shotgun microphone

[solarbird]

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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Comments

[vatine]

Yeah, that is definitely "gun-like" and may (or may not) provoke such a call. Hard to say, if you're sufficiently dressed in hi-vis, out in nature, you may just be taken for a normal hunter.

[solarbird]

Yeah, I thought about that, and that would help for that sort of thing, but in parks and town? No. And realistically, that's where I'd be doing this stuff most of the time if I built it.

[angelwolfgeek]

Maybe make it look like a wind instrument. Or cover it with foam tubing. Badguys don't cover guns in foam, right?

[solarbird]

The problem with all of those - it's a good idea - is that all those tubes have to be open to the air. They're all resonating at different limited ranges of frequencies, and that's key to how it works. So you really can't.

Which is a shame, because making it look like a big telescope would be both fitting and effective.