Parkes transient events : I. Database of single pulses, initial results, and missing fast radio bursts

A large number of observations from the Parkes 64 m diameter radio telescope, recorded with high time resolution, are publicly available. We have reprocessed all of the observations obtained during the first four years (from 1997-2001) of the Parkes Multibeam Receiver system in order to identify transient events, and have built a database that records the 568,736,756 pulse candidates generated during this search. We have discovered a new fast radio burst (FRB), FRB 010305, with a dispersion measure (DM) of 350 5 cm-3 pc and explored why so few FRBs have been discovered in data prior to 2001. After accounting for the dispersion smearing across the channel bandwidth and the sky regions surveyed, the number of FRBs is found to be consistent with model predictions. We also present five single pulse candidates from unknown sources, but with Galactic DMs. We extract a diverse range of sources from the database, which can be used, for example, as a training set of data for new software being developed to search for FRBs in the presence of radio frequency interference