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Medicina

A. Orfei announced (see Appendix 1) that the Italians were in the process of deciding whether to build a new compact/cheap 10 station MkII correlator based on advanced technology. A final decision was expected before the end of this year. Several participants expressed interest in this new development. K. Ruf felt that the MkII system might still be useful for adhoc experiments outside of the usual EVN sessions. T. Foley noted that at low frequncies the MkII system was just as useful as the MkIII system since the usable observing bands were only a few MHz wide. No decision had been taken yet on whether the correlator would be able to handle spectral line data. P. Burgess asked whether the correlator would be generally available to the EVN and whether PI's would be given support at the correlator. A. Orfei beleived that both would be possible. T. Foley noted that the old routine of switching to and fro between one recording system and another (within a VLBI session) was a significant overhead on VLBI operations. K. Ruf suggested that if MkII was ressurected then it ought to be done in a seperate network or a ``MkII only session''. There was some discussion about how MkII proposals would be dealt with given that the EVN PC had decided that they would no longer be considered. M.A. Garrett felt that it was too early to worry about these details. Once the correlator had been built and was operational a decision could be made. Until then the important thing was to ensure that the EVN (and other VLBI stations) did not dismantle the present MkII systems given that a new correlator might become available in the near future. It was possible that the new correlator would come on-line too late to save the MkII system. T. Foley noted that several MkIII systems had now found there way into parts of the former Soviet Union.

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