The first mosaics that we reduced were only made for testing purposes, to see how long the reduction would take and which problems we could get. These test mosaics were WN37.089 and WN37.078. They both lie in the Galactic Plane, so the noise levels in the maps are a little bit higher than in fields that lie out of the plane. Also we see more complex regions of emission, most likely H-II regions. These maps were analysed and a lot of tests were done like i) are all sources found given a lower fluxlimit, ii) are the components found real or are the source lists contaminated with spurious sources, iii) are the maxima of the sources in the right place, iv) howmany sources cannot be fitted, because the fitting routine is not converging, v) howmany sources are fitted but are not fitted well, vi) how fast is the batch in terms of CPU power, vii) how fast is the batch in terms of manpower (howmuch administrative work needs to be done like keeping track of the new arrived data, store it on DAT tape because the tapes are recycled and taken to Dwingeloo again, putting the maps in the AIPS filesystem, after the batch has finished checking the residual maps).
After these things were more or less sorted out, we defined the WENSS Mini Survey, which covered an area of 4 mosaics at 92 cm. This part of the sky is approximately 400 square degrees large. At 49 cm we have 9 mosaics which overlap the 92 cm maps. The mosaics involved are WN66.236, WN66.255, WN66.274, WN66.293, WF60.248, WF60.261, WF60.275, WF64.248, WF64.263, WF64.278, WF68.246, WF68.264 and WF68.281. This region near the North Ecliptic Pole was chosen, because it has a strong overlap with ROSAT and 6C fields. Therefore source comparison over a large wavelength regime would be possible. Since the first part of the science that we want to do involves source selection based on spectral information (like steep spectrum sources for high redshift radio galaxies and GPS sources for high redshift quasar candidates) comparison with other catalogues has our highest priority.