Help! I can't find the beam! (S/TEM version)

Hello again, my fellow EM aficionados! A common challenge we've all faced (particularly as new and/or less experienced users) is starting our session by opening up the column isolation valves only to be greeted by a blank screen with nothing on it.
Don't fret; it's usually not a very serious problem and one that can be remedied quite easily, so please stay tuned to see how to tackle this effectively and as quickly as possible.
Thank you for your support, my fellow electron microscopy aficionados! Please like, subscribe, and share and leave any questions or comments you may have and I will do my best to reply as soon as possible. Video topic requests are always welcome and appreciated; I enjoy making these videos and wish I could make them more frequently, but the demands of my job make it tough to do so; I’m in charge of 3 S/TEMs, 2 dual FIB/SEM systems, and 1 SEM and this keeps me very busy!
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[@j1o5n9a8s]

I wonder if you could make a video about a tomography walkthrough

[@NicholasRudawski]

Yes, tomography is definitely on the future topic list as several others have asked about this, too. I need to brush up on it a little more (though I do have some tomography experience), but I definitely agree that it would be a great addition to the video collection.

[@praveensahu6639]

Bro...can you pls make a video for creating alignment file and feg registry?

[@NicholasRudawski]

Hi Praveen. I was about to respond to this, and I then I realized you are the same person who asked about this in the video about dealing with the water outage recovery! Anyways, your suggestions are once again duly noted.

[@praveensahu6639]

@@NicholasRudawski My apologies..I became little impatient

[@tomekplotek]

😂😂😂very common issue !!! In both SEM and TEM !!!

[@NicholasRudawski]

Yes indeed! In fact, as you correctly point out, this also happens in SEM and dual FIB/SEM, so it would be very useful to have another video specifically covering that class of instruments.

[@adrianzavodov6745]

Eeea, every day routine on finding the beam )) Nicholas, do you know, why does the beam has the different monochromator shift for STEM and TEM? Every time I switch tem/stem, I lost the beam and should shift it by monoshift. Could the position of monochromator be stored for each mode?

[@NicholasRudawski]

So, the monochromator shouldn't be changing shift values when you change between TEM and STEM. Just to be clear, are you sure the reason you are losing the beam when switching between modes is from the monochromator and not something else? There will definitely be different beam shift values stored for TEM and STEM modes. The other possibility is that the monochromator is be normalized when you switch modes. This could cause a measurable (but small) shift in the beam, but with the monochromator spread out quite a bit, I would think this would be barely noticeable. Anyways, hard to diagnose without actually seeing what is happening; if you have some way of recording a video and showing it to me, I can probably provide a little more insight into what may be happening.

[@adrianzavodov6745]

​@@NicholasRudawskithank you for so detailed answer. I've try to attach the link on google-disk with explicative video of my screen, but apparently, TH-cam doesn't allow linking in comments. Anyway, thank you for some thoughts about it.

[@NicholasRudawski]

@@adrianzavodov6745 If you can email me a link to the video, I may be able to check it out that way; check the video description for my email address if you want to try doing this.