After purchasing some poverty slaves from ebay I was pretty disappointed with the range of the things. Lloyd told me there was a mod to improve them so I got searching….

I quickly found that it was pretty common for people to mod their ebay slaves and most reported huge improvements in range. The mod is fairly simple (takes 10 minutes) and I went about it my own way. If you’re going to do the mod you will need the following:-

• old rf cable - like the one that plugs a tv to an aerial wall socket
• Sharp Knife
• Phillips head screwdriver
• Tweezers (any sharp metal object will do)
• Pliers

The first step is to unscrew the screw and take the top off the transmitter. This will enable you to see the circuit board to which you need to attach the aerial.

The next step it to cut the rf cable to size, there’s some maths behind this here but basically you want it to be about 5.6″ long. Carefully cut one end so that there’s small amount of bare copper wire.

This bare copper wire is what you’ll push into the little hole shown above to the right of the writing “FS-616″.
The next step is to melt a hole in the top case of the casing, this can be done by heating the tweezers on the hob and then just pushing in the casing, be careful here you only want to make a small hole.

Make the hole so that it’s above the point in the board where you’re connecting the aerial. Once you’ve made the small hole use the knife to make it bigger (push the knife in and rotate it). This will ensure the hole is neatly cut and you can keep trying to push the aerial through until it just gets in. You’re aiming to get the casing through this hole aswell so it’s around 7mm at a guess. It should be a very snug fit, as this will hold the aerial in place.

Now at this point you can solder the aerial’s wire to the circuit board although with this mod it is not essential, I have done but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference to range.

The final step is to screw the casing back together and you’ll have a finished transmitter that looks like this:

The main beauty of this method of the mod is that you don’t need to solder anything and the aerial will still remain in place. It also means the aerial stands upright and will be a bit more durable then other mods you might see.

I haven’t tested extensively but before the mods mine seemed to only fire about 5 metres away and needed a line of sight, they now fire from about 50 metres away and through walls. I haven’t tested multiple flash set ups and with bmx so we’ll see…