A deep survey of the AKARI north ecliptic pole field I. WSRT 20 cm radio survey description, observations and data reduction

Aims. The Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope, WSRT, has been used to make a deep radio survey of an similar to 1.7 degree(2) field coinciding with the AKARI north ecliptic pole deep field. The observations, data reduction and source count analysis are presented, along with a description of the overall scientific objectives. Methods. The survey consisted of 10 pointings, mosaiced with enough overlap to maintain a similar sensitivity across the central region that reached as low as 21 mu Jy beam(-1) at 1.4 GHz. Results. A catalogue containing 462 sources detected with a resolution of 17.0 '' x 15.5 '' is presented. The differential source counts calculated from the WSRT data have been compared with those from the shallow VLA - NEP survey of Kollgaard et al. 1994, and show a pronounced excess for sources fainter than similar to 1 mJy, consistent with the presence of a population of star forming galaxies at sub-mJy flux levels. Conclusions. The AKARI north ecliptic pole deep field is the focus of a major observing campaign conducted across the entire spectral region. The combination of these data sets, along with the deep nature of the radio observations will allow unique studies of a large range of topics including the redshift evolution of the luminosity function of radio sources, the clustering environment of radio galaxies, the nature of obscured radio-loud active galactic nuclei, and the radio/far-infrared correlation for distant galaxies. This catalogue provides the basic data set for a future series of paper dealing with source identifications, morphologies, and the associated properties of the identified radio sources.