Curiously I wonder which meter has the best battery life these days?
The old Fluke 25/27 used to have 1000+ hours.
Curiously I wonder which meter has the best battery life these days?
The old Fluke 25/27 used to have 1000+ hours.
Curiously I wonder which meter has the best battery life these days?
The old Fluke 25/27 used to have 1000+ hours.I would have expected something really basic like a Fluke 12, but the Fluke 12E is rated for just 200 hours. Something modern with a simple ASIC (but not the ancient ICL7106). Accuracy, features, powerful MCU's and fancy displays tend to suck power. Basically the opposite of the Fluke 80-IV/180/280 series. I checked a few candidates, but couldn't find anything better than 800 hours, 400 hours appears to be standard. The Fluke 17B is 500 hours, which is at least better than the 87-V.
Forget bench meters unless you have a specific requirement for one.
Hand held meters are infinitely more versatile.
Even if you have a small bench, it's handy to be able to place your meter anywhere you want and not worry about a power cord.
Dave.
Sorry to raise an old thread, but I'm curious to see if you're view has changed since you acquired your Agilent 34461A?
I currently have a nice Advantest 5 1/2 digit I got cheap on e-bay and a surprisingly accurate (at least it agrees well with my Advantest) handheld meter I got from Maplin.
I want to get another meter that is of the same order as the Advantest - I'd like a 6 1/2 digit but they are a little pricey - and am looking at high end handhelds vs mid range (5 1/2 digit) bench.
The trade off is versatility/robustness of the handheld versus increased accuracy (of the order of a factor of 4 or so)/no batteries to worry about/larger brighter display of a bench top.
I want to buy new so I get a calibration point to compare my older uncalibrated meters with.
What are people's latest views?
One point I did not find in posts above is power outage. What can you do with benchtop meter if there is no mains power? Nothing, you are left with 0 functionality. Handheld has inherit advantage of versatility in such situation.
I am with Dave that handhelds are much more versatile and more useful all around, except maybe for super high accuracy and long term logging applications. Benchtops contains mostly empty space (due to "box" size constraint) and adds additional cable to trip on.
Concerning power options. Only cheap meters do not have auto power off feature. Proper meters have settable APO (or just turn off APO is it is npt needed).
One point I did not find in posts above is power outage. What can you do with benchtop meter if there is no mains power? Nothing, you are left with 0 functionality. Handheld has inherit advantage of versatility in such situation.
I'm just glad it doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. Nothing wrong with owning both!
I thought I would invest in a good meter. But given that; I can't decide whether this is an opportunity to go for a new bench that will be calibrated and possibly more accurate than my e-bay Advantest or go for a less accurate but more versatile solid handheld.
You'll probably get more use out of a solid handheld, and the convenience is nice to have as well (less bench space and no power cord to fuss with). Worst case and you want top accuracy without going crazy on price, look for a 50k count model, such as a Brymen BM869 from tme.eu (Gossen makes a 1.2M count model, but it's very expensive).
You might also want to consider a DMM Check Plus to check your existing meters against, and doesn't cost a fortune (less than half the calibration fee for one meter based on US cal pricing).
The Gossen 1.2M model is actually reasonably priced in that it is about the same (slightly cheaper) than the Agilent 34461A with very similar accuracy specs (in fact slightly better) but it is rather limited in that it only measures up to 100mA but it does do 4 wire resistance measurements.
I'm planning to get the 0.01% Voltage reference from Doug rather than the DMM check plus
I thought Doug stopped making his, leaving either the DMM Check or other units available on eBay.
Here's a perspective from someone who has been a hobbyist for a couple of years:
Bench or Handheld, get meters which have serial out / GPIB / whatever. You won't need this functionality yet, but a couple of years from now you might wish you had it!
I've been slowly working towards being able to characterize parts by sweeping one parameter, etc. I want to be able to hit "enter" on my keyboard and have a script do the rest. Fun! Up until now, I had to take data manually: tweak the knob, take a photo, repeat, then dump it all into excel.
Frankie (a forum user in china) sells two handhelds which are decent and both feature serial out. One it a bit higher precision (but not accuracy) than the other, and they are both pretty cheap for what you get ($54 and $37 USD).
Having a variety of meters like that is a good thing. Typically, if you are measuring and logging several variables at once, it is likely you only need uber precision on just one of them, so having one really high-end (5.5 digit) meter is nice. Having different makes of meters will give you a good picture into measuring their drift against each other (this is why it would be nice to have two 5.5 digit meters).
He still has them on his web shop - I've not looked on eBay:
The other advantage of the Voltage reference vs the DMM check from my point of view is I can order one at 3V instead of 5V which fits in with my 5 1/2 digit meter (the calibration points are 300mV, 3V and 30V so combined with a 10:1 divider I can check at 3 points (using the 3 matched resistors in parallel and series trick by the person whose name I forget - as described on Geller labs site):