Radio observations of the Hubble Deep Field-South region. I. Survey description and initial results

This paper is the first of a series describing the results of the Australia Telescope Hubble Deep Field-South radio survey. The survey was conducted at four wavelengths, 20, 11, 6, and 3 cm, over a 4 year period and achieves an rms sensitivity of about 10 mu Jy at each wavelength. We describe the observations and data reduction processes and present data on radio sources close to the center of the Hubble Deep Field-South. We discuss in detail the properties of a subset of these sources. The sources include both starburst galaxies and galaxies powered by an active galactic nucleus and range in redshift from 0.1 to 2.2. Some of them are characterized by unusually high radio-to-optical luminosities, presumably caused by dust extinction.