Setup of a prototype for the SHiP Straw Tracker Spectrometer

SHiP is a proposed general-purpose fixed-target experiment utilising 400 GeV protons from CERN's SPS accelerator. Its main focus is the search for hidden particles ("SHiP") such as Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) in the intensity frontier. Besides, SHiP will also offer unparalleled measurements with $\tau$-neutrinos and neutrino-induced charm production. To fulfil this goal SHiP is designed as a bipartite detector consisting of an Emulsion Spectrometer and a Hidden Sector Decay Spectrometer. A crucial component of the latter is the Spectrometer Straw Tracker (SST) consisting of roughly 16000 straw tubes operated horizontally with an unprecedented length of five metres. Its purpose is the reconstruction of the vertices and masses of the hidden particles' trajectories. Currently, a prototype of the SST consisting of four straw tubes is being built at Hamburg University. The layout of this prototype and first results will be presented in this talk.