Hi, it's product review time. We haven't done one in a while and this one's long overdue. A lot of people have been asking for it. It's the Agilant u1272a multimeter.

It's been out for a little while now and I've already done a tear down of it, so click here if you want to see the tear down inside of this thing. It's pretty good and I've also used it in several uh videos showing uh, some uh, handy operation of, uh, this thing. they'll be linked in as well and uh, so this will must be a product review now. I've also done a video showing a firmware issue with this thing which was in the old firmware.

They had a lot of problems with the firmware, but Agilant fixed it quickmart in record time. So this will be a review of the unit with the latest firmware and I won't mention the previous firmware so this is the one you'll get shipped. So let's take a look at it. the u11272 A And by the way, Ageline are going into a lot of trouble to pitch this thing directly against the industry standard the Classic Fluke 875.

so it's only fair that I use this as a comparison during the review to sort of see how it Stacks up. Let's go and here it is, up close and Agilant have really gone to town with this. It is a very nice design. A lot of thought put into the industrial design aspects of this meter.

Everything from the nice uh, you know the curved sides like this that really give it a nice good solid grip and feel in the hand I Really like it to the quality of the Plastics are very, they seem very good. The quality of the rubber is exceptional. I've always said I'm not a huge fan of the integrated rubber holster, but they've done a pretty darn good job of it on this meter. and it's built like a brick.

Dy It feels really solid and they've done a excellent job. You really feel like you're getting your money's worth with this thing and giving it the twist. t test here I Can see a little bit of movement and feel a little bit of movement in there, but I really really going to town on that thing. So it does feel very solid and like it could survive the drops and the bumps of industrial use.

Compared to a standard fluke 875 here, it is a little bit taller, which is a bit annoying. I Would have liked it to have been a tad more compact in that respect. Widthwise, it's pretty much exactly the same width at the top and bottom, but the nice sexy curved sides give it that illusion of being nice and slender and things like that. but it does take up maybe a little bit more footprint than I'd like, but still, it's not a big meter.

um, compared to say, a fluke, uh, two, um, 280 series or something like that, but it's not quite as big as a Gossen metrahit extra here or say a Fluke 280 series which is bigger again and compared to Uh, not a fair comparison, but compared to a little tiny BK Precision Uh 279b here. So it it is sort of on the biggish uh side for multimeters, but still very usable on the bench and weightwise, we're talking just over half a kilo there for that. And the Fluke 87 H It's lighter than the fluke 87 at 600. G Now one thing they did get wrong on the design side is that if you drop this thing like this, it's going to hit the range switch and take all the impact on that range switch if it falls flat like that.

But if you compare it to a fluke 87, it's designed to fall like that and hit the rubber holster and there's no uh and it won't actually hit your range switch in there like that. Bit of a design oversight, don't really like that, but they have gone to the effort to actually raise the rubber surround around the display like that, which is really quite nice. I Like that it's a Cat 4 600 volt input rated Cat 3,000 volt r Ated it's about as high as you can get on a handheld multimeter. so along with the HRC High rupture capacity fuses uh, these meters can handle any pretty much any overload you throw at them.

They're designed for industrial high energy applications, They're completely safe, and the range switch is okay. that annoying turn on beep. Oh, get on to that. but it it.

it's okay. It's similar to the Um Original Escort uh series. similar feel. you can actually get it in between like that, but generally it detents into place and the feel is is okay.

It's not as good as the 87 or the Gosen, and as for the display, the digits aren't as large or as fat is the 875. I Much prefer the 875, but the contrast is almost as good. I'm going to say at this angle, the 875 is uh Superior I think they're pretty much on par. not not that you want to read it from this angle anyway.

and from the top side I've got them same height and the same angle. the Agilant the winner on that one, and from the side angle the flukes the winner when it's closer like this and they're about the same once they're swapped. and as far as display glare goes, they're probably on par. You really can't uh differentiate them.

and because of all the functionality they got crammed into this thing. it's even got the kitchen sink. Uh, you can say that the um, but butons are expectedly, uh, complex. Yes, it's got a setup menu and it's got arrow keys and you can do stuff like that and well, you know that's the price you pay when you add on functionality like this.

It's a bit, you know. Look, it's got null and scale there. it's got Hertz milliseconds. log All sorts of you know there's all this dual functionality uh, purpose to these buttons, but you get used to it and it is fairly intuitive.

I've got to admit two and annoying features I Don't like one is that the off position is not at the end here I Don't understand the thinking about this I know? Well, I kind of know where it comes from. it's probably designed by committee. There're saying, oh, if it's off, we want to access this. uh, really easy to use.

uh, low impedance functionality. For the electricians and things like that, they can just only have to turn at one position and it and it's automatically in that mode. but it's really annoying. so when you want to switch the thing off, you can't just go wham like that.

you've got turn it back one notch. It's annoying and that annoying default turn on beep. Why? it's really freaking loud. We can turn that off, but if you turn it off, then you disable all the button beeps I Want my cake and eat it too I Want to be able to switch it on without being annoyed and I Want to be able to hear my beeps too just like the fluke.

