Guess who got to work with ESPN! That's right, I did! Thanks to meeting some people here at the station, I made some connections and got hooked up with ESPN for some football games. Networking in action, to be sure. My job was to hold a parabolic microphone, which looks like a big salad bowl with a microphone facing backwards in it. And it was wireless, which is good because it makes moving around on the sidelines a whole lot easier because you don't have to worry about how far the cable can reach, or coiling it back up as you move (most likely, there would have been someone trailing the mic holding the cable if it had one), and it's lighter when it's not attached to anything that's holding it down. It kind of looks like the drawing that I made here, because it's a big half-sphere (hence the parab name), and then it has handles on either side, and a little transmitter/receiver box on the top and the sides where the handles are, and then in the front there's a bar across the dome and it has a microphone positioned on it that faces toward the back of the dome. (you may have to click the little image to see the actual thing I drew, it doesn't seem to be posting properly for some reason)
Essentially, the parab focuses the sound so whatever area you point it at, it picks up that noise and kind of negates other noise around it because it has such a focused scope. It sounds really cool because you can point it at the ground where people are running and hear their footsteps from 20 yards away. It was awesome! I got paid to watch a football game and learn more about the technology that I may some day be working with.
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