  We present atmospheric parameters for 51 nearby FG dwarfs uniformly
distributed over the -2.60 < [Fe/H] < +0.20 metallicity range that is suitable
for the Galactic chemical evolution research. Lines of iron, Fe I and Fe II,
were used to derive a homogeneous set of effective temperatures, surface
gravities, iron abundances, and microturbulence velocities. We used
high-resolution (R>60000) Shane/Hamilton and CFHT/ESPaDOnS observed spectra and
non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) line formation for Fe I and Fe II in
the classical 1D model atmospheres. The spectroscopic method was tested with
the 20 benchmark stars, for which there are multiple measurements of the
infrared flux method (IRFM) Teff and their Hipparcos parallax error is < 10%.
We found NLTE abundances from lines of Fe I and Fe II to be consistent within
0.06 dex for every benchmark star, when applying a scaling factor of S_H = 0.5
to the Drawinian rates of inelastic Fe+H collisions. The obtained atmospheric
parameters were checked for each program star by comparing its position in the
log g-Teff plane with the theoretical evolutionary track in the Yi et al.
(2004) grid. Our final effective temperatures lie in between the T_IRFM scales
of Alonso et al. (1996) and Casagrande et al. (2011), with a mean difference of
+46 K and -51 K, respectively. NLTE leads to higher surface gravity compared
with that for LTE. The shift in log g is smaller than 0.1 dex for stars with
either [Fe/H] > -0.75, or Teff < 5750 K, or log g > 4.20. NLTE analysis is
crucial for the VMP turn-off and subgiant stars, for which the shift in log g
between NLTE and LTE can be up to 0.5 dex. The obtained atmospheric parameters
will be used in the forthcoming papers to determine NLTE abundances of
important astrophysical elements from lithium to europium and to improve
observational constraints on the chemo-dynamical models of the Galaxy
evolution.

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics