This triennium began with an action to re-create the Terms of Reference for the Working Group Global VLBI (WG-GV). These had been lost over the years since the Group was established in 1990. Fortunately, the personal archive of one long-term member yielded a copy of the original memorandum by R. D. Ekers, which was found to coincide quite well with current practice and areas of interest. New Terms of Reference, based on modern conditions, were drafted and accepted by both IAU and URSI.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a global project to design and build a new generation radio telescope at metre to centimetre wavelengths.

LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) is an innovative radio telescope optimized for the frequency range 30–240 MHz. The telescope is realized as a phased aperture array without any moving parts. Digital beam forming allows the telescope to point to any part of the sky within a second. Transient buffering makes retrospective imaging of explosive short-term events possible. The scientific focus of LOFAR will initially be on four key science projects (KSPs): (i) Detection of the formation of the very first stars and galaxies in the universe during the so-called epoch of reionization by measuring the power spectrum of the neutral hydrogen 21-cm line (Shaver et al. 1999) on the ∼ 5′ scale; (ii) Low-frequency surveys of the sky with of order 108 expected new sources; (iii) All-sky monitoring and detection of transient radio sources such as γ-ray bursts, X-ray binaries, and exo-planets (Farrell et al. 2004); and (iv) Radio detection of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos (Falcke & Gorham 2003) allowing for the first time access to particles beyond 1021 eV (Scholten et al. 2006). Apart from the KSPs open access for smaller projects is also planned. Here we give a brief description of the telescope.

The questions addressed in this large and popular meeting were: What mature proposals for the new large astronomical facilities of the next decade are available? When can they be funded? What international planning is underway?

Two projects are discussed in which a phase referencing technique is used to determine stellar parallaxes and/or proper motions by means of the circumstellar masers. The observations are special in the sense that both continuum and line sources need to be detected. To obtain stellar motions assumptions on the location of the maser with respect to the star need to be made.

We have started phase referenced monitoring of the 1667 MHz masers in the Mira variable U Her. Ultimately we hope to determine the annual parallax for this star. Three sets of VLB A observations have been performed so far. The first on July 22 1994, the second on March 6 1995 and a third on August 14 1995. Observations included bright extragalactic sources to calibrate instrumental effects and cycles of calibrator–source–calibrator (≈ 2° away) of typically 6 minutes. Without any special astrometric analysis software we detect the proper motion of U Her with an accuracy of several milli–arcseconds.