  A pilot survey has been made to obtain 21cm HI emission line profiles for 197
objects in the Zone of Avoidance (ZoA) that were classified as galaxies in the
2MASS all-sky near-infrared Extended Source Catalog (2MASX). 116 of the sources
were observed using the Nancay radio telescope, in the 325 to 11,825 km/s
range, and the other 81 sources were observed at Arecibo in the -500 to 11,000
km/s range, and for 9 also in the 9,500 to 21,000 km/s range. Global HI line
parameters are presented for the 22 and 29 2MASX objects that were detected at
Nancay and Arecibo, respectively, as well as upper limits for the undetected
2MASX objects. Whereas object 2MASX J08170147-3410277 appears to be a very
massive galaxy with an HI mass of 4.6 x 10E10 Msun, it is clear that only radio
synthesis HI imaging observations will allow a firm conclusion on this.
Overall, the global properties of the detected galaxies match those of other
ZoA HI surveys. Although the detections are as yet too sparse to give further
insight into suspected or unknown large-scale structures in the ZoA, they
already indicate that an extension of the present pilot survey is bound to
quantify filaments, clusters, and voids behind this part of the Milky Way. It
is shown that the number of candidate 2MASS-selected ZoA galaxies to be
observed in HI could have been reduced by about 15% through examination of
composite near-infrared images and the application of extinction-corrected
near-infrared colour limits. Present results confirm that the Galactic
extinction values from Schlegel et al. (1998) are valid for latitudes above
|b|=5 degrees, but increasingly less so for lower latitudes.
