  We report the discovery by the HATSouth survey of HATS-3b, a transiting
extrasolar planet orbiting a V=12.4 F-dwarf star. HATS-3b has a period of P =
3.5479d, mass of Mp = 1.07MJ, and radius of Rp = 1.38RJ. Given the radius of
the planet, the brightness of the host star, and the stellar rotational
velocity (vsini = 9.0km/s), this system will make an interesting target for
future observations to measure the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect and determine its
spin-orbit alignment. We detail the low/medium-resolution reconnaissance
spectroscopy that we are now using to deal with large numbers of transiting
planet candidates produced by the HATSouth survey. We show that this important
step in discovering planets produces logg and Teff parameters at a precision
suitable for efficient candidate vetting, as well as efficiently identifying
stellar mass eclipsing binaries with radial velocity semi-amplitudes as low as
1 km/s.
