> Is there a site in this country, that i may have missed,or
> one in the USA that will ship.
Have you tried Sound Professionals? (www.soundprofessionals.com) They
have those small mics all made up in stereo pairs and they take plug-in
power. I don't know if they ship to Canada, but it seems worthwhile to ask
by email or even telephone them. I ship to Canada all the time. It can be
done, though you should insist that they ship by US Mail, it's a lot cheaper
than UPS.
On making dishes: I made a 24" fiberglass dish a few years ago. It works
great, but I used to build boats so I made it a little more rugged than I
needed to so it is heavy. I bought some Kevlar/carbon fiber cloth a year
ago, intending to put what I'd learned to use and make a super-light one,
but haven't done so yet. I made a handy spreadsheet to help design the
parabola. It's easy to do with a pencil and paper or calculator, but the
spreadsheet makes it really quick and easy to explore the use of different
focal lengths. The spreadsheet is here:
http://www.wildbirdshop.com/temp/Parabola.xls. Someone mentioned the need
to use a computer designed parabola cut on a CNC machine or something.
Sounds cool, but that's not necessary. You can build a mold on a plywood
disk by piling up styrofoam circles, rasping them to rough dimensions,
laying on a layer of sheetrock mud, sanding and measuring (make a cutout of
your parabola from 1/4 plywood, gatorboard, or similar) until you have a
parabolic dome. Melt some paraffin into the surface of the sheetrock mud
(to act as a mold release agent) with a heat gun or hair dryer. There's
your basic mold. You'll need to think of a way to stiffen the rim, and that
might require some additional mold work, depending on how you do it. Drape
the cloth over the mold, work some epoxy into the cloth, let it cure and
you've got a dish. It's the cheapest way to get a dish (other than picking
up an old satellite TV dish from the recycle center) but not if you include
the value of your time. It's well worth it if you want to specify the
dimensions of your dish.
I use an AudioTechnica AT822 microphone in my dish. It points in towards
the dish and it is positioned so that, when in the "focal zone" of the dish
the mic's reception angle just about exactly covers the area of the dish. I
did this deliberately because it seemed like a good idea to me at the time.
That was before I joined this group and learned that it's a bad idea.
Personally, I think it sounds good, but it is true that the mic sticks way
out there in front and could snag bushes and stuff. It doesn't cause me any
problems, but I'm not you. For my next trick I've been thinking about using
an AT3035 (mono) and put it in a dish with a slightly shorter focal length.
As I understand it, that should give me better low frequencies. A 5" focal
length would put the mic inside the rim of the dish (in a 24" diameter dish)
and allow for a windscreen to be stretched over the entire dish just like a
drumhead. That would be pretty handy here on the coast. Longer focal
lengths result in a shallower dish for a given diameter and would require
some sort of curved supports across the front of the dish to hold the
windscreen out away from the mic, but that wouldn't be too bad, either. One
nice thing about making your own dish is that you can mess with it, changing
mics and stuff like that, without trepidation. People who buy finished
things tend not to fiddle with them - a mistake, in my opinion.
--Brian M. Godfrey
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