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We present the full source catalogue from the Australia Telescope 20 GHz (AT20G) Survey. The AT20G is a blind radio survey carried out at 20 GHz with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) from 2004 to 2008, and covers the whole sky south of declination 0°. The AT20G source catalogue presented here is an order of magnitude larger than any previous catalogue of high-frequency radio sources, and includes 5890 sources above a 20 GHz flux-density limit of 40 mJy. All AT20G sources have total intensity and polarization measured at 20 GHz, and most sources south of declination also have near-simultaneous flux-density measurements at 5 and 8 GHz. A total of 1559 sources were detected in polarized total intensity at one or more of the three frequencies. The completeness of the AT20G source catalogue is 91 per cent above 100 mJy beam−1 and 79 per cent above 50 mJy beam−1 in regions south of declination . North of , some observations of sources between 14 and 20 h in right ascension were lost due to bad weather and could not be repeated, so the catalogue completeness is lower in this region. Each detected source was visually inspected as part of our quality control process, and so the reliability of the final catalogue is essentially 100 per cent. We detect a small but significant population of non-thermal sources that are either undetected or have only weak detections in low-frequency catalogues. We introduce the term Ultra-Inverted Spectrum to describe these radio sources, which have a spectral index and which constitute roughly 1.2 per cent of the AT20G sample. The 20 GHz flux densities measured for the strongest AT20G sources are in excellent agreement with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe ( WMAP) 5-year source catalogue of Wright et al., and we find that the WMAP source catalogue is close to complete for sources stronger than 1.5 Jy at 23 GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present some first results on the variability, polarization and general properties of radio sources selected at 20 GHz, the highest frequency at which a sensitive radio survey has been carried out over a large area of sky. Sources with flux densities above 100 mJy in the Australia Telescope Compact Array 20 GHz pilot survey at declination −60° to −70° were observed at up to three epochs during 2002–04, including near-simultaneous measurements at 5, 8 and 18 GHz in 2003. Of the 173 sources detected, 65 per cent are candidate QSOs or BL Lac objects, 20 per cent galaxies and 15 per cent faint optical objects or blank fields. On a 1–2 yr time-scale, the general level of variability at 20 GHz appears to be low. For the 108 sources with good-quality measurements in both 2003 and 2004, the median variability index at 20 GHz was 6.9 per cent and only five sources varied by more than 30 per cent in flux density. Most sources in our sample show low levels of linear polarization (typically 1–5 per cent), with a median fractional polarization of 2.3 per cent at 20 GHz. There is a trend for fainter 20 GHz sources to have higher fractional polarization. At least 40 per cent of sources selected at 20 GHz have strong spectral curvature over the frequency range 1–20 GHz. We use a radio ‘two-colour diagram’ to characterize the radio spectra of our sample, and confirm that the flux densities of radio sources at 20 GHz (which are also the foreground point-source population for cosmic microwave background anisotropy experiments like Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and Planck) cannot be reliably predicted by extrapolating from surveys at lower frequencies. As a result, direct selection at 20 GHz appears to be a more efficient way of identifying 90 GHz phase calibrators for Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) than the currently proposed technique of extrapolation from radio surveys at 1–5 GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]