A new experiment for a high precision measurement of the pion mass is presented. It combines the cyclotron trap to produce pionic atoms in a small volume, with a doubly focussing crystal spectrometer to measure pionic and muonic X-ray transitions with high accuracy. The muonic X-rays will serve as new high precision standards. The first test experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the project. It yielded a preliminary value for the pion mass of (139570.71\pm 0.53) keV c². In combination with a recent muon momentum result a new value for the muon neutrino was obtained: M²_\nu\mu=(0.02898\pm0.03267) MeV²/c⁴. With some improvements which are being prepared, the next measurement can be expected to yield an accuracy of better than 1ppm for the pion mass and hence a limit smaller than 70 keVc² for the neutrino mass.

PACS numbers: 14.60.Pq