A new 7-beam 6 - 7 GHz receiver has been built to survey the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds for newly forming high-mass stars that are pinpointed by strong methanol maser emission at 6668 MHz .
The receiver was jointly constructed by Jodrell Bank Observatory ( JBO ) and the Australia Telescope National Facility ( ATNF ) and allows simultaneous coverage at 6668 and 6035 MHz .
It was successfully commissioned at Parkes in January 2006 and is now being used to conduct the Parkes-Jodrell multibeam maser survey of the Milky Way .
This will be the first systematic survey of the entire Galactic plane for masers of not only 6668-MHz methanol , but also 6035-MHz excited-state hydroxyl .
The survey is two orders of magnitude faster than most previous systematic surveys and has an rms noise level of \sim 0.17 Jy .
This paper describes the observational strategy , techniques and reduction procedures of the Galactic and Magellanic Cloud surveys , together with deeper , pointed , follow-up observations and complementary observations with other instruments .
It also includes an estimate of the survey detection efficiency .
The 111 days of observations with the Parkes telescope have so far yielded > 800 methanol sources , of which \sim 350 are new discoveries .
The whole project will provide the first comprehensive Galaxy-wide catalogue of 6668-MHz and 6035-MHz masers .