After a frustrating week of troubleshooting a prototype, I have an humble request for multimeter designers.
I have many multimeters, and I like most of them: the new ones are cheap, small size and most of the time they work as promised, but there is that APO (automatic power off) function that drives me crazy.
I had 4 or 5 meter connected all the time, and they wanted to save batteries, so they beeped every 5 to 15 minutes, to advise me they wanted to switch off, and I had to stop my work
Let see the AN8009 (which is one of the simpler) : you can disable APO at switch on, but if you forget, it will beep, and you have to switch it off an on again. If it was set-up to check continuity, you must turn the switch to off, then to the fourth step (ohm etc), then push the yellow button for selecting beep.
When you are in an hurry, this is frustrating (and other meters are more frustrating than this).
I thought that a better procedure could be:
- the meter beeps (and displays a flashing APO alert to show which one meter is beeping)
- I touch a button (any button..)
- the APO is disabled until I swuth the meter off.
Any comment to this rant?
Bet regards