Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

hi all. i just received my cybersync commander and CSR+ unit in the mail and desperately need to get it functioning by tomorrow morning at 9a PST. any help is greatly appreciated!

I was able to follow the instructions in the manual to successfully wire up the CSR+ to the AB800 320WS strobe i have and configure the cybersync commander to "see" the CSR+. the cybersync commander screen does not report any problem with the light and appears to allow me to adjust the power of both the strobe and the model lamp.

the problem is that no adjustment is actually made in the intensity of the flash. I am able to trigger the flash successfully when the cybersync commander is in the hotshoe of my canon 5d mk 2. but the strobe and modeling lamp are always at full intensity, regardless of the settings reported by the cybersync commander.

can someone help me figure out why this would be happening? i expected to be able to control the intensity of the ab800 via the cybersync commander.

thanks, e.

First, Make sure the channel and frequency dials are correctly oriented. The settings are indicated by the darker notch in the cut in the dial for channel and frequency, respectively. Odd numbers are marked, even numbers are unmarked and lie inbetween. Battery powered plus recievers have arrows pointing in the correct direction rather than a notch.

Next, if you followed the OPEN MEMORY>OPEN FROM STUDIO proceedures, look at the bottom row of dashes. Do you see two white dashes or only one? If you see a white dash under a channel that is not the channel you are working on (regardless if your channel has one), then that is the channel your reciever is likely set to. You can simply change the channel of the reciever to the one you intended. (you can specify the rogue channel as "NONE" in the SPEC LIGHTS menu to get rid of the white dash you are not using).

Do you have the RJ11 cord (telephone cord) plugged into the head and the reciver? If not, be sure to do so. If so, try turning the cord around so that the end which was in the head is now in the reciever, and vice versa. If there is a fault in the cord, you may have a fault in the control or the trigger, while the other works fine. Since you are potentially moving the known good trigger function, also connect the short sync cord from the edge of the reciever to the hole marked "sync". This will fire the light even if the trigger circuit is broken in the telephone cord.



Does this mean the you see the blue bar in the graph, and it moves up and down? If so, and you are in the middle of the range (i.e. room to move up or down). If not, press and hold up on the power for about 3 seconds, the blue bar should appear.

Do you get a red outline around the bar when you make an adjustment? If so, then there is not communication between that reciever and the CyberCommander (if you max the power and try to go up or bottom out the power and try to go down, you will also get the red outline, as an error indicator. This must be done somewhere in the middle of the range, and only a one click change is needed to see this outline)



I have a hunch the frequency dial is set correctly, but the channel dial is not. The hotshoe will fire on all channels, while adjustments are via the joystick are channel specific.

My next hunch is there is no blue bar, and the reciever has a remenant of testing which results in the power being lower than minimum (in a sense).

Last is the RJ11 cord. It is possible it is bad. Any 4 or 6 conductor cross over cable will work in a pinch if this is the case.

If these tests do not produce positive results, please feel free to give us a call, and you can ask for David, I will be happy to assist you.

Problem resolved. The specification did not match with the channel setting.

Yes! the problem was indeed resolved. thank you for the fantastic service.

i'll go a bit into detail as to what happened so that others using search engines might find an answer in this post.

i was mistaken about the channel that the CSR+ unit was set on. I thought it was 1, but it was 15. i didn't understand that the Open Studio function was searching for nearby CSR+ units and that a white bar would appear under each unit it found. I manually specified the light type on channel 1 when the light was really on channel 15. When I would trigger the cybersync commander with my camera, the strobe would go off, but always at full power.

The reason for this, i learned, is that the command to fire the strobe went out over all channels. So even though my power adjustments were on the wrong channel, the signal to trigger the light got to my CSR+ unit and the strobe flashed!

once i adjusted the channel on the CSR+ unit to match my settings on the cybersync commander, everything worked great!

thanks again for the help.