Torun Station Report to be presented at TOG meeting (Catania)

The 32 m radio telescope is presently fully operational. In the year 1998
the percentage of failer time was 3.0, maintenance and service took 6.2 %
and the rest belonged to scientific programs. 

Recent developments (since the last TOG meeting)

 1) Repair of the recorder unit has been made at Metron (Great Britain).
    After replacement of the headstack and adjustments to the tape guidance
    the recorder performance is much better. This was evident in the results
    of the November '98 session.

 2) Assembling of the UHF receiving system (750-940 or 950-1150 MHz).
    It has rather low sensitivity since the receiving antenna is placed
    in the secondary focus and inside the L-band horn. We plan to improve
    the system.

 3) 5 cm (6 GHz) receiver built earlier in 1998 has been improved. Now, since
    its passband spans down to 5 GHz, the 5 cm system can be used as a reference
    for beam swithing for the 6 cm system.

 4) A two channel 22 GHz system should be ready by the end of this year.
    It will be used principally for VLBI and for single telescope spectral work.

 5) Construction of a new 16 k channel correlator has been finalized
    in January 1999. It is based on CMOS technique and includes a dedicated
    PC run under the Linux operating system.

 6) New permanent position has been established for an observatory frequency
    manager, who is also responsible for the protection zone around the radio
    telescope.


Problems awaiting solution:

 1) The VLBI terminal may still need certain tape guidance adjustments. Results 
    of the most recent session (February '99) will be decisive in this respect.

 2) Interference problems are severe at UHF an L bands.

 3) The IF patching is planned, but in fact quite many its components are ready.