We present first results of the H_2_O Southern Galactic Plane Survey (HOPS), using the Mopra Radio Telescope with a broad-band backend and a beam size of about 2arcmin. We have observed 100deg^2^ of the southern Galactic plane at 12mm (19.5-27.5GHz), including spectral line emission from H_2_O masers, multiple metastable transitions of ammonia, cyanoacetylene, methanol and radio recombination lines. In this paper, we report on the characteristics of the survey and H2O maser emission. We find 540 H_2_O masers, of which 334 are new detections.
Cone search capability for table J/MNRAS/416/1764/table2 (Properties of detected water masers)