I'm finding that most of the cables I use to connect my triggers to my SB flash and monolights last less than a year. I missed several nice shots last summer because cables that I tested and were working fine the week before suddenly weren't working at all in the heat of battle. When lights aren't firing the first thing I check is that everything is turned on. The second is that cables are plugged in, and the third is to try different cable. I always carry spare batteries and cables. Learned the hard way.
Garrett Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam had a quote long ago. Something along the lines that if you are troubleshooting anything on the set, and it at all involves a cable, start there, most of the time its the culprit. That advice has served me well on many occasions.
As a follow-up to my posts within this thread, I never did get my pocket wizards to fire my AB800's via a Radio Shack 1/8th mono sync cable. I bought three of these cables from Radio Shack. None worked.
Yesterday I received 4 cables that I purchased specifically for this purpose from zebraflash.com (part number 0018; $6.00 each). I only tried the very first cable, but it worked. I will try the other three cables tomorrow night.
all 4 zebraflash.com cables work. I had one more Radio Shack cable on my table, so I tried it with the same AB800 and the same two Pocket Wizards. No luck.
I do not believe that 4 Radio Shack cables were faulty, however there must be some difference in the way the contacts line up. For $6/ea, I'll stick with cables made for the job.
