I bought these triggers because I can’t afford pocket wizards. So I looked for alternatives, I came across these wireless triggers (Cactus V2s) and I thought sure why not give them a try, its only 30 dollars (for the transmitter and receiver) that I would loose if they didn’t work. I first bought them from gadgetinfinity.com and it took about 2 weeks to get them… too long for me to wait. Then I found out about Midwest photo exchange and I received them in about a week (much better). I ordered the transmitter and receiver from gadgetinfinity.com and I ordered 3 more receivers from Midwest photo exchange. So I would have 4 in total plus the transmitter.
I came to a grim conclusion, that a couple of my receivers were bad or they couldn’t receive the signal from the transmitter (note: I am only working a few feet away from my speedlites, oh and all my batteries were brand new). So I decided to mod my transmitter first to see if it was that. I soldered a coiled up piece of wire that was about 12 inches long (I took the advice from this guy strobemonkey on flickr. When I completed his steps I tried to use them again but still no luck.
So I decided to look at messing around with my receivers since they were already not working correctly. I decided to add on a makeshift battery pack for them. I went to radio shack and bought the AA battery packs with color coded wires (red and black).
The batteries that the receiver uses put out 3 volts so that’s why I used 2 AA’s because they put out 1.5 volts each and in series they put out 3 volts. I drilled a hole in the side of the receivers that way I could still use the footpad if needed. I fed the wires through that hole then I soldered the black (negative) to the negative terminal and the red wire to the positive terminal inside the case. Then I took some wire and threaded them so that the battery case would be attached to the cover that pops open on the receiver so that if needed I could change the channels.
I also added a strap to the battery case so that if I needed to hang the V2s I could.
This process took me about 2 hours to do and that includes the transmitter and the 4 receivers.
After I completed all of it I did a test on if they would work or not. And sure enough everything worked, not only it worked but it worked great, I now only have about 1 in 300 pictures I take that something doesn’t work right and a flash wont fire. I can live with that. I decided to walk away from the speedlites and measure the distance I could get away from them before they wouldn’t fire. I got to about 50 feet away before I couldn’t walk any further away I was inside. When I got time to go outside I started to walk down my street and I would say that got about 300ft away before I would loose a good connection. I am very happy with this modification.
A few issues did arise from this. Now that everything was working I tested each of my speedlites with a receiver. (I did all the testing previously with a 580 exII). I tested my Vivitar 285hv (worked perfectly), my canon 244T (worked perfectly) and finally my 430ex…. Well it sucked, it would flash without me even touching anything and it wouldn’t flash when I wanted it to. So I decided to get a hot shoe mount and try it that way. Well it fixed only one problem and that was the flashing without me touching anything. But it was still wouldn’t flash when I wanted it to. I determined that the flash wasn’t receiving the signal from the V2s because I could see the led light up when I hit the test button on the transmitter. I looked at it closely and decided that it was the contacts on the 430ex that were giving me the problem. So I decided to make it as simple at a piece of tape covering the base of the hot shoe except for the center contact point. I used a piece of masking tape because I knew it would be easy to cut out the center of it for that contact point. After I put the tape on everything worked great.
After I did all my modifications I probably spent about $60 dollars which is still a third of the cost for one pocket wizard. Granted I would love to have one but they are way too expensive, especially for an enthusiast like me.
I like my Cactus V2s’s and they work well for me and I would suggest them to anybody as long as they plan to mod them in a similar fashion.
Jason
