1. List of action items

1. Wunderlich to distribute the vacuum switching memo together with a blank PCB to upgraded EVN observatories before end of July.
2. All stations planning to use vacuum switching: adjust your tape recorder now for 15in operation with thick tape.
3. Perea remebered that he had got an email about suitable recontouring tapes and he promised to email it to Ruf for distribution.
4. Ruf to ask NRAO for thin tapes for verification of station compatibility with the VLBA correlator. Porcas suggested that this can be actually assigned to Mioduszewski.
5. All stations with thin tape upgrade: record (RF/IF) noise on this thin record quality verification tape and send it to Socorro for analysis.
6. Porcas to ensure that pointers to EVN station Mark IV capability status table and SCHED setup files for Mark IV observing can be found in the proposal guide.
7. Burgess or Ralph Spencer to organize this ``VIV kick-off'' meeting.
8. All stations: Send updates of station information (especially including when thin tape is available on your station) to Porcas (porcas@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de).
9. Porcas to contact Mike Garrett (JIVE) to arrange for station status table updates in JIVE WWW and PI information.
10. Ruf contacts Arthur Niell (Haystack) to get details of the thin tape purchase plans of the geodetic community and to discuss the possibility of combining purchases.
11. Himwich to encourage geodetic stations to use Track, either the Web or the terminal version. (Contact ``vlbatape@nrao.edu'' for new station arrangements and passwords.)
12. All stations: list the boundary conditions and timescales for reaction to target of opportunity proposals.
13. Perea to send JPL IF switchbox capabilities documentation to Ruf. Altunin to email possible Web references about the box to Ruf.
14. Ruf to send the block schedule to DSN/Madrid as early as possible indicating especially the CAL observation.
15. Gurvits to ask Rolf Schwarz (MPIfR/Bonn) for an ASCII version of the block schedule and to arrange that it gets updated to JIVE Web pages.
16. Gurvits contacts Richard Schilizzi (JIVE) to enforce the EVN Board of Directors' meeting decision in March 1997 to provide 24 hours before the beginning of a given session for system checkout, plus an additional 12 hours before each frequency change.
17. Porcas to ``publicize'' on the ``evntech@nfra.nl'' mailing list the email addresses of the PIs of a given session at the moment when the schedule files should be frozen on ``astbo1''. This enables station technical friends to easily contact PIs for clarifications.
18. Gurvits: to recommend to the EVN Board of Directors (BD) that manpower to scheduling software should be allocated.
19. Porcas promised to make sure that next call for proposals will include enough pointers that the PIs can understand the new features available with SCHED+VEX+Mark IV.
20. Burgess will talk to Ralph Spencer (Jodrell) about a possible candidate for writing Linux/FS-compatible control software and asks Ralph to add this to the EMU/VIV meeting agenda in September.
21. Whenever the amplitude calibration of a given station is off by more than 5%, Conway feeds this back to station(s) involved.
22. Conway to make sure that all JIVE support scientists know about good calibrators and will recommend putting them into schedules.
23. Porcas to distribute guidelines to proposers as how to propose a ``TOO'' to the EVN.
24. Altunin to send DSN scheduling and station contact information to ``jive@jive.nfra.nl'' for inclusion in JIVE/EVN Web pages http://www.nfra.nl/jive/evn/network/members.html.
25. Mioduzsewski to look up this information, i.e. how to arrange access to ``weight plots'' and send the results of this to ``evntech@nfra.nl''.
26. Foley to send these Westerbork updates to Porcas for inclusion to the EVN status table.