In 1984 a group of us working at APPH, the landing gear factory, perused an electronics catalog and we saved on postage by buying things together, it was a wonderful day when things arrived and I was in possession of my first analog multimeter. I may do a blog on that one, later.
This blog will be about the third multimeter, recently purchased, and these conversations will be a review of the state of things out there in the market, because quite frankly, the multimeter market is a complete shambles and I hope to shed some light on that. However, multimeter number three is a reasonable surprise, and I know for sure that it is going to be better than a recently ordered multimeter number four and possibly a lot worse than multimeter number five, although because of timing and locality, five will probably be four.
Anyways, back to number three.
It was ordered from Amazon and was featured as a "warehouse deal" which means it had possibly been a customer return, the original "new" price, with shipping and taxes, being $31.35 and the "used" price was $22.08 so I thought, for shits and giggles, I would order it as a backup to my aging cheapo multimeter from a decade ago (multimeter number two) plus there were also crocodile clip leads included, which I wanted for my electronics studies.
It arrived, but was dead as a dodo, however, I quickly found that it was the included nine volt battery and replaced it, all was good, but I thought I should contact Amazon customer service and have a grumble. I have found that with the big companies, grumbling is often a satisfying way to reach a state of ungrumble, so with fair difficulty I ended up in online chat with a representative with a distinctive foreign sounding name.
After quite a short whinge, the chap said I could return it, free of charge, or if I chose, a partial refund would be given, so I picked the latter and he awarded me a twenty percent refund of $4.40 and asked if that was satisfactory, I said yes, and then to my surprise he also gave me a $5.00 courtesy credit for any future purchases. Therefore, when all the dust settled, multimeter number three ended up costing a whopping $12.68 and that definitely ticked off the shits and giggles box.
The innards :
The little motherboard is not that bad, most of the solder joints look fine with some voids, perhaps some are a little dull and the cleaning process, to remove any excess flux, left much to be desired. There are a couple of fuses, one glass 250V 200mA glass quick blow fuse in an interesting, soldered holder that will be a challenge to replace and a surface mount zero ohm resistor "fuse" or trace jumper as an overcurrent protector. Then the "brass rail" on the right hand side is a shunt so that the microprocessor can calculate amperage when the test lead is in the 10A socket.
As usual with these Chinese testers, there is the epoxy "blob" on the left hand side there, that is the microprocessor that does all those basic electronic calculations based on lead input and selector position, just the basic formulae that we learned at trade school with mostly acceptable accuracy.
Overall multimeter three is of reasonable quality, materials are ok, soldering is fair, features are ok and I expect for the price, that is acceptable for a little hobby unit, the little manual, with the smallest font known to man, not so much when you have ancient eyes like mine. As for longevity, well it will be used for my light electronics, arduino and breadboard use, so no danger there, will I be using this one to test mains voltage?, well highly unlikely, I will not be sticking those test leads into any receptacle because I suspect that magic smoke may appear and possibly the smell of cooking bacon could be a possibility.
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