Experience with VXI electronics and data acquisition for the EUROGAM spectrometer

During 1992--1993 the Nuclear Structure Facility at Daresbury Laboratory hosted phase one of the EUROGAM experimental program. These were the first nuclear physics experiments to make large scale use of the VXIbus standard for electronics and data acquisition. EUROGAM phase 1 was made up of an array of 45 escape suppressed Germanium (Ge) detectors. It was used for gamma-ray spectroscopy both stand-along and in conjunction with external detectors including the Daresbury Recoil Separator (RS), isomer detectors and various particle detectors. An overview of the system, details of special VXI cards, the readout and trigger systems for EUROGRAM have been previously reported at the 1991 IEEE-NSS. Here the authors report on how they worked in real experiments