Get It Local – Pocket Wizard Sync Cables

One thing that’s kept me in a perpetual state of wonderment is how in the world Radio Shack is still in business. Seriously. I remember buying some walkie-talkies from them when I was 12 years old and they seemed to be on their last leg even then. Please don’t get me wrong; I don’t particularly have anything against Radio Shack, I just fail to see how they’ve remained in business all these years. I mean, in the present day economy we’ve got the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy and the sale of Merrill Lynch, yet we can still trust Radio Shack to ask for our phone number when we buy batteries.*

I pretty much had to eat my words this past weekend. I had a portrait session coming up and realized I was a sync cable short for connecting my Pocket Wizard to my Alien Bees AB-1600. I usually order my sync cables from FlashZebra.com, but I knew I wouldn’t have time to get it delivered. I couldn’t trust Walmart or Target to have the cable I needed. Thus, my only hopeful source: the local neighborhood Radio Shack.[ad name=”250×250″]

The mini plug sync cables that I use look exactly like 1/8″ mono audio cables. When I first started using Pocket Wizards to sync my lighting gear, I tried using a stereo audio cable to no avail. That’s what made me think that there was something technically different about the sync cables I’d bought online. I’d read online where many people said that an audio cable worked for them, so I figured I’d give a mono audio cable a try.

Radio Shack did not let me down. They had a 3′ mono audio cable for $2 cheaper than the 6″ cable I’d bought online. I got it home and plugged it in and it worked great.

So, a few lessons I learned.

1. Radio Shack is still of some use to me.
2. Stereo audio cables ARE NOT reliable when syncing Pocket Wizards to a strobe that has an 1/8″ mini phone sync port.
3. Mono audio cables ARE reliable when syncing Pocket Wizards to the aforementioned strobes.

If you aren’t sure how to tell the difference between a mono plug and an stereo plug, please refer to the main image for this article. See the one black ring around the tip of the plug? That means it’s mono. If it had two rings, it’d be stereo.

* I trust that someone will pick up on the somewhat obscure reference?