ABSTRACT
A brief review of timing and focal plane detectors for heavy ions in spectrographs is given. Then the concept and the performance of the GSI-magnetic spectrograph is presented. The rapid development of various types of ionization and proportional detectors led to the design of a new group of spectrographs with excellent ion optical focusing, a large solid angle and a large dispersion to meet the properties of the available detectors. But very often the detectors could not completely make use of the full focal length of the spectrographs. The consequence is that a spectrograph has to cover a large momentum byte of the order of 20 % or more in order to avoid arbitrary cuts in the spectra for each nuclide. The reaction products from different micro-bunches may surpass each other in the spectrograph. The kinematical broadening leads to a shift of the focal plane of the spectrograph.
