Multifrequency variability of OJ 287 before and during the next outburst

The BL Lac object OJ 287 (z0.306) is a highly variable, lowenergy peakedblazar, which has shown intermittent emission with outstanding pseudoperiodicoutbursts every 1112 years. Longterm and denselysampled light curves havebeen collected in the radio and optical bands since 1891. We aim at studying thespectral and temporal behaviour of OJ 287, on both long and short time scales,in the radio, mm, optical, UV and Xray band, before the next major outburst,expected to occur in spring or fall 2006. Groundbased multifrequency campaignshave already been planned in the frame of the WEBT and ENIGMA collaborations andVLBI observations proposed, in order to search for correlations among thesynchrotron radiomm flux, the parsec jet structure and the inverseCompton Xray emission. truncated!, Please see actual data for full text [truncated!, Please see actual data for full text]