shotgun microphone
- April 25th, 2016
- Posted in diy
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I really kind of want to make one of these shotgun microphones from an Electronics Experimenter’s Handbook of many years ago:
Look at that thing, is that amazing or what? The frequency range isn’t as wide as it could be, but I don’t even know whether that matters too much in these sorts of applications. It’d be fun regardess! And maybe even actually useful in field recording. So frequency spectrum isn’t what I’m worried about.
I more worry about getting shot on sight by some cop after some idiot calls in a sniper.
I really wish I wasn’t making that up, but I’ve already been warned once that I’m inviting bullet danger with this thing. I’d say maybe I could paint it orange and put a big NERF sign on it, and that might work for me, but it wouldn’t work for everybody I know, because racism fucks everything, and I might, you know, want to loan it out or have somebody else adjust it and who even knows, right?
As impacts of the national-security fear state go, this is a pretty low-grade one, but it still sucks. And this is a case where being a supervillain doesn’t even help, because this is something you’d need to do in civvies, and secret identity blah blah blah why do I even have one if I can’t use it to MAKE FIELD RECORDINGS WITH AMAZING MICROPHONES THAT LOOK LIKE GIANT LASER WEAPONS OF THE 1960s?!
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I did build one about 40 years ago-cardboard tubes(Saran wrap tubes from the school kitchen) and a cigar box ( the plans were from one of the Radio Shack Transistor Projects books, I think). As I recall, it worked, but was fussy about aiming. I lived out in the country at the time, and tested it on songbirds and a pond full of frogs. Old school “crystal” piezo microphone and a cheap cassette recorder. At that time, I had no worries about getting shot, or looking up to find myself surrounded by cops..
They’re going to be very fussy about aiming indeed! “Shotgun” isn’t really even right with these things, it’s more “sniper.” Extremely narrow pickup ranges! But that’s kind of the point, after all.