Abstract. The first measurements of the Australian National University's new radioactive ion beam capability were carried out using elastic scattering of a 8 Li radioactive beam from a 197 Au target. The purpose of this experiment was to test the radioactive ion beam capability as a complete system, which uses a pair of twin position-sensitive parallel plate avalanche counters as tracking detectors along with a highly pixelated double sided Si detector array. The tracking detector system allows us to have extremely high purity secondary radioactive ion beams by electronically tagging the reaction products of interest, thus allowing complete separation from the unwanted contaminant beam species of similar mass and charge. Here, some recent developments and characteristics of this system are presented.