Chemstation 101 - Restoring a Previous Tune File

It's been a while since I've done one of these posts, and I'm in Alpharetta, Ga this week attending the Agilent MassHunter Data Analysis class. Let's say I've been inspired by the data acquisition review.

A few months back, Jason wrote about a way to reset his 5973 acquisition software after the tuning macro loses the ability to find the PFTBA mass peaks (69, 219, 502) in his blog entitled "Cannot achieve constant peak widths". But what if you need to go back to a specific tune file? The most likely situation I can think of (since it has happened to me) is if you share an instrument, and a coworker re-tunes the instrument using the same .u file, changing the instrument's response enough that your continuing calibration verification standard (CCV) now fails to meet method criteria. Instead of collecting a new calibration (ICAL), you can restore the tune file you used to collect the original calibration data, and reacquire and evaluate a CCV.

First, we should probably talk about the difference between tune parameters and tune files. Tune parameters are the collection of targets and other settings saved to a .u file, like dftpp.u.

 

The file used to control the MSD during data collection can be found via the File menu in Tune and Vacuum Control.

 

Selecting "Restore Previous Tune(s)..." will bring up a file browser for selecting the tune to restore. Unlike the parameter files, these don't have a file extension; their names include the .u file used to generate them, plus a date and time code for when they were generated. This is where good record keeping helps.

After you select your tune, the software performs a profile scan. If you like what you see, you can overwrite the file currently associated with the selected .u file. This technique should also correct the "cannot find constant peak widths" error Jason described in his blog.