... These observations are a precursor to a large scale, extragalactic, Zone of Avoidance (ZOA) survey with the Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA). ... Full survey observations, which will begin in 2007, will reveal local large scale structure in a part of the extragalactic sky that is relatively unexplored due to the obscuration of optical light by dust in our Galaxy. ... Figure 3 Spectrum of a previously unknown galaxy from the precursor observations. Figure 4 HI Image of the galaxy from Figure 3. ...

... 2.3 Data acquisition Spectra generated by the Multibeam correlator contain the usual structure seen in spectra from other H i instruments: a bandpass spectrum which is the sum of the sky , ground and receiver temperatures multiplied by the product of the filters in the receiver chain; superimposed on this is a noise ... Note also that sources extended much beyond ,40 arcmin can be imaged poorly in HIPASS images because of the bandpass sidelobe effect described in Section 3.3. ...