Re: high end multimeters, part II


"Mike Monett" <No@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Xns99188B422AF41Noemailadr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Michael, over the years, I have spent a fortune on HP, Fluke, Tek
etc. lab equipment. All of it eventually died and became impossible
to repair.

I now have a policy of designing and building my own lab equipment.
The ic's available these days are inexpensive and probably supply
more than enough capability for anything you may wish to measure.


If you need the capabilities of a 189, you're not going to duplicate that in
your own shop for under $500 - unless your time is free and you have no
deadlines. And you still have to face the obsolescence question - its just
been moved to somewhere else. If your DIY equipment fails (it always fails
while you are trying to accomplish some other task, otherwise you wouldn't
know it had failed), you suggest you might have to redesign it to use some
other chip that's available at the time. I don't see how that's any more
cost effective than throwing out a dead/unrepairable DMM and buying a newer
model. Either way, there is a secondary investment at an inopportune time,
to replace equipment that you expected to last longer than it did. If its a
DIY device, the investment may be primarily time, instead of cash. But its
still real money, and real schedule time.

Overall, I am very happy with the 189. I wouldn't let impending obsolescence
keep me from buying another one. Most of the time, DMM's last long enough
that they don't owe us anything by the time they die. (My Heath DMM is 30
yrs old and works fine, but I needed true RMS and logging so I bought the
189. I still use both, plus several old HP bench DMM's).

Buy what you need from a reputable brand, and assume that either the
warranty will cover problems, or else it will last long enough that you
aren't pissed off when it becomes necessary to replace it. And the third
possibility, that its unrepairable in a short time due to some part supply
problem that the manufacturer didn't adequately plan for, becomes a very low
probability risk that you should be able to live with. As someone else
suggested, in that case you should still be able to buy replacement parts on
ebay.

Steve


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