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I decided to replace most of my DMX cables with Wicycles. Before I took them to the first gig I got out a couple of non-ADJ fixtures and tried them out. Worked great, and I was excited about the expected ease of setup at the upcoming gig. At the gig I couldn't get the WiCycles to communicate with each other - so I had the extra hassle of uninstalling the Wicycles and installing DMX cables.

Afterward I set up the entire system at home and called Blizzard Lighting support to troubleshoot the wireless system. The problem turned out to be my Mega Bar Pros (strangely the Mega Bar 50s weren't a problem). The Wicycle system worked great except whenever I plugged a DMX connection into the Mega Pro Bar - at which point the system quit working.

The Mega Pro Bars shut the system down even when I ran a DMX cable to it from a fixture that worked fine with the Wicycle receiver, i.e., no Wicycle was plugged into it directly.

The Blizzard Lighting guy had heard of the problem and it seemed to be cause by the master signals the Mega Pro Bar sends out on the DMX line even in DMX mode. He suggested that I terminate the Mega Pro Bar and run it in Slave mode. I did both. That did fix the WiCycle communication problem, but the Mega Pro Bar doesn't respond properly to DMX signals in Slave mode.

Has anyone found a solution to this problem? Any suggestions?
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I really don't want another piece of equipment to set up, much less pay to solve the fixture's problem. Talking with Will was an exploration of alternatives in the event ADJ couldn't fix this problem with the Mega Bar.

I did ask Will to check with Blizzard's engineers to see if a splitter would solve the problem. Will did respond "I’d say that would work" without mentioning any communications with an engineer [Maybe Will didn't need to because he is an engineer. I didn't know.]

So I checked with ENTTEC to see if its D-Split would solve the problem. Jeremy said they couldn't be sure unless I sent a Mega Bar and a wiCICLE transmitter and receiver to them in Australia. Oddly he was pretty sure that ENTTEC's much more expensive splitter would do the trick.

In short, I sure hope ADJ can fix this problem with the Mega Bar.
Thanks for the response.

It would be a waste of all our time if my Mega Bar is doing what all Mega Bars do. The guy at ENTTEC said, "I suspect they're possibly either sending out something that isn't DMX at all, or it's almost DMX but with a non-zero start code, maybe."

Would you kindly ask your tech guys if the Mega Bar indeed sends slave signals even when it is in DMX mode?

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