On Sun, 26 Apr 2015 07:33:59 -0700, Cursitor Doom
wrote:

....snip....
I still haven't worked out, however, why it is that this meter can
perform ESR measurments in circuit whereas for capacitance one has to
lift a lead. There's probably some obvious answer to this conundrum I'm
overlooking.

If checking BOTH capacitance and ESR in situ is important, I highly
recommend using your soundcard, properly. You can set the drive
arbitrarily to fairly smmll values which don't turn on adjacent
semiconductor components [well, sometime] and the parallel impedances
floating around connected to the cap won't show up very much.

I compared in situ readings to 'removed' readings, after using my
soundcard and found very little difference in values.

This was done using MULTIPLE frequency points AND fairly long run lengths
of 4800 or 9600 24 bit samples, with the ability to extend run-lengths to
19200, with results appearing each second. Measure over the spectrum of
10Hz to 89kHz and there is a wealth of information.

Seems like a few seconds in situ beats unsoldering/soldering a component
buried where you can't even adequately get at it.

Plus, if you already have a high quality soundcard, your investment in
instrumentation is low, really low.