Dear Jim,

I of course support all your comments, especially for the
work we did together and our conclusions we stressed
during the Nice meeting and in particular the danger of
using local ties at a weekly basis. The danger would be
more aggravated if the IERS tends to make available as
official products to non-specialist users, weekly combined
solutions which incorporate, each week, "not-weekly-measured"
and may be "out-of-control" local ties.

The only way I see to have some "control" on the local ties
and by the way to avoid their over-weighting  is to include them
once in a long-term solution as we suggested during the Nice
meeting. Again, it is much more realistic and safe to generate
long-term, well controlled per technique solutions (free of any
local tie) and then to combine these long-term per-technique
solutions including the local ties only once.

Therefore to be constructive, I would much prefer to have e-mail
discussion to see the opinion of the other WG members stating their
expectation and views of such weekly combined solutions.

I also had a look to the available SINEX files archived at
the CPP site and yes I agree that the IVS "combined" solutions
could not reasonably be used as they are for the reasons you
mentioned. On the other hand, beside the "official" ILRS combined
solutions provided by ASI there are also ILRS combined solutions
by NCL.

Regards
Zuheir