EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: Axtman on February 24, 2014, 05:01:12 am
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Does anyone have own and or use a Phillips PM2525 multimeter? Thanks!
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Yes I have owned one for almost a year now.
What exactly are you wondering about it?
I did a teardown of it on my website, frozenelectronics.com ... also on YT under Frozen Electronics.
It's a great basic bench multimeter, the specs are okay but it's not a super-high-precision model. It does the job well for me though, and it does have a 'hi res' mode on most ranges. It's basically a 4 1/2 digit meter for most ranges. The "Probe" input below the regular banana jacks is a proprietary connector that I've managed to reverse engineer with the help of some online pinouts. I've been meaning to make my own 4-terminal probes for a while now. It's a cool feature that is under-used on these models because the original probes are IMPOSSIBLE to find. I've been looking for almost a year trying to find a set of those probes and it's impossible -- there's both a 4-terminal resistance probe and a thermocouple probe for the temperature measurement.
The Probe connector also has I2C data on it for calibration when in cal mode. I don't know anything else about that because I haven't messed around with my calibration. My unit seems to be pretty damn close to in cal despite travelling across the continent and then being in one of my moves across the city.
The current goes down to 100 picoamps in the lowest range, which is cool. (0.0000uA). The frequency measurement seems to be fairly accurate as well. The capacitance measurement is like any capacitance on a multimeter, it works okay but it's nothing like an LCR meter. It can be good for sanity checks or if a cap has the marking worn off or something. The continuity is pretty slow and non-latching, so it's only useful if you're probing simple things and not something intermittent.
Mine has (I think) an RS-232 or parallel port in the back. My power supply (PM2811) and my scope also have parallel/serial connections and I've been meaning to play around with them, but never got around to it.
If you have any more questions let me know! I'd be happy to help.