Chromatography Forum

Hi - Does anyone know what causes the following message when autotuning an agilent 5973 MSD:
"tune action stopped. Offset at maximum and the peaks are too large!"

I seem to remember having had this problem before, for me it was the source. It had be cleaned carelessly and it needed to be re-done. After that I was good. You may want to check all the wire connections on the source are good, paying attention to the blue wire which connects to the Entrance Lens.
couple of other things maybe worth paying attention to, the EM Voltage and the analyzer vacuum

Working with the information given; I will say the error is related to the Entrance Lens Offset, which directly relates to abundance. If the AutoTune routine is trying to reduce the abundance of a target mass and has fully minimized the EntOffs; yet the abundance remains above the setpoint... there is no where left to go, auto tune fails with the error you have reported.

good luck

Thanks for your help. I will try what you suggest. Just out of interest, do you know what sort of Vacumn would be "normal" for the 5973 with turbo pump and 1ml per min. flow with capillary column as I have a triode gauge and it is reading 1.0 x 10-3 torr.
Sorry, I am trying to get an instrument going with no previous experience!

1X10-3 sounds like your turbo is not running, that pressure is generated by the rough pump. Open up manual tune and on the upper right of the page tells the turbo pump speed.

What was the last thing done to the system that is causing your tune problem?

Is it possible that the signal of the analyte is too high? reduce the concention of the analyte maybe work.