The Red Tide Spectrometer

Red Tide/USB650 Features

• Preconfigured spectrometer for 350 to 1000 nm range
• 650 element detector for nominal 2.0 nm resolution
• Highly cost effective optical tool for most general spectral measurements
• Can be used for transmittance, absorbance, reflectance and irradiance measurements
• USB interface for direct, efficient spectrometer-to-computer connection

The Red Tide Spectrometer, also known as the USB650, is the world's most amazing low cost spectrometer. It is both low cost and a truly utilitarian tool that is ideal for many general purpose spectral measurements.

The Red Tide Spectrometer has a pre- configured range of from 350 to 1000 nm and a resolution of ~2.0 nm. It can be used with most all Ocean Insights‘ accessories to provide many and varied measurements.

Red Tide Design

This utilitarian spectrometer is of an asymmetrical crossed Czerny-Turner optical design with a 42 mm input / 68 mm output focal length. The detector is a linear silicon CCD array with 650 enabled detecytor elements (pixels). The input slit is 25 µm wide with the optical signal being received via a fiber optic line, with a 905 SMA connector. The signal to noise ratio is 250 : 1. The A/D resolution of 12 bits provides a dynamic ran ge of 2X10⁸ overall. Integration time is variable from 3 ms through 65 s.

Set-up

There are two configurations for the Red Tide spectrometer. One is a standard spectrometer system which includes an attached tungsten light source and a cuvette sample holder. This latter system is a true spectrophotometer similar to the CHEMUSB4-VIS/NIR system. Both configurations interface to a computer, via USB 2.0 port. The spectrometer configuration (USB-650) can be used with various OceanOptics spectrometer accessories, light sources and sampling optics, so as to create application-specific systems for various transmission, absorbance, reflection and emission applications. The spectrophotometer configuration (USB-650-UV-VIS or USB-650-VIS) comes both in a UV/VIS and a VIS-NIR version.

The USB650-VIS/NIR is an excellent value as it is a true spectrophotometer that covers the full visible and some of the near infrared spectrum. On the other hand, purchase of the UV/VIS version is not recommended because of the expense for a limited ultraviolet range addition.

Note that the OceanOptics “OceanView” software is suggested for the operating software, OceanView is a modular, Java-based spectroscopy software platform that operates on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.