Thursday, October 14, 2010

Ghetto repeater: Using my Cybersync trigger to fire poverty wizards... two separate brand radio receivers fired from one trigger all in sync

I started off using "poverty wizards" when I followed Strobist.com and played with off-camera flash as cables got in the way. I had problems like everyone else and started doing the mods ie. adding an antenna to get more distance and adapting a AA battery pack to the receiver. Then I found myself with 4 flash units and dying radio/trigger units. I knew I'd eventually have to step up to something more reliable but Pocket Wizards with 4 receivers, ouch! Then the dreaded day came when doing a fashion shoot for a magazine and my poverty wizards failed and I was running three lights. With two MUAs, two models, two stylist, the magazine editor all on-site I started to sweat. I had to think quick and used a pc cable to fire my main speedlight and put the other on slave and add a optical eye on the last light as it didn't have built in slave function. We were indoors so it worked out. But the next day I ordered what my limited funds allowed as I just bought a 35mm 1.8 for my Nikon and upgraded my Pentax body to a K-7 so I did some research and got a Cybersync trigger and 2 receivers.
Now back to the story... so I am shooting tomorrow and have one of my lights getting a firmware update. I would like 3 lights but will be shooting into the sun and optical slaves won't work in bright light. So how can I make this work? I have several poverty wizards sitting around so I thought how can I use my reliable Cybersyncs and maybe use a poverty wizard as a psuedo-repeater and make it more reliable ie two lights closer to each other away from the main/key and camera trigger.


Here is my Seagull adapter, MOD, and in this case using a PC connection to the 1/8 into the Cybersync receiver as I will need the 1/8 on the Seagull for the other half of this mod.
You could use the cable that came with the poverty wizard "micro to PC" but I had cut one already and spliced in a 1/8 for another project. Yes, I do tons of projects :)
The final mod: the Cybersync trigger on the camera hot shoe will trigger the same brand receiver, Cybersync, which is connected via PC cord to the flash (via Seagull adapter) which will be light #2 for the upcoming shoot. The PC and 1/8 share an electrical connection inside the adapter so it causes the 1/8 cord to micro, connected to the poverty wizard, to fire. The poverty wizard receiver will fire light #3 which ie acting like a pseudo repeater as it will prolly be out of range if just used on camera or from the main/key light.