Welcome to Gatan Microscopy Suite

Welcome to the Gatan Microscopy Suite

The Gatan Microscopy Suite (GMS) comprises DigitalMicrograph and many plugin modules that help you collect and analyze images and spectra from your microscope. You may have purchased a license for just one or many of these components. This page and the release notes contain important information and we urge you to spend a moment checking to see if anything is relevant to your particular situation.

General Issues

1. The Gatan Microscopy Suite requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
2. You should not daisychain more than 3 Gatan Firewire Adapters to a PC. Instead you should connect them through a powered Firewire hub.
3. The Gatan FasTEM support software requires version 2.0 of JEOL's FasTEM software to be installed. This should be the actual released software and not a pre-release beta.

First-time installation of GMS

To install software from the GMS you need a software license to be installed on your machine. The process is therefore:

1. Insert the license disk in your CDROM and hit the "Install Licenses" button in the dialog that appears.
2. Insert the GMS disk in your CDROM. The GMS installation should start automatically.

Additional components can be installed by first installing their license then running once again the setup.exe of the GMS installer.

Upgrading from pre-GMS software to GMS

The GMS includes a completely revised Camera plugin. There are a number of issues that arise as a result:

1. Magnification table and defect correction strings.

   The magnification table information and defect location information are not automatically transferred from the old camera preferences to the new. To do this;

   1. Launch DigitalMicrograph after installing the new GMS
   2. Open the script file DefectStringPatch.s from the Camera sub-folder of the Support folder on the GMS CD
   3. Hit Ctrl-Enter to run the script
   4. Hit "Use Current Prefs" button
   5. Open the script file MagTablePatch.s from the Camera sub-folder of the Support folder on the GMS CD
   6. Hit Ctrl-Enter to run the script
   7. Hit "Use Current Prefs" button

2. Gain reference images.

   The GMS software generates MSC gain references for binning other than 1x1 from the 1x1 gain reference image. It will, however, use the existing gain reference images for these binnings if they exist and they will not be updated if you acquire a new gain reference. Before you prepare a gain reference using the new software you should manually delete any gain references that exist for binning other than 1x1. The new software will then correctly generate these on the fly when needed from the 1x1 gain reference image. The gain reference images are located in the DigitalMicrograph folder and have names like "MSC SI003 1 Gain Ref. x2.dm3".

3. Camera parameters used for script acquisition ( including gain reference preparation ).

   In GMS 1.0 this was changed so that unspecified acquisition parameters were taken from a new "Default" parameter set (stored in tags). The Default parameter set can be accessed through the "Camera > Acquisition Parameters >Acquire..." menu item. Select "Default" on the "Setup" menu in the dialog that appears. The parameters most likely to be of interest are those relating to shutter selection and settling on MSC cameras. In GMS 1.1 the old pre-GMS behavior has been restored, so that the Record parameter set is again the fundamental one used by scripts.

For a summary of how the GMS has changed since the previous version view the release notes.

For contact information visit our web site www.gatan.com.