Looking for XRF comparison and calibration software recommendations

[esnible]

My hobby is researching ancient coins and when commercial XRF detectors became available various historians and metallurgists started publishing scientific papers with measurements of precious metal content of coins. I noticed the papers never mentioned XRF calibration, but in person, I heard wide opinions on the great need — or unimportance — of calibration.

When I heard about DIY XRF I got interested. I am a software person. I’d like to do obvious comparisons between different detectors, under different conditions, and see how much the results vary, especially with regard to trace elements in ancient metals.

A colleague of mine loves hardware and wants to build a very low cost detector to get started with. I am eager to see if his hardware will be sensitive enough for XRF. Now I need to put together software and hardware to get the data from an experimental detector into a computer. Ideally I’d like software that can suggest what elements might be appearing when the source is an XRF detector.

I looked into ImpulseQt. I noticed it only seemed to work with live signal capture. I found videos showing how to export data, I couldn’t figure out if it supports importing data instead of live capture.

I looked into InterSpec. It does have the ability to read data from files, but I don’t yet have any data yet to try it with. InterSpec seems to accept data in many formats (ANSI/IEEE N42.42 seems to be popular), but it isn’t clear to me how to record MCA or sound card data and convert it into N42.

Is there any public XRF data available online? Such as “three minutes of copper”?