Tips for field workers (especially in the tropics)

© Bill Palmer 2007

After quite a few years fieldwork in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere in the Pacific, I thought I'd put a few tips based on my experience, for what they're worth, out there for others. If anyone disagrees with my suggestions or wants to give me the benifit of their experience, I'll be glad to hear it, so email me on bill.palmer@surrey.ac.uk.

Some of the major issues are power for equipment, preserving data in the field, dealing with the ravages on equipment form humidity and insects, what kind of media to use for recording etc, and transporting all your gear.

As far as humidity is concerned, there' not much you can do about it. Use plenty of silicon sachets to absorb moisture as much as possible. Store your equipment in a relatively moisture proof container - you should use a Pelican case as they are lockable (preserving your equipment from theft), and crushproof and waterproof (preserving your equpiment from travel and the environment). Never use any kind of media like floppy discs or audio tape of any kind, which grow mold rapidly. The exception will have to be tape for your video camera, and there's not much you can do about that. Use as much solid state equipment as possible, and for audio recording use a solid state recorder like a Marantz or an Edirol. They have the alternative problem that their memory flashcards fill rapidly, so they need backing up to the laptop often, which is disruptive to sessions with your informants, and requires using precious power to fire up the laptop just to back up, but it's the most usable, archivable and safest form of audio data.

Preserving data and computer files in the field from loss of or damage to the equipment that they are recorded or saved on is a major issue. If your laptop gets stolen or sinks when that canoe overturns or whatever, or goes astray on the way home on the plane, you could stand to lose all the work and all the material you have collected if you don't back up properly. So, always make numerous backup copies. At the end of each day or whatever, back up everything you've done that day. Take three forms of media for backup: a one or two gig memory stick, an external hard drive (I use an 80 gig drive that has the same capacity as my laptop hard drive), and plenty of CDs or DVDs. When you've filled the flash card on your audio recorder (and it's worth taking several) download everything to the laptop, then back it up to the memory stick or external hard drive, then burn a CD of it. Only then delete the material from the audio recorder's flash card. The same goes for photos you take with your digital still camera. Make sure you store your various backup media in different locations at the field site so that if something gets destroyed by fire or water or is stolen something else somewhere else remains. Whenever you get back into town or somewhere else where you can post something, post all your backup CDs to yourself back at your home institution.

Humidity is not the only environmental problem in the field. The warmth of a laptop make them wonderful homes for ants and other insects, and the same is true for other equipment. My external harddrive died this time in the field, potentially compromising my backup procedures, and I'm sure it was due to ants. This is a good example of why you need several different backup media. A one or two gig memory stick at least will hold all your analysis documents and a few small audio files. 

As for power, this is a major problem. First make sure you take a large number of AA batteries to power your various equipment. If you have a video or still camera or any other equipment that has it's own special battery, make sure you take several spares if they are rechargable, as you can't rely on getting a chance to recharge when one runs out before you need it again. If they take some special nonrechargable battery make sure you take large numbers as they won't be available in the field. Don't rely on locally available AA batteries if they are available, as they will be poor quaility and will run out quickly. On the odd occasion I've had to, and I've gotten 20 minutes recording out of 8 locally available AAs in my Marantz audio recorder, and six photos in my still camera out of four AAs. Ideally take a lot of rechargeable AAs, enough for three full sets for all your equipment, so you can use the equipment with one set while recharging another set and keeping a third set in reserve. Take a solar AA recharging kit and also a couple of high speed AA rechargers for mains power to use when you go to town if you get the chance. But also take a stack of nonrechargeable AAs to use in between recharges as needed.

