Connector confusion

I've been offered a chance to get an Aquatica housing for a 5D fairly cheap and am thinking about going for it but the seller says that it's not a 5 pin connector, rather a 4 pin and a 2 pin.

I've had a look for 4 pin cables and I can only see sea and sea do them but the shape/pin connection does not look the same.

The Nikonos connectors look the same - they have 5 holes in the same layout as mine have, only I have 1 or 3 pins missing respectively.

If I were to get this housing would I be able to use Nikonos 5 pin cables? If I were able to use a 5 pin cable for both the 4 and 2 pin connections would it be worth getting a dual cable for use with something like 2x Sea and Sea Duo strobes or rather going for a Sea and Sea YS-100alpha with a YS-27DX slave, and if I were to slave a second strobe would it need cabling or would the wirelss slave sensor work even though my master would only be connected via 4 pins?

EDIT: just found the image of a Nikonos connector on http://www.camerasunderwater.info/engineer...ash/nikttl.html and it appears to be the same as this but the 4 pin is missing the Q (quench/ttl stop) pin and the 2 pin is missing Rdy (ready to fire), Q (quench/ttl stop) and SP

Does nobody have any ideas or advice?

Unless you'll be using a TTL converter of some type, you only need 2 pins, fire, and ground. It sounds like you should be fine.

Cheers

James

rather going for a Sea and Sea YS-100alpha with a YS-27DX slave, and if I were to slave a second strobe would it need cabling or would the wirelss slave sensor work even though my master would only be connected via 4 pins?

I used to use a hardwired YS-110 with a YS-27dx slave and I found that for the most reliable slave performance I ran an optical fiber from the YS-110 to the YS-27.

For Macro, it would have been fine without the optical connection, but for W/A when the strobes are angled outward, the slave wouldn't always fire unless I connected them via fiber optics.

Electronic cable connectors are often based on the Nikonos 5-pin system, but not all the pins are active in digital cameras. There are adapters that, through fibre-optic encoding or additional electronics, restore TTL function, but most cables restrict the widely available strobes to manual function.

Ikelite strobes use a different cable.

So: what strobe do you want to use? Is TTL a neccessity? Are Sea & Sea cables too rough and ready for your needs?

Tim