NCGH

One of the best ways for the hunter on a budget to find equipment is the flea market. Almost any town above a few thousand will sport one, but if not one will be within a decent driving distance. They range in size from a couple of booths in an old gas station garage, to huge hundred booth operations that span several buildings, and sell anything you can imagine, even services like repair work.

Common hunting items can almost always be found, though some searching needs to be done. It is easy to find common household still cameras, both digital and film. A good film camera can be found for $20 easily and occasionally as cheap as $5. Digital will run twice that for a few year old model, but for the hunter on a budget, a good steal. Video cameras can also be found in bulk, however quality becomes an issue. Your group probably wants a smaller camera with a night shot feature, but most cameras at the market are older cameras without these features. Also with the older cameras, batteries, accessories and film become an issue as these items either become impossible to find or wear out. That does not mean that newer camera can not be found, they are just a bit harder. While not as common, voice recorders can be found at good price. These tend to be straight forward, they run on battery, an interface is usually easy to see and most can be used by anyone without the need of a manual.

The big pull for hunters at the market however, is the odd tidbits that are almost impossible to find elsewhere. Rare or not usually available equipment such as oscilloscope, old security systems (occasionally new or non-traditional systems as well), cables of all types and lengths, video splitters (lots of old video hardware equipment, mostly analog) and all sorts of other things that are expensive or hard to find otherwise.

Always know what you are looking for before you buy, sometimes what seems like a good purchase turns sour when you find a cable missing, a feature doesn’t work, or you can’t understand the foreign scribbles that mark the buttons without the missing manual. Flea markets are the ultimate place for buyer beware, most people have a no return policy at best, and others simply will not be there the following week for you to even try, so ask questions, try out your proposed equipment and try to find any faults with the items before the deal goes down. Expect some missing parts, particularly power cables, so while looking, remember the extra cost of getting those parts elsewhere.

Not everything is a deal, sometimes what you find will be for sale at twice the real value. Other times you will find things for near free (and sometimes free) prices. There is always the option of cutting a deal (I’ll buy 4 if you knock $X off each) as no price is set in stone. Trading is also an option depending on the person, assuming you have the items to trade. But the biggest boon to flea market dealings is when you can deal with the same person time after time and build a relationship. When you do this, they will look for items you are interested in, cut better deals, and even hold items you can’t afford at the moment.

Flea markets are invaluable for finding equipment for the hunter with not a lot to toss around, but plenty of time to spend browsing the market. Note that most flea market sellers don’t take credit cards or checks, so a wallet full of cash is a very good thing.

As paranormal investigators, we’re constantly looking for new techniques and, in particular, cost effective equipment solutions for detecting and recording paranormal activity. An idea prompted by an episode of Paranormal State involving laser pointers and automatic night lights that we tried recently works wonderfully for detecting motion and coming in at under ten dollars for initial setup, certainly qualifies in the cost effective department, too.

Take a light sensor-activated nightlight (found at Walmart for around $5 for a 4-pack) and plug it into an outlet or power source. We used the LED version because it takes less power to get the nightlight to illuminate. At some distance, take a simple laser pointer (the $3 magnetic-backed ones from Walmart work wonderfully) and securely mount it so the laser beam shines on the light sensor of the nightlight. The nightlight will stay dark as long as the laser shines on the sensor, but if anything passes through the beam, the nightlight will instantly light up. This gives a low-tech, very bright, and fast response alert without all of the hassle of motion sensors that require a security system controller and extensive setup.

This article was featured in the May, 2009 newsletter.

For us in the Ghost Hunting world, our evidence is everything, it shows where we’ve been and what we found. A story is fine but having a picture, or video is even better. But sometimes bad things happen, a hard drive crashes, or a few disks are lost and suddenly half your collection is gone. But it can be prevented!

The first tip to preserving your data is to collect it into one place. Assign a person to be in charge of the data. At the end of the hunt, after analysis, they get all the data and put it onto one computer or external hard drive. If the data includes audio tapes or VHS they put them into a collected area. Try to put as much data into digital as possible. This allows the group to know where all data is at any time, no calling everyone who could possibly have it trying to find an important bit of info. This also keeps the originals out of harm’s way, no one can edit an original, thus it should always be there.

Next is to ensure losing a hard drive, or a computer crash or losing a cd or dvd doesn’t lose an important file. Once everything is in one place, make a copy of everything. Usually this means putting it onto a few dvds or cds. However keeping these copies doesn’t help if something happens to the location, say a fire, or a flood, or the person really has an issue finding things. So the copy should be kept in another location, if your group has access to a storage shed or the like, this would be a good place to hold it as well.

Once you’ve managed that no single loss should destroy your evidence. However it is important to keep making copies of new data that comes in to ensure that data is kept safe as well.

It’s really that easy!