I'm going to be very interested in other's responses to Chris' questions.
This is my third fall recording NFCs. For the last two I was doing it at home, feeding the mic input to my home computer and recording with Easy Hi-Q Recorder.
This year I added a second mic at a nature center. There is no power at the site, and I needed standalone recorder. Rather than kludge something together I bought a SongMeter SM1-M (wildlifeacoustics.com). Kind of pricey, but every other approach I could think of added up to the same cost or more. You can set the SongMeter to record on whatever schedule you want. It saves the data to an SDHC card. It provides power to the mic.
The mic is based on Bill Evan's flowerpot design using the Knowles element, but I put it on a government surplus mast to get it above some of the insect noise.
I've been using Bill Evan's tools Tseep-x and Thrush-x along with GlassOFire to sort the data. I've been working in an unsystematic way to estimate how well Tseep-x and Thrush-x work. It's obvious that they miss a lot sounds, but by far most of them are too faint for me to be confident of the identity of the caller, anyway.
I just got Raven 1.3 and I'm thinking of running some comparisons with Bill's tools. Has anyone done that?
My biggest problem at home is katydid calls. I can sort through them pretty fast using Glassofire, but it is a pain.
David Martin http://naturebits.org -- NFC-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_WELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NFC_RULES http://www.mail-archive.com/nfc-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html --
