Products > Test Equipment
Fluke 8846A Discontinued. Is it worth it to pay higher prices?
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bdunham7:

--- Quote from: Echelon on June 30, 2022, 03:26:31 pm ---On paper it looks like it ticks all my boxes.  The thing that bothers me----and maybe you can help put this to rest----is that in my mind, BK Precision is of a lower quality and caliber.  I'm not sure where I have that impression from.  I noticed that BK Precision has a place in the non-standards/safety compliant thread.  Am I completely way off with this?

--- End quote ---

BK Precision is a variety pack of a company.  They have been around quite some time and they have everything from legacy products that they designed long ago to outright rebadges.  A lot of their stuff is somewhere in the middle, either custom built from their design or a customized rebadge.  The result is that they vary (IMO) from a solid A-brand to a C+ brand in a few cases.  Some of their products are top-notch, like DC loads and PSUs that don't blow up when charging batteries.  They also have some very old design products that they are still selling--which is good in some cases.  It just depends on what you are buying.  They also are pretty decent about support, although they simply don't have detailed technical information on a lot of their recent products.

 I think the noncompliant handheld meters were built by CEM, a well known not-so-great supplier to discounters everywhere.  Their bench meters (LCR and DMM) are made by Tonghui and are typically pretty good at a very good price.  The 5493C is new and I haven't seen one yet in person.  My impression is that it won't be quite as good as the DMM6500, especially when it comes to the current ranges and extended features, but it has a straightforward press-the-button operation style that you seem to want.
 

--- Quote ---Also, not that the Fluke scores well here, but how is the repairability of the 5493C?

--- End quote ---

The Fluke 8846A is an interesting case in that while it seems to be utterly unrepairable in both my experience and that of those far more skilled than I ( https://xdevs.com/fix/f8846a/ ), it is also nearly bulletproof if you don't physically abuse it or leave the display on 24/7 at full brightness.  Every one that I've seen not working has looked rough.  The one thing that can be fixed is the Front/Rear switch, anything else seems impossible.  After spending some time and despair on a few, I think there may be an issue with mechanically induced failures inside the PCB below the outguard FPGA.  Electrically they seem to be pretty robust, although I did see one that had components blown off the board from what probably was way too much voltage applied to the rear terminals.

As far as repairing BK Precision/Tonghui bench meters, I'm 2 for 2.  There's no documentation or schematics, but so far I haven't seen any part numbers scrubbed off or anything like that.  They seem to be mostly COTS parts internally.  So unless they've changed their philosophy I suspect that repairability will be difficult but maybe not impossible, which is about as good as it gets these days.  Even the company probably doesn't service them at the board level--their 3 year warranty and fixed-fee repair service may just be unit replacements.  Maybe display boards, case parts, etc are available but that's going to be it. 

Anyway, I'm not trying to sell you one, just to make you aware of it.
Kleinstein:
The cyclone is a FPGA that is used in the Fluke 8846, especially the name for a FPGA family. So not a Fluke specific part, but a part Fluke needs to build the DMM. The Fluke specific part is the program / firmware for the FPGA.  With such an old design it would not make much sense to change the design to just use a newer and better available FPGA to do the same job.  This would need a new PCB and if done right new tests to make sure that things like the INL is not severely effected.  So if the FPGA is no longer available this would pretty much mean stop of production.  A upgrade to a different FPGA is possible and was done for other meters, but the 8846 was due to go obsolete anyway and AFAIK there are not unique features that make it hard to replace.

The question is if Fluke would offer a direct replacement or consider the DMM6500, Keithly2100 and DMM7510 as sufficient to cover most of the market.
With alternatives available from Keithley they may not plan for a direct replacement and this does not really mean much for the brand as a whole. They may just shift that market segment more to the Keithley brand in the same holding. Another possiblity is they have a replacement, but not yet ready.

Fluke still has the 8858 as a high end bench meter, though not as a more normal bench meter but more something for a cal lab and to complement the calibrators.
bdunham7:

--- Quote from: Echelon on June 30, 2022, 03:35:38 pm ---Forgive me if this is a NOOB question, but what is a Cyclone?  Are Cyclones a proprietary ASICs Fluke is/was using in their meters?

--- End quote ---

Not a proprietary ASIC, the Cyclone is an FPGA and the 8846A uses two of them (one inguard, one outguard) to run the meter.  The original Cyclone that Fluke uses was introduced in 2002 and I think they are up to Cyclone 10 or something.  It would be like having a current production device that still uses a Core2 Duo and Windows XP.  They (the original model Fluke used) were still available in single-unit quantities a few years ago when I checked, but perhaps they've dried up.


--- Quote ---What makes you say that Fluke might be heading down hill without a replacement model?  Have you seen other signs of this decline?  I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

--- End quote ---

I don't mean that the whole company is going to collapse or that you should dump your Fortive stock, but just that if they aren't putting any R&D into this area, it means there won't be products for us to buy.  Fluke's industrial and calibration business is booming AFAIK, so the only reason for them to abandon this segment is either short term profit improvement or lack of capacity because their engineers retired and they didn't hire new ones in this department.  So not replacing the model--even with an 8846B that is the same thing except a TFT display and a respun board with chips that aren't two decades old--seems like a sort of beginning of the end to me.
nctnico:
IMHO you got this wrong. You shouldn't see Fluke, Keithley and Tektronix as different manufacturers. They are just brands from Fortive. So the DMM6500 is just as much a Fluke as the DMMs that previously got sold under the Fluke brand. It looks like Fortive is organising the branding so Tektronix is for oscilloscopes and general test equipment, Keithley for the high accuracy electrical equipment and Fluke for calibration (which goes far beyond electrical).

And some equipment is hard to improve. The Tektronix FCA3000 series frequency counters for example are very good today even though they have been on the market for >10 years. In some ways even better compared to what Keysight has to offer at their highest end.
aronake:
I bought a 15 year old fluke 8845A for 350 USD last calibrated in 2012. Then needed one more bench multimeter so got a DMM6500 two month ago. The Fluke is still very accurate despite long time from calibration, around 1 off on last digit for 5V DC. The DMM6500 despite new around 11 off on last digit for 5V DC.

So happy I have both, but would easily go for DMM6500 if i could only choose one. The display possibilities much better on the DMM6500. It is much more responsive, can sample MUCH quicker, and you can build your own scan card for it for 100 USD or so.
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