Last week I had a really bad flash transmitter problem during a photo assignment. The defect device was an EL-Skyport Eco Transmitter (19349) a standard 2.4 GHz digital wireless flash trigger. The Trigger failed to fire the flash, I changed camera, tried another flash unit, verified trigger channel on both receiver and transmitter, basically tried everything, but nothing worked. The Skyport transmitter looked like it worked, I was able to turn it on, turn it off, change channel and use the test button, even a power cycle didn’t improve anything. Finally I replaced the almost new battery to a brand new, but unfortunately no flash was trigged and the complete photo session was in danger. But this time I was lucky, by coincident I had a spare remote trigger from another manufacturer and with help of an external sync-cable I was able to fire one flash and then I could use slave triggering using the Eye cell on the other.

Small wireless flash transmitter from Elinchrom

Small wireless flash transmitter from Elinchrom

After the session I tried to debug this issues and this particular unit continued to malfunction. Another Transmitter worked perfect, but this looked like it was broken. I also searched Internet for suggestion on the problem but found nothing. As the last option I downloaded the Skyport manual and looked for some sort of debugging checklist.

The problem was solved while reading the manual carefully, there’s a “hidden” speed mode that is enabled by pressing the Test button in 5 seconds. This mode-setting is then stored in the unit (independent of power cycles) until the unit is factory restored by pressing the Test button in at least 10 seconds. This is an example of a feature with really bad user interface, catastrophic outcome and even a bad description in the manual design. This type of design errors shall not be present in professional photo equipment.

I think this “feature” is present in the other Skyport transmitters from Elinchrom, for example Skyport Transmitter RX Speed.