Our local junior ice hockey club wants to announce various messages to the gathering masses (all three of them at most games!). I've already plumbed my old laptop in to the Public Address system so we can play appropriate music at the game stoppages.
So now my idea is to get a wireless radio microphone of some reasonable quality to feed in to the microphone input of the laptop and thence on out the headphone socket and through the PA (we need wireless because the timekeeper's bench and the DJ area are some 50metres apart). Plumbing through the laptop to use its mixing capabilities.
A cheap (=A312) radio microphone off Ebay is no use. I've even wired up a quarter-inch jack socket to a 3.5mm jack plug the proper way but it's still no use. (The "proper way" is to ignore the middle ring power connection on the stereo 3.5mm jack for the electret microphones commonly used with laptops. I've done some research here, but am willing to admit my fallibility).
I'm looking for advice: Anyone done this before? What impedance microphone should I look for? Any good sources for the kit?
The club have a budget up to (I guess) =A3100 but cannot afford much more for anything sophisticated.
Any help appreciated; thanks in advance
Mungo