AB 1600 Issue

Did some quick and dirty maternity pics for my sister this afternoon. All worked well, did about 20 shots or so. Finished up and asked the rest of the family if they wanted a couple family pics. Most said yes, so back out we went. Hadn't disconnected anything.

First shot - flash, second shot - flash, third shot - flash, then all of the sudden it stopped. Test button would fire, mini showed above 3/4 full. But nothing through the sync cord.

Went in and tested with triggers, flashed everytime.

Thinking something is wrong with the sync cord, but I don't see any tears or frays.

Anyone ever run in to this?

I have had a synch cord go bad on me before with no visible damage to the cord. I tested it using a spare cord I has that was to short for general use.

I've learned to never trust any battery meter. Especially one in the unit itself.
First thing you do is always change the batteries. Even if you just changed them.
Especially if they're rechargables.

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, someone decreed that flash synch cables should be made of wire as fine as baby hair. And about the same durability.

I freely accept that these things will go bad in the normal course of things - they're almost disposables and quite probably designed as an ongoing revenue source for manufacturers. Being miserly and thoroughly fed up of constantly buying new cables, round about 1970 I started making my own using co-ax microphone cable (yep, that stuff that's designed to be trodden on, wrenched, stretched, generally abused). There used to be, in Europe, a firm called Rowi who made solderless synch plugs (which could also be soldered on, if desired). I am still using some cables made all those decades ago - one single failure when a student trod on the cable coming from a studio power pack and ripped the cable out of the ¼" jack plug; an easy fix. Other than that 100% reliability for 4+ decades. Not one single failure of the cable or that much maligned synch plug.

If you're really picky, it's even possible to make your cable curly (it's not rocket science, the sheathing is thermo-plastic) - the strain-relief concept - but I've never found the need using this cable.