We read the friggin' manual! (update)

A while ago I wrote about my struggles with a brand new Sennheiser wireless G3 set that would not work. Three experienced videographers and a professional sound engineer could not get a signal out of that particular set. It was a frustrating and humbling experience. My friend spent an entire evening knitpicking the manual, came to me in sheer desperation the morning he was supposed to shoot with it for the first time and finally took my G2 set because I wasn't succesfull, either.
He sent the set back to the store and received a new one a week later. He hooked the set up to his camera, turned it on and... no signal... Not again! But a second later he discovered he had hooked up the transmitter to the camera instead of the receiver... Switched them around and by god, a signal! So yes, very once in a while you have memorized the manual and things still don't work... you just happened to have that one-in-a-thousand-lemon...

But we read the friggin' manual!?

I've owned the Sennheiser EW-100 G2 wireless mic system for many years and it's been a great workhorse. For the budget-minded shooters the general consensus is that you can't get any better for the money. I believe I paid between 600 and 700 euro's for mine many years ago.
A friend of mine rents my set on a regular basis but has finally decided to buy a set of his own: the latest successor of my set, the Sennheiser EW-112P G3. Newer must be better, right?

He was familiar with the settings of my set and assumed the new system would have pretty much the same menu. Not so. The day before the shoot he spent literally hours setting up his system but the mic would not pick up any sound. He practically memorized the manual but to no avail.