.Back in 2004, I decided to expand the range of the Random Access Thought (File) venue for This Week In Amateur Radio by adding in-the-field interviews at local hamfests, amateur club meetings and with individual characters worthy of Random Access note. At the time, I considered the purchase of some kind of a digital audio recorder and so did some typical Internet research. What I found was that while there were several half way decent machines on the market, there were two principal issues. These devices, with the exception of some inexpensive mp3 recorders, were still physically large, boxy AND they were very expensive.
.
Due largely to self-inflicted laziness, I drifted over the mighty Hudson River to the local RadioShack in East Greenbush and found a solution, For a cheap $49.00 plus tax and tip, I was able to secure a RadioShack CTR-121 CAT.NO.14-128 portable audio cassette recorder, custom manufactured in China by people working in fire trap sweat shops for three cents an hour.
.
This cassette recorder, otherwise known as the C49DRSACR, was actually a fairly decent investment. The first in-the-field assignment was to record events at the Schenectady Museum Amateur Radio Association's Field Day. Using the built-in microphone, I was quite surprised at the good voice quality but the first of two and a half irritants soon came into sonic focus. This machine has a tape counter which can used to roughly ascertain where something might be located on the cassette. The counter makes use of some unseen mechanism linked to the capstan that moves the tape. However the counter would make a faint tick-tick-tick which acoustically translated directly onto the tape into a much more noticeable THWACK THWACK THWACK.
.
The solution to this problem was to use an equally cheap external RadioShack computer microphone CAT.NO.33-3025A, which took us away from the unwanted imposing tick-tick-tick, but the tick-tick-tick continued to manifest itself by imposing a wow-wow-wow on the tape normally not be heard unless a sound such as a bell or tone were picked up, which made recording such sounds problematic.
.
The second concern was common to many such portable cassette machines. To assist in better capturing more distant voices or sound, there is a built-in automatic gain control or AGC. But the AGC is set similar to the AGC in a single sideband radio receiver with a fast attack and slow decay. Thus, if someone spoke close to the microphone, the subject would playback loud with background audio pushed way down. When the near-field speaker stopped speaking, the background audio would rush up to almost full gain. Experiments using digital noise reduction, hiss reduction or forcing levels was usually not really too terribly satisfactory.
.
But I lived with it anyway until a few weeks ago when, after a typical Saturday Chinese Lunch, we all walked next door to the Guitar Center. The short story is that I purchased an Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder. The long story of this remarkable device will be forthcoming once I have more to say about it. In the meantime, I have no intention of disposing of the C49DRSACR.While it is becoming almost impossible to locate new stock audio cassette product, I do have a small collection of those here in the N2FNH Magnetic Tape Library and some kind of hardware is needed to play those. But should the C49DRSACR unceremoniously crap out, I might have to go to yard sales to buy somebody else's junk to replace it.
