We present a newly designed compact grating spectrometer for the energy range from 210 eV to 1250 eV, which would include the K alpha(1,2) emission lines of vital elements like C, N, and O. The spectrometer is based on a grazing incidence spherical varied line spacing grating with 2400 l/mm at its center and a radius of curvature of 58 542 mm. First, results show a resolving power of around 1000 at an energy of 550 eV and a working spectrometer for high vacuum (10(-4) mbar) environment without losing photon intensity.