22 Sep
2010
22 Sep
'10
11:28 a.m.
FLuke was at
least 5 times the price of a cheap meter with similar
paper specifications. But I do object if what I get isn't much
better than the
cheap version.
That's a bit unfair on the Fluke: it might have been quite a bit better
than my Rolson quite-a-lot-of-functions multimeter (good enough for
continuity tests and fiddling with the car).
Your complaints are that swapping the battery would eventually lead to
a failure which could easily have been prevented by better design
My rela moan here is that if I am spending sevearl hundred pounds on an
instrument when 'simular' ones cost, say \pounds 20, then there has to be
something to justify the higher cost. And not cutting corners is part of
it.
(actually
the Rolson might win there :-)) and that the LCD display failed through
old age (10p says the Rolson won't last that long despite the light
usage it sees).
Actually, there are 2 more complainmts. The first is hte mode switching
aranagement, which did sometimes not work properly (why they did it this
way I don;t know)
And the other is that spares are not available. Perhaps that is unfair
after all this time, but I do like to keep my devices running for
ridiculously long times. The 'lifetime warranty' on modrre moderm DMMs
uses their own definiton of 'lifetime' and is of not much use to me...
I've poked around the FLuke website. It's somewhat silly in that, for
exampl,e what manuals they have for download depends on whether you claim
to be in the US or UK. If you're in the US, there's a like for getting
spare parts (mind you, the form on the next page seems to be broken),
that doesn't exist in the UK., But anyway...
One thing I _do not_ like is that there are no service manuals for the
later instruments (this applies to Agilent too, I have considered one of
their meters). There are calibration manuals, but no compoent-level
scheamtics or parts lists. Which means (a) it's going to be
expensive/diffiuclt to repair and (b) I can't see if the mode swithcing
'feature' is still there or not.
It's coming to the point where I am going to have to make my own portable
DMM to get one that I like...
I cannot really comment on the accuracy of my two cheap and one
not-so-cheap
(but free to me) meters, other than to say that they all matched to
within one
percent (and also matched the equally uncalibrated PSU) but I bet I
could
send my branded one off to be calibrated with a straight face (if I
could afford it)
I don;t need traceable claibration for anything I do. Calibrating against
my own pseudo-standards (like 0.01% resisotrs), is good enough.
but the Rolson would cost more in postage alone than
the meter did in
the first
place :-)
So do you have a cheap meter against which to compare?
No. I have some reasonable bench DVMs, etc (going back quite a few years,
some are old enoguh to be all discrete transistors, I think one even has
a couple of vlavles in the input stageto keep the impedance high enough).
Given those, and until recently a Fluke DMM, why would I want a cheap one?
Oh, I do have, non-working, but I suspect repairalbe, a fully valved DVM.
An 8U or so rack of electronics. Around 50 valves all told...
-tony