7 Jan
2006
7 Jan
'06
10:06 a.m.
At 1:20 PM +0000 1/7/06, Philip Pemberton wrote:
In message <m1Ev2mD-000IyIC at p850ug1>
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
Count me as another Fluke fan, I started with the Fluke 77 in the
Navy, and as a result bought a Fluke 77 III. It's the one piece of
test equipment that I use the most.
I'm not sure where Richard lives, but anyone looking into
Oscilloscopes or meters that lives close to a Fry's might want to
consider checking them out. They're where I got my Fluke 77 III and
Tek TDS-220 from, and at least the one near me seems to always have a
good selection.
Something else I added to my assortment of test equipment in the last
year or so was something I've always wanted, though I have to
question my need for it, and that's a clamp-on Amp meter.
The next pieces of test equipment I'm likely to be looking at will be
a Variac and a Oscillator.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
1) A multimeter. Digital or analogue, the choice
is yours (I have, and
use, both). It is rare to need to make accurate measurements in classic
computer work, so analogue is OK, and in fact better when you want to
'peak' the voltage at some test point or something like that. If you go
digital, I would certainly consider a Fluke.
Avoid the cheap little "pocket" meters though. If it isn't a Fluke,
it's
likely to be horrendously inaccurate at best. I once had a cheapie DMM that
was about 1.5V out on the 3V scale, and 5V out on the 30V scale.
Fluke 25 and 27 ruggedised DMMs are starting to appear on the surplus market;
seems most of them are ex-military stock. They're pretty rugged, but also
rather heavy. I've got a Fluke 25 that's been dropped a fair few times, and
still works perfectly.