Chromatography Forum

Our lab not-so-recently aquired a GC and a quadra-pole MS. Fairly old. Runs on a windows NT machine. I've gotten the the GC to fire up and clear it's faults. The MS on the other hand.... Well the xcaliber software reports it at being "Not Connected".
Some really basic Questions:
1. The system configuration lists it as a "Finnigan GCQ" not a GCQ plus, is this an issue?
2. Does the DPC need to be up and running in order for the unit to shake hands and initialize with the PC?
3. I get a blinking power light on the GCQ. Does that indicate some sort of fault or stand-by mode?

Yes I checked my cords (All pins tested for continuity).
Yes I tried changing the COM port in the instrument configuration. 3 & 4 return terrible error messages. I am pretty sure that the GC is in COM 1 that leave COM2.
When I first open the XCaliber program it shows the GCQ as "Initializing" for about 30 seconds then goes to "Not Connected."

Any insights would be much appreciated.

Thanks

The GCQ and GCQ Plus are both Ion traps , not quadrupole instruments. The Plus is just a later model with some of the terrible faults corrected

You can run both the GC and GCQ independently as you can choose what is connected within Xcalibur.

The GCQ uses three boards installed in the PC to communicate, it does not use a COM port. These are The Acquisition DSP PCB, Control DSP PCB, and Waveform DDS PCB

I have a pdf of the original GCQ Plus operators manual I can e-mail you if you think it might help ?

Looks like my instrument does not appear in the list for the Xcalibur configuration. There closest is for a Finnigan Q-GC which I am fairly sure is a gas chormatograper not an MS.

Given that Fischer Thermo no longer supports my MS, where could I find a software version of Xcalibur or other software to run my GCQ+?

Your Xcalibur should be for your GCQ, the Q-GC will need to be enabled as the input source assuming this is the GC you have ?
You can get a lot of stuff downloaded from Thermo
http://sjsupport.thermofinnigan.com/pub ... stomer.asp

Whilst support has been discontinued it does not mean that they can't/won't help.

We have a Thermo Fischer Trace GC. It has been configured and communicates with the computer system without flaw.