Common Problems With Radio Transmitters & Triggers for Photographers

Photography Tips

There’s nothing worse than being out in the field, after hours of carefully packing your camera equipment, only to notice that one of your devices isn’t working properly. If you’ve ever had trouble with your radio triggers—or even if you haven’t yet—Adorama TV‘s video is a great way to see how you can troubleshoot them and get them back working in minutes:

One problem you might have is that your flash isn’t firing, even though you went through the setup process and have everything in place, seemingly functional. Here are a couple of steps that you can take to figure out what happens.

How to Troubleshoot Radio Triggers

Press the Test button on the transmitter and check if the receiver is lighting up. If it’s not, the two are most likely not communicating. Make sure they are both set on the same channel, and on the same zone. So, for instance, you should have both set on channel 17, zone C.

Here we see the two transmitters set on the same channel, but different zones.

Plug a sync cord into the receiver and into the strobe. After plugging in, use the test button on the receiver to see if the flash is firing.

Then, hit the Test button on the transmitter as well—the flash should also fire. If it fires, everything should be okay on this end as well.

Finally, take a shot on the camera and see if the flash is triggering. By testing every single aspect of the whole chain you should correctly identify the issue.

Make sure you have a sync cord with you—an extra one if you want to be extra careful—and make sure you have some extra batteries, too!