I bought a working Philips 2517E and a 2517X with damaged LCD a few days ago from a woman whose late father had kept them in his home lab. These are true RMS, auto ranging hand held 4 digit multimeters from the late 70's - very advanced for their time!
An article in the
Philips Technical Review publication from 1978 describes the multimeters in detail including the custom bipolar and CMOS chips Philips designed for these meters.
My initial checks show me that the PM 2517E works fine. Calibration is good comparing with my Fluke 8060A. There are five axial 22uF/10V electrolytes in the power supply none of which seems to be leaking, but I will replace them as soon as I received new ones in the same dimensions as age must have taken its toll on them.
The PM 2517X needs a new LCD display and doesn't show any useful readings, but I have checked the outputs from the main board with my logic analyzer and the main board seems to be working fine, so I'm consindering good ways to replace the display module. An arduino or PIC processor reading the signals from the main board, driving a 2x16 character LCD and some serial RS232 or USB output in order to convert the multimeter into a data logging multimeter could be a fun project, but a copy of the 2517E LED display on a piece of prototyping board will probably be my first go to ensure the meter actually works.
I coudn't find any threads about these fine instruments so I decided to start a new one.
Below are some pictures of the PM2517E and the internals of the PM2517X for your enjoyment.
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