ah, welcome to the wonderfully downright CONFUSING world of pocket wizard. it took me 3 weeks to figure it all out.
1) theres a big difference between Receivers, Transmitters, and Tranceivers (both in one). the receivers have a nonfunctional plastic hotshoe (sneaks!), the other 2 look the same but actually have a REAL hotshoe connection. u must fully understand what DIRECTION you are sending the signal, this is very confusing! for example, the Transmitter "receives" the signal to fire OUT FROM your camera's hotshoe, and THEN transmits to fire your strobes. But if you wanted to say fire that same camera with a Receiver, u couldnt use the hotshoe, you'd have to connect the Pocket Wiz into the motor drive terminal via cord.
2) the pocket wizard "mini-phone" is a propietary connection. do yourself a favor and get a pocket wiz mini-phone > standard pc adaptor for 10 bucks. if u dont have one of these, u can get into the nightmare scenario of two diff. propietary connections -one on the Pocket Wiz, the other depending on what yer connecting it to. for example, those wonderful guys at Nikon charge some $175 for their propietary Nikon 10 pin motor chord > pocket wizard miniphone. and yes, there is no adpator! its much easier to connect the Pocket Wiz's to strobes IF the maker of your strobe is DECENT enough to give u a pc terminal connection and not some Apple-Esque propietary one. but for example, if u need to fire say the D100 or any other Nikon camera remotely with Pocket Wizard , u need this rip-off cord for EACH one. the cord costs more than the receiver!
3)know EXACTLY what u want to fire off remotely, and see if its possible. for example, there is NO cord whatsoever for the Contax 645, u need a custom one made. and, for the D100, since its digital, u can get into problems when syncing it to film Nikons like i have. it seems to me that the D100 is some tenths of a second "slower" in firing its shutter, this ruined a shoot for me when using rear curtain sync.
hope this helps-
