Abstract: A deployment of radiologic beacons detect radiation levels for emitted radiation around a particular geographic area such as a town, city or campus environment. In a deployment of beacons for detecting and gathering radiological gamma-ray spectral data, each beacon periodically generates a set of values indicative of radiation at a particular energy level, and assembles a vector of the set of values ordered according to increasing energy levels. Each of the beacons transmits the vector as a stream or periodic sequence of data to a common aggregation location. Each beacon encodes the data according to a compression mechanism based on a Poisson distribution of the spectral data. A running average of the values for each energy level is maintained for the sequence of vectors, and encoding/decoding mechanisms are selected based on the average value to be encoded.