Taking advantage of recent technical progress which has overcome some of the difficulties encountered in the 1960s in the radio detection of extensive air showers induced by ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECR), a new experimental apparatus (CODALEMA) has been built and operated. We will present the characteristics of this device and the analysis techniques that have been developed for observing electrical transients associated with cosmic rays. We find a collection of events for which both time and arrival direction coincidences between particle and radio signals are observed. The counting rate corresponds to shower energies ⩾ 5 × 10 16 eV . The performance level which has been reached considerably enlarges the perspectives for studying UHECR events using radio detection.