Millimetre continuum emission from symbiotic stars - I. The measurements

We report millimetre-wave continuum observations of symbiotic stars obtained using the Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Owens Valley Radio Observatory millimetre array. Complementary centimetre-wave observations from the Very Large Array and the Australia Telescope Compact Array, often obtained within weeks of the millimetre-wave data, are also described. As a result of these measurements, the number of symbiotics observed at millimetre wavelengths has increased from 6 to 32, adding He2-38, BICru, He2-104, He2-106 (= V835Cen), He2-171, He2-176, AS210, H1-36, AS289, K3-9, CHCyg, RRTel and ZAnd to the list of those detected. We note that several sources are variable at millimetre wavelengths and we discuss these objects individually. Additionally, we report 0.45-mm upper limits for HMSge and V1016Cyg - dusty symbiotics previously detected at 0.8-2.0mm. We demonstrate that most of the symbiotics detected at centimetre wavelengths, including several with known binary periods, will fall above the detection threshold of new millimetre-wave bolometer arrays, thus allowing us more stringently to test the standard binary models for symbiotic radio emission. In Paper II we shall describe our fits to the data presented here, concentrating on prototypical systems such as ZAnd and AGPeg.