Experience with Boom Poles, anyone?

[Feliks]

I'm involved with a group of somewhat serious armature filmmakers, its really just to give a friend of mine some good material to edit (he's quite good and could easily see him going into editing as a profession). But anyway, as we have been getting more and more experienced our filming and effects quality has grown greatly despite an extremely low budget (each person buys their own props). Our audio quality, however has not kept up.

To solve this I was thinking of making a boom-pole (those microphones on the really large sticks they hold over the actor's heads). I found plenty of information on making the pole itself, but I'm somewhat at a loss on knowing what type of microphone to work with and how to actually capture the sound. This would be on an extremely limited budget, I'm thinking of spending only around $50 on the mic itself. If anyone has any experience with this type of thing I'd be happy to hear from you.

[kshcshbash]

Have you checked the various IRC channels on such things as freenode?

There are some guys on ##linux that know their audio stuff...