04-05-2012, 09:49 PM
Just a small snippet of trivia - but relevant to this thread.
Many, many years ago (early 1970's) I had a good friend who was a highly skilled and, it must be said, a very gifted electronics engineer. He designed a whole raft of electronic equipment for his own hobby use and some of it was quite impressive too. Anyway, the only multimeter he ever owned & used was a Heathtkit VTVM. I'll never forget the way he used to gently tap the meter transparent plastic cover now and again, because the needle would occasionally stick!
I never did discover if he cleared that minor, but irritating, fault. I recall asking him if he ever used, or had owned, an AVO, or a passive multimeter, to which his response was something like "Why should I use one of those? This meter tells me everything that I am likely to need to know - and it doesn't load the circuit."
To my mind, that just about sums up the usefulness of a VTVM (especially if it reads resistance as well.)
Al.
Many, many years ago (early 1970's) I had a good friend who was a highly skilled and, it must be said, a very gifted electronics engineer. He designed a whole raft of electronic equipment for his own hobby use and some of it was quite impressive too. Anyway, the only multimeter he ever owned & used was a Heathtkit VTVM. I'll never forget the way he used to gently tap the meter transparent plastic cover now and again, because the needle would occasionally stick!
I never did discover if he cleared that minor, but irritating, fault. I recall asking him if he ever used, or had owned, an AVO, or a passive multimeter, to which his response was something like "Why should I use one of those? This meter tells me everything that I am likely to need to know - and it doesn't load the circuit."To my mind, that just about sums up the usefulness of a VTVM (especially if it reads resistance as well.)
Al.
