Just used my EEVblog BM235's temperate probe to record a fever of 39.3c. Such a versatile unit! :p
Indeed, I used mind to calibrate my daughter's thermometer:
Maybe I'm missing the joke here, but is that not a terrible idea? Inaccuracy on a typical K-type thermocouple is the difference between hyperthermia and hypothermia!
It's a great idea, I just hadn't thought of it.
rs20 is right, it's a terrible idea.
Typical inaccuracy on a multimeter thermocouple is terrible, relatively speaking. We are talking +/- several degrees at any temperature. If you are measuring your soldering iron tip temperature, maybe that's not too bad. If you are checking human body temperature for a fever, it is not acceptable in the least. OTOH, when done right, with a proper ice-water (or triple point) bath for the cold junction and a giant lookup table or high order polynomial calculations for the mV-temp conversion, then you can get very high absolute accuracy from a thermocouple. A handheld meter doesn't do that. It uses a thermistor to estimate the cold junction temperature (or worse, skips it and just assumes room temp), and probably uses linear interpolation on a conversion table with a few points spread over the several hundred degree range of the thing.