Hi Valerie,
I just got some gear for long term unattended recording of frogs,
and thought I'd pass on the details, since it might apply. No doubt
there are other solutions out there.
The Marantz PMD 620 (~$450 as configured) is the first digital field
recorder I've seen that might actually work for me. With a 16GB SD
card, I should get 55 continuous hours of WAV recording, and
presumably about three weeks of MP3. With the voice activation
feature recording, you could greatly exceed even that. This
presupposes the power to do so, and along those lines I am looking
at things like the Xantrex XPower Solar Powerpack.
I just got the recorder so I'm getting ahead of myself, but I
haven't seen a cheaper truly functional setup for long term
unattended recording. A lot of the other units in its class will
stop at a 2GB or 4GB file limit, but the PMD 620 has a feature to
split the files automatically. It also is supposed to gracefully
handle power interupptions. All this should be well within the
budget you mentioned.
You really got my attention with the Curry Village rockfall story,
and hopefully some more experienced folks will reply as well.
All the best,
David
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