Audio recorders in areas with no electricity

[William J Poser]

I have used solar-powered battery chargers in the field.
The ones I have are little boxes not much larger than necessary
to hold the batteries. The lid is covered with solar cells.
They are very simple and so reasonably robust and not terribly
expensive. My experience has been that I could fully recharge
a set of batteries by leaving these out all day, meaning that
if you need K batteries per day, it is sufficient to bring 2K
batteries. This was in Northern British Columbia. You presumably
get a lot more sun in Vanuatu.

In looking at specifications, I would distinguish carefully between
solid state storage and microdrives. Microdrives have moving parts
and can be expected to use substantial power. Solid state storage
should not use much power. I have not been in your situation recently
and so have not looked into this, but it does not make sense that
solid state storage would draw much power.

You can get 10GB worth of flash cards for no more than 300 euros.
USB sticks are a bit cheaper. I just bought a 2GB USB stick for
Canadian $39.98, about 27 euros, so five of them would be 135 euros.
With USB sticks the problem of transfer arises. I have a vague
memory of having seen stand-alone flash-USB transfer devices
but can't find them right off. If the weight is not a problem,
you could probably simply bring a laptop to use for transfer.
They now have a long enough battery life that if you only
used it to transfer from flash card to USB stick you could
get by for six weeks without recharging it.

An alternative, however, is a standalone flash->minidrive device,
like these: http://www.card-media.co.uk/digimagic+dm180.htm.
You can get a 20GB miniature hard drive combined with flash card
reader for about 200 euros. These are powered by their own
batteries, but at the rate you of data collection you mention,
you'd only have it powered on for about an hour total during
your six week trip in order to transfer from a flash card.

Bill