Multimeter Madness : Circuitmate DM15B

In a few weeks time there will be the big neighbourhood yard sale here, so I am looking forward to sharing some of my electrical finds here on the blog. I will admit that my last blog about the cheapo multimeter left me feeling rather sad, mainly because those dangerous Chinese multimeters have flooded the market, and will continue to as long as idiots like myself want to buy one "just to see how bad they can be" so I blame myself for all the ills of the planet, it is all my fault and I apologize.

I wanted to balance things out by buying a few vintage homegrown multimeters, they don't have to be manufactured in Canada or the USA, but some will have been designed on this continent in the last thirty or so years, perhaps even older, and some will be marketplace finds like this one :

This was a great find on marketplace last weekend, the owner sold it for two bucks and made a caveat that it "kinda" worked. It was on our route so we picked it up from his house, dropped a tooney in his postbox and made off like a thief in the night, or day as it was. It is a Beckman Industries Circuitmate DM15B, designed in San Diego, California and manufactured in Taiwan around 1985. In addition it came with some nice Pomona 3782-36 Minigrabber Test clip to stacking banana plug leads, 36" long and I'm not sure which part of the deal makes me happier, the multimeter or the leads.

Pomona Electronics was a company specializing in electronic test equipment and accessories, apparently it was acquired by Fluke Corporation, and as is the state of companies in the states, Fluke is no longer owned by Fluke. The test leads have Pomona on the wiring and possibly date back to the mid 1980s, they are, like the multimeter, in great shape.

After placing a fresh nine volt battery in it and giving the multimeter a slight clean, it kinda worked extremely well, very well in fact and my overall impression of it is it is a solid little device, same size as that abhorrent depressing thing that I reviewed in the last blog, but this one actually has a fuse and solid as a little rock, and I may be going on a bit but those test leads are a very nice addition to my collection. I did some testing, voltage is accurate, continuity buzzer a little buzzing wasp, and resistance testing as accurate as I need it :

Testing a 1k ohm resistor, 991 reported, within a percentage of actual value, I repeated the test for a whole range of resistors and accuracy was very good between 10 ohm and a million. I like the feel of these older meters, something to do with the weight I suppose, plus overall this Circuitmate appears to be very well built, and I suppose because it is almost forty years old and still working like a champ, that is proof of how well it was constructed.

I am very happy with the test leads, did I mention that?

I am therefore no longer sad, I am happy and my faith in life, the universe and everything has been restored once again.