In this article a recently constructed scanning electrochemical microscope
with an original automatic target location facility is described and its op
eration is demonstrated on different targets. The measuring tip positioning
device is based on stepper motor driven linear modules with 75 nm linear t
ravel resolution. The home-built electronic unit and the Windows 95 compati
ble measuring and image-forming program furnish the microscope to operate i
n both amperometric and potentiometric modes. A novel, simplex algorithm ba
sed automatic target location program was developed to substitute the tedio
us and lengthy manual tip positioning. In this article different strategies
are described and the most important results of this investigation are sum
marized.