts are placed logically where routing will be sane, follow the ratsnest connection lines to get your board routed.
Last you want to go to your manufacturer's website, look up all their specifications on board construction [0], and make sure all their recommended design rules and board stackup are plugged into board setup. This may mean going back and changing some trace sizes, trace placements, vias, and so on to pass design checks. Later you will do this earlier, but it's better not to get bogged down at first and just start designing, and you'll learn why things are routed as they are.
After this, spend time inspecting your board, looking for errors, making sure all checks pass and everything makes sense after a few reviews. Then export your gerbers and drill maps and send the zip to your manufacturer.
It's a little daunting at first because there are just a lot of steps between a schematic -- essentially a cartoon version of what your circuit will be, and a layout -- what your circuit will actually look like. You don't have to do every step at once and once you have the schematic drawn, you can just keep adding to it until you have something that works.
There's a push these days to move towards HALEU fuel in the US; it's basically downblended submarine fuel stock [0]. It'll take about a decade to really start the downblending and distribution process at commercial scale in earnest [1], and there's some projects for instrumentation, transport containment, and so on in the works. Once commercial scale feedstock production is proven out, we'll start seeing shovels breaking ground on new reactor sites.
Probably, but I would think you'd need to use a paste stencil to raise the PCB contacts evenly above the solder mask layer since it's not quite flush, or just get the board pre-tinned.
The windings in isolation transformers are inductively coupled through the magnetic field in the core. There's often a shield between the two windings to reduce any capacitive coupling.
Krane's Introductory Nuclear Physics is often considered a standard text, and includes a crash course in quantum that might be enough for someone comfortable with linear PDE's. You may also like Knoll's Radiation Detection and Measurement if you are interested in electronics and apparatus.
Have you tried panel mounting the antenna on a big (at least 4 sq ft) ground plane? We use these at work and had a very hard time until we started building nice big ground planes into all mechanical designs (that and reading the design advice on the decoupling network with a microscope).
You can sketch out your board in KiCad [0] and export it as a gerber that you can send to a printing service. CERN uses it now, so it's worth learning, as it'll only improve over time. As for PCB shops, I'd start with comparing [1] [2] and [3], and seeing which has the best price for your needs. Generally, just searching reddit for "PCB prototype manufacturer" will get you a couple decent options. It really depends on how complicated your design is and how big of a run you need.
Ideally, of all components are the same, there is no jitter, and if you feed in a test signal from a generator with exactly the same area per pulse, you should see a histogram where every count is in a single bin.
In real life, components have tolerances, and readouts have jitter, so the counts spread out and you might see, with the same input, one device with, say, 100 counts in bin 60, while a comparably performing device might have 33 each in bins 58, 59, and 60.
This can be hard to compare visually as a PDF, but if you compare CDF's, you see S-curves with rising edges that only differ slightly in slope and position, making the test more intuitive.