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Effelsberg Station Report
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The switchover to a new control system based on Linux and VME machines -
started last summer - has been more or less completed. VLBI with the MKIV and
the VLBA terminals both work fine, as well as all the single dish observing
modes of continuum, spectroscopy, and pulsars.

The DBBC and a Mark 5B+ are being installed in the Faraday room at Effelsberg
and test observations are planed for the week 3/2011. The Mark 5B+ will be
upgraded to Mark 5C as soon as the FiLA10G boards will become available. A new
Field System PC was set up for the new backends and parallel recording of the
old and new systems are planned for the EVN session in Feb/Mar 2011.

An RDBE produced by NRAO arrived in Bonn. After some initial testing it will
be installed at Effelsberg together with another Mark 5C. Software to control
it via the Field System has to be written still. Initially it can only record
2 Gb/s via a polyphase filterbank firmware. As the digital down-converter
firmware is not yet ready the old VLBA system has to be kept operational at
least till summer 2011. It is also required for the 80 Hz VLBA radiometry.

Evlbi is still possible via the Mark 5A connected to the MK IV terminal. After
successful testing of the DBBC, the Mark 5B+ will receive the double 1 Gb
Ethernet card for e-VLBI at 1024 Mb/s. With the FiLA10G it is expected that
the data-rates for eVLBI can be increased.