An announcement from Dirk and the IVS Coordinating Center:
I’m pleased to announce that we will organize an IVS Technical Operations
Workshop (TOW) at the beginning of May (May 3–5, 2021) as a virtual meeting. As usual, the meeting will be oriented towards training and problem resolution in VLBI operations; this year’s TOW is intended to focus on VGOS. Given the virtual nature of this year’s installment, the hands-on part of TOW will be largely reduced. However, we felt it to be important to continue training and not to have a lapse of four years between workshops.
As in past workshops, the intended audience for this meeting is the technical staff of the stations. We plan on having Zoom live sessions in the mornings (U.S. East Coast time) of May 3-5, spread over 3-4 hours, plus several pre-recorded presentations. Only reg- istered participants will be able to attend the presentations. In order to get a head count of the expected crowd, we ask that you register on the TOW website; please do so no later than April 5. (Note: registration is now closed; please email tow2021@haystack.mit.edu for assistance.)
In addition to the TOW workshop itself, it is also planned to tag on a workshop about mixed-mode correlation directly following the TOW on May 6-7, also virtually. The intended audience here is the correlator staff of the correlators that will process VGOS data together with legacy S/X data. We ask the correlator personnel to indicate their intent to participate also by April 5.
Please see the TOW site, https://www.haystack.mit.edu/conference-2/TOW2021, for additional information.