At the GFZ-Potsdam we have designed, built and installed in-house upgrades to both the airlock and sample stage which allow us to operate our Cameca 6f instrument with a significantly reduced hydrogen background with the sample maintained at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Here we describe in detail the nature of these modifications and report some of the challenges which were encountered during the development process. The primary motivation for this undertaking was to suppress hydrogen vacuum contamination which adversely impacts the detection limit for intra-crystalline H in specific and which degrades overall data quality in general. A subsidiary goal was to assess the feasibility of using SIMS to analyze frozen, near-surface fluid inclusions. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.