I have tried various approaches to powering my laptop. There are solar panels that are designed for military application specifically to power laptops in the field.  These have the advantage that they are light and made of ut a flexible synthetic material so they fold up into a small square, and I really recommend this option. However, the crucial information you need to consider when sourcing equipment is the amplitude and voltage input of the laptop you are powering, and laptops differ widely on this. The military laptops have very low amplitude input, so the panel output, which is designed to match that, cannot power the laptop you will probably be using, without additional equipment. I use a P3 Solar Power Pack made by G3Systems (www.g3-systems.co.uk ) and this outputs a notional 12 volts, which is fine, but only 1.5 amps, which is nothing like enough for a normal laptop - for example mine requires 5 amps input. Basically, even if the panel outputs enough voltage for your laptop input, it won't provide enough amplitude. You also need to make sure that you have some kind of regulation to the input voltage to the laptop if you try to run directly off the solar panel. The panel will notionally output 12 volts, but solar panels output widely varying voltages ranging from 6 or 8 volts up to 28 volts in the case of the P3, depending on the sun conditions, and the higher voltages will cook your laptop. Last time I bit the bullet and did what I've always tried to avoid doing and bought a heavy duty car battery in the nearest town on the way to my field site. What you're supposed to do is run the solar panel into the car battery to keep that charged up, and run the laptop and your other recharging equipment for AAs, your video camera batteries etc off the car battery. This has a big disadvantage in that car batteries are heavy and hard to lug around. You will need the associated equipment to convert the 12 volt output from the car battery into the correct input for the laptop, for example in my case the laptop input was 15 volts at 5 amps. This converter now becomes the weak link in the chain. With heavy use they burn out, and then you are in the infuriating position of having plenty of power (in the car battery) but being unable to get it out of the battery and into your laptop. So, take several of these converters, get as heavy duty ones as you can, and don't run through them all the time. By that I mean use them to recharge the batteries for your laptop, and then actually use the laptop on battery power, rather than running the laptop off the car battery as if it was mains power, because this is likely to overload the converter. Make sure you buy at least three high capacity batteries for your laptop that give about 6-8 hours of use in ideal conditions. Keep them as topped up as possible from the car battery, and make sure you always run your laptop on the low power setting. That way you can run the laptop for quite a while, and then recharge the batteries in the laptop when you are not using it. The alternative to all that is to buy a cheap generator in the field. This is of course a much bigger and harder item to move around, and depends on the availablity of two stroke fuel, but if you have one you have limitless power. Cheap generators are just that, and don't last for ever, but a very cheap generator should still last out your field work period, and then you can make yourself very popular by giving it to someone in your field community. (The latter ditto with a car battery.) If you treat buying a small generator as the purchase of a disposable peice of field equipment it can be quite an effective way to go, if you budget runs to it. On one occasion I had to hire a small generator from someone in a field site, which I did for the odd day here and there and used it intensively to recharge all my batteries then give it back and run my equipment off the battries. But even so after a fairly short time I had given the owner more than the original purchase price, which of course made him very happy and helpful in other ways. But of course not everywhere is near enough to a town where you could buy a generator, and not all transportation to field sites let you get it to the site anyway, so solar is the best if you get reliable enough equipment you need.

Finally, always try to make your entire assembly of field equipment transportable by you alone on foot in one go - I mean try to make sure you can carry everything at once, even if you can only hobble along resting every ten paces. (Of course, if you have a generator there's no way you can carry that along with anything else.) There will be times when you can't rely on leaving something to go back for in a little while. I manage to do this even with a car battery: A small day pack on my chest, a big backpack on my back, an equipment case in one hand, and a car battery with some straps rigged up to make a handle in the other hand. It is incredibly heavy, and I have nearly pitched down flights of stairs, but there have always been a few occasions where I've needed to move everything on my own. Also, people are often very kind and will offer to help when they see you staggering about under all that stuff, but there's a big difference in accepting an offer from someone to lug your heavy stuff, and asking people you don't know or hardly know to do it. (There are also always plenty of people who enjoy watching the amusing spectacle of you staggering about festooned with masses of stuff. But with this, as with many other things in the field, you can't worry about seeming ridiculous.)

I hope these thoughts are helpful. I am happy to take email queries and will answer if my experiences give me something useful to say.