I decided to do a little more testing of my 540EZ and the radio slaves
today and made a surprising discovery. The reason my flash unit had
been reading such a low trigger voltage (3.25 volts) and not working
with the radio slaves is that it appears to have a short in the high
voltage section which has been quickly draining the batteries.
I was sure that I had recently put in fresh batteries but was surprised
to see that the recycle time for a full dump was running about 30
seconds when it should have been more line 10. I checked the voltage on
the batteries and found it was down near 1.3 volts. I put in a fresh
set and immediately measured the trigger voltage at 4.85 volts. I
attached both types of radio slave and discovered they were working
OK... well mostly. It was necessary to wait for 5 seconds on 1/4 power
or 9 seconds on full power before the flash would trigger which was well
after the ready light came on. As I continued to test I noticed that
the interval necessary to trigger the flash with the slave was quickly
growing longer and longer and within about 15 minutes had grown to 30
seconds. Measuring the batteries again I discovered that the no load
battery voltage had dropped by 15% (from 1.585 to 1.35) in about 15 minutes.
I think the problem had been hidden from me since I normally use the
flash with an external high voltage power supply. The problem became
apparent today when testing it on AA batteries alone. Recycle times
became very long very quickly.
My conclusion is there's nothing wrong with the cheap radio slaves, just
the expensive flash unit. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
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