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Weak and Compact Radio Emission in Early High-Mass Star Forming Regions: I. VLA Observations

We present a high sensitivity radio continuum survey at 6 and 1.3$\,$cm using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array towards a sample of 58 high-mass star forming regions. Our sample was chosen from dust clumps within infrared dark clouds with and without IR sources (CMC-IRs, CMCs, respectively), and hot molecular cores (HMCs), with no previous, or relatively weak radio continuum detection at the $1\,$mJy level. Due to the improvement in the continuum sensitivity of the VLA, this survey achieved map rms levels of $\sim$ 3-10 $μ$Jy beam$^{-1}$ at sub-arcsecond angular resolution. We extracted 70 centimeter continuum sources associated with 1.2$\,$mm dust clumps. Most sources are weak, compact, and are prime candidates for high-mass protostars. Detection rates of radio sources associated with the mm dust clumps for CMCs, CMC-IRs and HMCs are 6$\%$, 53$\%$ and 100$\%$, respectively. This result is consistent with increasing high-mass star formation activity from CMCs to HMCs. The radio sources located within HMCs and CMC-IRs occur close to the dust clump centers with a median offset from it of 12,000$\,$AU and 4,000$\,$AU, respectively. We calculated 5 - 25$\,$GHz spectral indices using power law fits and obtain a median value of 0.5 (i.e., flux increasing with frequency), suggestive of thermal emission from ionized jets. In this paper we describe the sample, observations, and detections. The analysis and discussion will be presented in Paper II.