On Wed, 08 Apr 2015 03:09:36 -0700, whisky-dave wrote:

On Tuesday, 7 April 2015 21:49:51 UTC+1, Cursitor Doom wrote:
On Tue, 07 Apr 2015 11:01:14 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

My experience says a £40 or so DVM from the far east is likely to be
ok.
For many, a Fluke is simply too expensive for casual use.

40 notes these days will buy you a lovely s/h AVO model 8 and it'll
last a lifetime.

But for a lot of modern uses an AVO isn't that good. It's relatively
big, bulky and heavy too.

I bought a model 7 the other day for 15 quid and it's built
like a tank and will measure up to 1200V with zero risk of exploding in
your face - unlike those ridiculous cheap AND nasty DVMs where you're
taking your life in your hands with just normal mains voltages.
Real quality never dates.

not everyone wants to measure 1200V. I have about a dozen AVOs on a
shelf they haven;t been used for years. We use DMMs now they are far
better for almost every use an AVO was put to.

Quite often that extra little bit of loading an analogue meter puts
across a measurement makes for a more meaningful reading. DMMs are so
high impedance and whilst most of the time that's a good thing, there are
other times when it can be very unhelpful and provide a false positive.
And like someone else said, for peaking & tweaking, they're *way* better
than a DMM.