It sounds like you have the 80lb piglet of all MCAs. I bought one from this same E-bay guy (high prices, horrible packing, my 1st Ebay purchase, now I know better, but at least I got a manual...) but mine appears to work. It's shelved for now in favor of a Canberra System 30 machine that is much smaller and lighter and has an integral PMT supply. The tantalums used in profusion in these 2 models can short and cause all sorts of mischief. In order to get the System 30 going, I had to replace a tantalum and an op amp.
If you could get your hands on a semiconductor detector or proportional chamber you could get a proton reading from your fusor.
Folks looking for documentation on the old MCAs might want to get in touch with Don Orie at OE Technologies (www.oetech.com). After striking out with Canberra for documentation on the System 30, I called Don, and he was able to supply xeroxed documentation at a very fair price.
The serial output on the older MCAs is very primitive, harking back to the dinosaur age of teletype, paper tape, and (fearfully advanced for those times)cassette. I'm looking at using a data acquisition program called Windmill to grab the serial data dump fom the MCA and stick it into a spreadsheet. Any information on the data output format from the old Canberra MCAs would be greatly appreciated(Canberra won't support them). Windmill is available as a free download from the folks who made it, with full documentation available for 50 quid or so (they're Limeys...). I don't have their contact info readily at hand, but they shouldn't be too hard to find, as their name popped up several times when I loaded the BullsEye search engine with "data acquisition software".
Richard Hester
Created on Friday, December 29, 2000 7:33 PM EDT by Richard L. Hester