Living life on the edge - Widefield VLBI at 90 cm!

We report on a recent 90-cm wide-field VLBI survey of two 3.1-deg^2 fields using the VLBA, Westerbork and Jodrell Bank telescopes. In-beam calibration was used to calibrate each field; this process was simplified by imaging the calibrators in DIFMAP and transferring the calibration solutions to AIPS using the newly developed DIFMAP task cordump. We detected and imaged 13 out of the 141 sources originally detected by the low resolution (54") WENSS survey of the same two fields. The sources were detected at 7-12 sigma levels above the image noise, had total flux densities in the range of 85-1640 mJy and were located between 16' and 58' from the phase centre of each field. This is the first systematic (and non-biased), deep, high-resolution survey of the low-frequency radio sky. These initial results suggest that new instruments such as LOFAR should detect many compact radio sources and that plans to extend these arrays to baselines of several thousand kilometres are warranted.