Max Harding vk3jin wrote:
Get the Bob Parker kit from Dick Smith or direct from Bob and you wont
regret getting this great instrument. most of us Aussie techs use it.

What do you actually use it for?
Seems that every time I want to know ESR it's in a power supply or on
a motherboard with a dozen hooked in parallel thru ground/power planes.
I've had zero success finding bad caps.

Out of circut, yes, but if you're gonna go to the hassle and board risk
of removing the cap, might as well replace it. Half the time, have to
pull the leads out and remove 'em one at a time from the ground plane.
Holes are just too tiny to suck out the solder while the lead is in there.

Over the decades, I've tried 35pS TDR to try to isolate caps.
Tried spectrum analyzer with tracking generator to sweep power/ground
planes while shorting caps to look for change.

It's rare that there's only one cap, and with those, you can just look
for ripple while it's operating.

So what's the magic method for finding high ESR caps in-circuit in a
typical situation of parallel caps?
mike
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