AbstractThe results of the activity over the last few years of a Ukrainian and Russian joint team are presented. The discussed topics are: calculations of the probing beam trajectories; optimization of the heavy ion beam probing (HIBP) installation on fusion devices; hardware used in the experiments; recent results obtained on the small tokamaks TJ-1 and T-10; extension of HIBP diagnostics to stellarators and to next-step tokamaks. A new stable and intense mode of a solid state emitter and the use of a Na probing beam are proposed to modify the beam emission spectroscopy injector technique.