New fieldwork equipment

[more in the series of old partial posts with current relevance.. this one edited since it’s been pointed out that the original post was rather cryptic.]

I had a bunch of new equipment to take to the field last year:

• new earphones (much smaller than my previous travel pair)
• SD digi video
• Edirol R-09 (used before, but not in Australia)
• Audiotechnica Pro70 microphones. My setup has two microphones joined to a single plug (one for each channel).
• External laptop battery

It all worked pretty well. There were a few issues, though.

The external laptop battery was a hassle to get through airport security. The battery is about the size of a laptop, although much lighter and flatter. This makes it appear to be a suspicious electronic device on X-ray scans. It wasn’t something that the security people had seen before, so they just screened it a few times then searched me. It caused a particular problem once or twice because they rescreened my whole bag without closing it, so a whole bunch of stuff fell out (stuff like original fieldnotes) and ended up in the scanning machine. I didn’t lose anything and the TSA people were contrite, but all the contrition in the world doesn’t make up for a lost original field notebook.

I didn’t like the fact that the mics are undetachable from each other. That is, you can’t just use one mic. I also had a big wind-interference problem on this trip. I was there later in the year than previous trips. If I was recording a single speaker I had to wrap the other microphone in something to avoid picking up wind noise. And shielding the speaker’s mic was hard, too. It’s just about impossible  to wear a lapel mic with a sock over it! Maybe I should have brought some baby socks.

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