Mastech multimeters from Maplin - opinions

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:26:23 +0100, Chris scrawled:

Look at KewTech or AlphaTek. Both value for money decent meters.

They dont give enough info on specs to really judge much. What specs are there dont look the best (esp only down to 4mA dc), and the price is a bit high. rapidelectronics.com will do you something with specs like that for a tenner.

NT

"Chris" wrote in message news:43528d39$0$49771$ snipped-for-privacy@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net...

Couple of weeks ago noticed that Farnell do cheapo meters - £9 or so for little "palm size" ones. Limited and no doubt not very accurate, but suitable for us. (Not too worried if someone nicks them!) otoh ... the White Gold meter I bought some years ago for £60 is still going strong, so can recommend Maplin generally. hth Neil

"Chris" wrote in message news:43528d39$0$49771$ snipped-for-privacy@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net...

Check out the cheaper Metermans from Farnell

I had a quick look: do you want to connect this to a PC? Its snag may be that it connects to a serial port socket rather than the serial bus's modern cousin the USB. Maybe old type serial port sockets will be disappearing from new PCs ere long??

On 16 Oct 2005 12:51:03 -0700, jim_in snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com scrawled:

They already are and it's becoming more and more difficult to get a laptop for site maintenance with the required ports, i.e. serial, for a vast majority of equipment.

They may be old, but there's nothing wrong with them, unlike that pile of s**te USB.

The laptop issue was because of lack of space for the connector.

However, they will be vanishing from PC's now, as Microsoft has told the vendors to get rid of all the leagcy devices on the LPC bus (the embedded ISA bus in systems with no ISA card slots). The items typically on the LPC bus are serial, parallel, floppy, PS2 mouse/keyboard, games port (although that mostly vanished from southbridge chips ~8 years ago).

There are PCI serial port cards to be had quite cheaply.

I've had a Fluke meter for over ten years. It's been thrown around, dropped and generally abused. I have taken the trouble to have it calibrated every couple of years and it has always been spot on.

It really isn't worth titting around for the small incremental price of a decent product.

Do you actually need the ability to interface with a PC?

Also, I'd say the spec isn't great for general DIY and electronics. I find capacitance, frequency and temperature measurement well worth having. Also things like max and minimum and average - with a 'hold' facility.

Ok, so a Fluke with all this will cost maybe 4 times the price. But is always a delight to use.

If you only want simple DVM facilities for occasional use buy a cheap one and be prepared to junk it after it gets broken.

Easy enough problem to solve though:

And thanks to the PoS USB you can have as many as you like! ;-)

Not sure what that adaptor uses but the only one I have found that consistently works across a wide range of equipment is the type using the "ftdi" chipset as it fully implements all serial interface pins (not all do) Also buffering is correctly implemented unlike many that are on offer out there.

No connection with this place and they might not be the cheapest

Speed is what's wrong with them. Perhaps OK for the odd voltage measurement, but even if you can crank them up to 115 Kbits/second they're still not fast enough for image or video transfer.

Handy to know...

(having said that, what was the old line about "232" being the number of ways of connecting three wires to a 25 pin plug! It is pretty rare to find kit that actually makes use of many of the more obscure RS232 facilities - especially the clocked and synch transfer capabilities)

Perhaps I should have said all *9 pin* serial functions.

I bought this model (for a specific job that needed data logged to a pc.) BUT it was sold by Maplin for £19.99 at the time - I would not have paid £50 for it. The yellow part is a rubbery case protection. In order to change the battery (PP3), this has to be removed to get to the back of the meter. A philips screwdriver is also required - and the third screw is found by peeling off the QC label... The probes are cheap pointy things without any method of clipping then to test points. The 5 pin connector that plugs in to the meter (RS232) is *very* fragile - the pins are 15 mm long and it is moulded so you need to be careful. The baud rate is fixed at 600. The supplied software is ok, results can be graphed, saved to disk, printed etc. The display digits are large (about 13mm )and there is a backlight. The carrying case for meter and cables is thin plastic carp. The 4mA range has a resolution of 1uA (but an accuracy of +-1.2% +- 3 digits. The 4V range has a resolution of 4mV with +- 0.5% accuracy +- 3 digits.

Geo

Thanks everyone for the responses. I am more interested in paying to get a reliable meter than getting the cheapest possible meter. I didn't specifically have a need for the RS232 interface, but I could see it being useful in the future.

I have narrowed it down to a few options:

Meterman 35XP (some of the Meterman meters on Farnell have Fluke listed as the manufacturer - presumably an error?)

Cheers

Chris

"Chris" wrote in message news:435412a8$0$73602$ snipped-for-privacy@ptn-nntp-reader03.plus.net...

Not an error Fluke own Meterman. I would suggest takeing a look at the 34XR. the main fault is a subtle one, the imput resistance is 9.1 M ohms not 10

Please read

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 10:49:44 +0100, Mr Fizzion scrawled:

Depends how fast you want to go, I never said RS232 is better than anything else and we should all switch to serial only.

Exactly why I don't use serial connections for image or video transfer.

My car isn't much use at flying, so I don't attempt it.

Thanks James (and everyone else for responding). I've now ordered a 34XR.

Cheers

Chris