© Paolo Soletta, INAF–OAC 2025
By Marjolein Verkouter
Due to scheduling conflicts with several other VLBI-related meetings in April and May 2025, the joint EVN Technical Operations Group (TOG) and 6th GMVA Technical Group (TG) meeting was rescheduled to 4–5 September 2025. The meeting was hosted by INAF–OAC and the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT). In total, 42 participants registered, with at least 25 attending in person.
The EVN TOG meeting took place at INAF–OAC in Cagliari, while the GMVA TG meeting was held at the SRT site and included a guided tour of the facility, giving participants the chance to visit the secondary-focus cabin—if they dared to climb the stairs—and to see the tri-band receiver currently undergoing commissioning.
The joint meeting focused on topics affecting both VLBI arrays, including progress towards deployment of the DBBC3 backend, installation and commissioning of tri-band receivers and frequency phase transfer, the status of the EVN Storage Pool at JIVE (currently providing 10 PB of online, hard-disk-based storage), and efforts to improve the EVN network through enhanced monitoring of participating stations. Read the full EVN TOG agenda here and the GMVA TG agenda here.
Active, in-person participation in the EVN TOG and GMVA TG meetings remains a vital element in transforming the individual radio-astronomical telescopes of both networks into powerful, coherent instruments, enabling the delivery of unique science to the research community.