FRBs and pulsars with MeerKAT and the Nançay Radio Observatory telescopes

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are incredibly luminous radio transients of micro to millisecond duration originating from cosmological distances. Despite rapid progress over the last 15 years and several hundreds of FRB discoveries, their physical origins remain a mystery. Since late 2019, our MeerTRAP team has conducted an FRB survey at the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array. In my talk, I will present the first FRB sample discovered so far, amounting to about two dozen new FRBs. In particular, I will discuss their sample properties, such as their observed burst morphologies, scattering and scintillation parameters and what they tell us about intervening ionised media. I will then focus on a few science highlights, such as the FRB host galaxy associations and what the MeerTRAP sample implies for the FRB all-sky rate and cosmology. In the second part of my talk, I will present initial results from a simultaneous multi-telescope multi-frequency campaign that we recently performed with the telescopes at the Nançay Radio Observatory and the upgraded GMRT to understand the wide-band single-pulse properties of bright northern radio pulsars. The slides were presented at the 2023 Kerastari Workshop "Timing and Imaging of compact sources with SKA pathfinders and precursors" in Kerastari, Greece.