| General > General Technical Chat |
| Seriously, anyone know the story and meaning of "OL" on multimeters? |
| << < (3/8) > >> |
| Mr. Scram:
It's obviously "Out of Luck". |
| wilfred:
--- Quote from: VK3DRB on November 03, 2018, 12:52:06 pm ---I remember a rather boastful electronic engineer at IBM seeing OL on fluke DMM, saying something like "OL means the meter is faulty". OL is a defacto standard that works with seven segment displays quite nicely. We use a lot of defacto standards without thinking about it. One defacto standard I hate is SMD tantalum caps having the stripe as positive, yet on electrolytic caps it in negative. Who ever devised the tantalum "standard" needs to be removed from the gene pool. It is illogical, stupid and dangerous. I think many of us have been caught out with that once. --- End quote --- Re SMD tantalum cap marking. Thanks for the warning. Only used through hole till now. |
| Feynman:
For me its always been "over load". Most multimeter manuals describe "OL" with something like "Overload condition is detected", e.g. the manual of the Fluke 87V. |
| BeBuLamar:
While it may not make sense it means "Over Load" because the DMM manufacturers said so. I just wonder which DMM was first to display "OL". Early DMM display a 1 for this. |
| tom66:
I want to know why budget multimeters show a single "1" when in over-range. If the concern is over logic complexity, I can understand not wanting to implement text characters, but a single or double hyphen would probably be more understandable. So many times I've worked someone unfamiliar with multimeters through a problem and they've said things like, it reads "1 Volt" and then only do you realise that they had it on the mV range and that's the overload indication. |
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