Where this command is found:
This command is found in the BCS main window under the pulldown menu Amplifiers.
What it does:
By activating this command, the BCS Amplifiers are set to auto-scale. Its status is indicated by a green LED symbol (#5) in the BCS main window.
In the pulldown menu, its status is indicated by the presence ( = on) or absence (= off) of a check mark next to the Autoscale Amplifiers entry.
What it means:
The signal of all our probes (diode, ion chambers) need to be amplified and converted to a current. This is done with a series of Stanford Amplifiers. Their dynamic range requires proper scaling to avoid saturation or too low counts. By default this is done automatically ('autoscale'). There are some processes within the operation of the beamline that involve flying scans of a stage against one of the probes. The Amplifier Autoscaling is too slow for flying scans. In most of this tasks, the system therefore automatically switches off the autoscaling before it starts a flying scan, but does not switch it back on (there are good reasons for this).
It is important to have the beamline amplifiers on autoscale when doing beam tuning.
