recording a venue wireless mike
 

and yet another venue with a wireless mike and staff who don't know anything about it.

what I'd really like is a scanner of some sort that can pick the frequency of the wireless mike and allow me to receive & record without have to pester staff or crawl around in cupboards looking for connections.

anyone know of or use something like this?

Re: recording a venue wireless mike
 

This has come up before but the thing is that different manufacturers use different standards for their 'companding' so it is not very likely to work. You could carry around a van load of receivers from Sennheiser, Shure, Trantec, Lectrosonic etc but there's dozens of other makes as well and you would spend a while tuning even if you had the right one.

I have successfully intercepted a VHF radio mic at a club venue using a GRE model PSR-282 scanner from Maplin but I haven't tried it with UHF mics.

Re: recording a venue wireless mike
 

Any scanner with a wide band setting will do the job if it covers the band. The squashed dynamic range from the transmitter can be expanded in most audio editors, and even in it's compressed state is quite usable. In most cases, the make of the mic can be established and the only issue is the band it's working in. Most of course have the frequency in a display window if they're decent. If they're cheaper models, then they're more likely to be in the music shop type frequency bands, so a bit of detective work should do the trick.