Here is how I recovered the stuff from the filter. First I poured the coolant out of the filter into a 1 gallon zip lock bag. Then I cut open the filter, removed the paper and metal filter core, and rinsed the contents of the filter can into the ziplock bag.
Then I cut the paper pleat away from the metal core, and then washed the paper with water into another 1 gallon zip lock bag. When finished I combined contents into a single bag, and hung it up with one corner down. After a day all of the solids settled down into the low corner.
I twisted up and cut off the low corner. In the process of doing this the lightest materials floated up resuspending in the water. I transferred the water into another bag, let the remainder settle out over another day, drained most of the water out of the bag, and poured the bottom remainder through a coffee filter. This produced the small pile of light brown material. It is the portion of filtrate that is most easily suspended in the coolant and therefore is not likely to clog anything; it just goes with the flow.
The big pile contains a lot of different stuff. Much of it is dark and granular, like a fine sand. It also contains a substantial amount of very fine powder some of which is probably dried gray sludge. All mixed together dry, it is not possible to say what is dried sludge and what is not. I can say that the darkest, most sand like material readily settles out, when wet it is not sludgy, and not likely to clog the radiator. It is abrasive, and perhaps has an adverse effect on the life of the water pump. The dark granular material is definitely not the same grey stuff that collects in the top of the radiator.
Attached is another picture. This picture contains the same material from the previous picture, and in addition, contains a dried sample of grey sludge that I had previously flushed from the heater cores. The grey sludge when dry has a greenish tint and is in the upper right side of the picture.
The grey sludge I collected before installing the filter by directly hooking up a garden hose to the heater core outlets, and flushing full force, collecting the output in a 5 gallon bucket. The grey sludge settles out fairly quickly and dries to a very fine powder that is not at all granular.
At this point in time, all I can conclude is that there is a fair amount of "stuff'" in my coolant system that the filter has caught. The radiator still has a small amount of visible grey sludge, which is only visible inside a few of the core tubes, but there is less than when I installed the filter.
Since I don't know whether or not my engine is still producing grey sludge, I can't say one way or another if the filter is keeping the radiator from getting worse. I can only say the radiator is cleaner than before installing the filter and has not gotten worse.