I was reading through the user manual for my 1273A the other day and found that the "Z low" feature can be used to indicate whether a battery is really dead and on it's way out or not.
I use my old batteries for some bread board projects and stuff like that after the have been used in my meters or whatever. The lithium ones seem to last a while even after they are not up to powering meters or whatever anymore.
My DE-5000 was struggling to test some caps I was playing around with and as the battery was getting down to 1 bar I thought that might be the problem. It was reading 7.8v or 7.6v if I remember correctly. I changed the old battery for a brand new one and the problem was solved. The DE-5000 worked as it should again.
It was displaying in pF when I was measuring uF sized caps for anyone interested. If your DE-5000 exhibits this behaviour. change the batteries out before taking it apart!
Anyways... my U1273 won't measure anything apart from A or mA/uA for about 5-10 mins after testing a 9v battery with the "Z low". It just shows blank spaces where the numbers should be but displays the range and any other info normally displayed on the screen for a given mode. After around 5-10 mins it measures everything fine again like nothing had happened.
Does anyone know why this is or does their Keysight meter do this also?
I don't want to contact Keysight if it is something I am doing wrong although it does say it can perform this in the manual.