[Mike Cash]

I have posted elsewhere how very disappointed I was with the dismal reliability of my 16 channel Chinese remote flash trigger. After much hunting around on the net and on the Strobist section of Flickr, I happened upon some information that I thought I would share here.

It seems that much of the unreliability of the flashes stems from the poor quality of the connection in the receiver to the PC connection on the back of the unit. The phono plug connection is reportedly much, much more reliable. I don't have any flash units which have mini-jack connections so I had to use a work-around. One way is to wire a female connection to a hotshoe adapter. (Alternately, they are available for sale from places like flashzebra.com). I initially tried to go that route, but found that the wiring in the phono extension cable I tried to cannibalize was so incredibly fine and tiny that it was going to be impossible to work with.

Instead, I tried the method I saw someone else had used. I cut the phono plug off the receiver and the PC connector off of a hotshoe adapter. I then wired, soldered, and taped them together permanently.

The result wasn't pretty to look at, but the end result was that from the previous 25~50% reliability I had cursed at the last two events I tried to shoot with them I shot up to 100% reliability at the dance performance I shot yesterday.

The operation was simple enough: Just cut the wires and strip back the insulation. The PC wire contained two separate color-coded wires. The phono plug's wires were of the coaxial type. The center wire goes to the red wire on the PC side. Pull the outer wrap of the coax together and twist it. Take the center wire and the red wire, twist them together and solder them, then cover with a couple turns of electrical tape. Then do the same for the PC's black wire and the phono plug's outer coax layer, laying them over the previously soldered and taped connection. I suppose you could leave off the soldering, but soldering irons are incredibly cheap and there's really no good reason to not go ahead and get one for the job. A simple little 20W job that I bought for about five bucks did the job very nicely.