Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I went to use my two alien bee 800's mounted with cybersyncs to shoot a basketball game.

I have a pair of CyberSync Cord Powered Receivers and one Battery operated CyberSync Trigger Transmitter.

I had one light set up on a handrail on the bleachers and one receiver with sync cord plugged into the light and then all powered by a extension cord ran to a wall outlet.

I had the other light setup the same but instead of a hand rail it was on an electrical conduit on the all.

I had them all set and aimed how I wanted and then they both started to fire without me triggering them.

I was the only photog rapher there so no one could have made them trigger.

What could cause this as I have never had a problem using these lights like this before?

I am thinking that either the outlets that I was using to power them are not good or something in the bleachers and electrical conduit was triggering them.

Seems like the battery is always the place to start with these issues... have you verified that the battery in the CST is still good. Also, have you tried plugging them in at another location and seeing if the problem repeats itself?

Don't own AB's but if they have a built-in optical slave sensor (and it was on) that can be affected by other folks in the stands taking pictures with point-&-shoots or even a flickering fluorescent light.

Some gyms/stadiums have flashing lights that will go off when a team scores.

AB's disable the optical slave when a sync cord is inserted.

Having looked at your order history, I would suspect the CST battery, as mentiond above. As it gets low, it can rapid fire the lights. Press the test button and if it blinks multiple times or does not blink, then the battery need to be replaced. Blinking once should indicate an OK battery. If the conduit was the cause, then I would expect only the one on the conduit to fire, but both could still fire. BTW, batteries are available at most places that carry a reasonable selection of batteries, like Wal Mart, Kroger, Walgreens, Radio Shack, etc.

It seems that the battery is bad as it did it again when I got home replaced it and it works fine thanks for the help.