Pocket Wizards FlexTT5 & MiniTT1 first impressions

This is the fourth time I am writing this post and it is going to be the last. Between the time I received the Pocket Wizards, did some test in my kitchen and finally tried them out in the open, my perception of the product changed drastically. To make it short, the ETTL Pocket Wizards are going back to the store and will be replaced by the old school PW that actually work as advertised.

Of course, as faith would have it, I have the worst possible flashes to work with the MiniTT1 & FlexTT5: 1x 580EXII and 2x 430EX but that is something you learn after reading the manual and they fail to give any range mesurements, knowing how stupid these would look.

To be fair, the remotes work perfectly as advertised, when I am 15” away. After that, it is hit or miss until 30” which is the point where they are less reliable than my eBay triggers.

After reading the documentation, it seems like Pocket Wizards is blaming the IR from the flash as the source of the interferences. Since the IR is used only for ETTL data transmission (as far as I know), switching to manual mode should solve the issue and give me the fantastic range I was expecting when I bought these. But, nope, it does not change anything. I did some test by changing the position of the antenna of the TT5 without much success and needless to say that I never managed to shoot around corners!

The suggested alternative is to buy a hot shoe cable (OC-E3) and put the remote as far away as possible from the flash. I might try that with the ferrite clamp but honestly, I dont feel like spending any more money to fix something that should have been working straight out of the box.

So, unless one of you, knowledgeable readers, has managed to have these things working with the same equipment as mine, I am going back to the technology from the 90s (aka walkie talkie PW).