We present the results of a 430-MHz survey for pulsars conducted during the upgrade to the 305-m Arecibo radio telescope .
Our survey covered a total of 1147 deg ^ { 2 } of sky using a drift-scan technique .
We detected 33 pulsars , 10 of which were not known prior to the survey observations .
The highlight of the new discoveries is PSR J0407+1607 , which has a spin period of 25.7 ms , a characteristic age of 1.5 Gyr and is in a 1.8-yr orbit about a low-mass ( > 0.2 M _ { \odot } ) companion .
The long orbital period and small eccentricity ( e = 0.0009 ) make the binary system an important new addition to the ensemble of binary pulsars suitable to test for violations of the strong equivalence principle .
We also report on our initially unsuccessful attempts to detect optically the companion to J0407+1607 which imply that its absolute visual magnitude is > 12.1 .
If , as expected on evolutionary grounds , the companion is an He white dwarf , our non-detection imples a cooling age of least 1 Gyr .