Peak Element Before Acquisition

[Alison]

When using the "Peak Element Before Acquisition" feature, does the element you want to peak have to be the first one on the spectrometer? We tried this option the other day with the element as the second to be analyzed on the spectrometer and it started the peak search where it left off after measuring the first element. As a result, it did not find the peak for the second element. We tried this three times and it did the same thing each time, so I'm not sure if it's our probe or if we missed something regarding this feature.

[John Donovan]

When using the "Peak Element Before Acquisition" feature, does the element you want to peak have to be the first one on the spectrometer? We tried this option the other day with the element as the second to be analyzed on the spectrometer and it started the peak search where it left off after measuring the first element. As a result, it did not find the peak for the second element. We tried this three times and it did the same thing each time, so I'm not sure if it's our probe or if we missed something regarding this feature.

Hi Alison,
I rewrote this code recently and did test it, but maybe not with then 2nd element on a spectrometer.  But do update PFE and test again- not sure what version you are on.

I'll give this a look this weekend.  Thanks for catching this.

Just curious, why are you peaking on every acquisition?

[Alison]

Hi John,
We have version 10.8.3 right now, but we can't update at the moment because someone is in the middle of a session. We are seeing a frequent, somewhat large shift in peak position during sessions, so we are trying to mitigate this problem for now using the peaking feature.

Thank you for the help!

[Probeman]

Hi Alison,
Ok, well this is sounding more and more like instrument mechanical problem. Especially since Mike recently posted about having a problem with the peaking which no one else can reproduce...

http://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=459.0

Ok, I can confirm there is a bug that is preventing the peaking before acquisition feature for subsequent elements on a spectrometer. I'll fix that tonight, but here's a word to the wise: call your JEOL service engineer and fix your instrument!   

[John Donovan]

Hi Alison,
I've uploaded new ProbeForEPMA.msi files to all our download sites.  Go ahead and use the Help | Update menu to update PFE.  Thanks for catching this problem!

The issue was that subsequent elements on each spectrometer were not being moved to their peak positions before the pre-peaking started. This was an bug from the massive rewrite I did to the acquisition code to better support multiple condition samples in January.

Now get your spectrometer mechanicals looked at!
john