It does have a separate Molt range, but it's also got it for the AC as well as the DC and well, that's just two extra switch positions to complicate things. I I Know they're probably a design decision based on input protection or possibly or something like that or or uh, you know, noise or some sort of design aspect forced them to do that, but I would have preferred just volts, Ac, volts, DC and save the switch positions, but oh well, you can't have everything. But apart from that, Ohms and Diode is Uh separate, which is quite nice. Capacitance is got its own one and uh M um, milliamps are uh AC and DC are actually shared on the same switch position unlike Vault, but unlike the Fluke 87, it does default to DC, which is excellent for us.

Electronics Guys probably a disadvantage for the electricians, but uh, now, the setup feature of this is fairly simplistic. You hold down the setup button and bingo you're in the menu. Left and right button takes you through the various Uh menu items and up and down changes your Uh value. So the beeper.

we can actually change the frequency of the Beeper which is quite nice. I'll change it to 4267 Hertz Now it doesn't tell you this, but this is actually the enter button. Would have been nice if they put enter on there, but you press that and that locks in the current reading and you can turn the filter off and on. Auto hold Functionality: the various Uh data login modes which will go into um uh, decibels, uh, the DB reference the auto power off uh, time limit the backlight time limit uh what can you change the backlight time limit to oh, look 1 second intervals.

There you go. Let's set it to 30. Happy with that and uh. input alert uh off and on 4 to 20 milliamp current mode the the um type of thermo couple.

You've got all sorts of things. so it it really is. There's a lot of functionality your serial Communications that you can set up in here. smoothing mode um how many uh options for smoothing really is quite Advanced Press and hold the setup button and it like resets the meter I Don't know why it's got various turnon functionality.

We can display the firmware that we've got there. Version 2.0 we can, uh, hold. Well, you're not going to believe this. Here's a huge epic firmware failure.

I've was just playing with the power on options here and you're supposed and they were kind of working. If you hold down this one and turn the meter on, it's supposed to display the firmware version. Oh it does. It's come good.

I Swear this meter was locking up and wouldn't do anything. Hold down this one. Turn it on. it's working.

There's all the enunciators if you want to have a look. Oh I swear this thing the firmware. It's still got bugs in it. Um, anyway.

Let's uh, turn it off. let's turn the hole down this. It's supposed to enable the smooth in mode and it does. and it's got smooth down the bottom there of the display and it's got various other turn on uh functions.

you can disable the auto power off and things like that. I swear it was buggy. and as for the back light, it's a rather nice looking. Orange It's rather unusual compared to the fluke.

here. this is in bright light. it's pitch black. Turn it on.

It's rather quite nice. I Like it. It works fairly well compared to the low level on the fluke and the high level on the fluke. but uh, as as you can see, the big digits on the fluke really come through there.

but uh, that's not H it sort of washes out on the side. Check out the side. there fluke is is probably the winner there on the side, but uh, topwise, probably the agilant. but there you go.

It's not a bad backlight though. and the tilting Bailon is rather nice. It's a similar angle to the fluke here, but the fluke does actually. Rock a fair bit more because this thing has a really nice wide base on it.

I Really like it. Um, but it does. Actually, you can actually just pop it out like that. It's just a one of those friction fit retention things in there like that, but it's It's not a bad tiling baale as far as that goes.

But yes, it is plastic, you know, and it's not the old bendy ones like you used to get on the fluke. Oh well. And as for the back of it here, we do have the nice uh probe retention Hooks and they do actually clip in there uh, quite well and there's a hanging hook up there I Think you might be able to get some sort of magnetic uh, hanger or lanyard attachment or something like that. And as for the probes: 1,000 Vol 15 amp cat 3 uh rated or Cat 4 rated at 600 volts uh 15 amps and they are quite nice.

uh, silicon leads as you'd expect uh from an agilant thing. But here in lies the rub. You don't actually get traditional probes. You get these four shrouded 4mm banana plugs like this, which is I guess is okay.

if you want to go from, you know, plug something into a banana Jack or a shrouded banana Jack like that. but then you get I actually got two of these uh probe attachments like this one is your traditional uh shroud. uh, one is your traditional exposed one and the other is a fully insulated one I Believe that's to meet Cat 4 requirements and while this sounds good in theory and you plug them in and they, they hold and retain quite well I guess but they're just long and really unwieldy I don't Ah, I don't like them, they just I don't get a sense of confidence with these modular Jacks I think it's a bad move and if you compare the modular agilant probe here with the new uh fluke twist um, their new uh insulated twist probes they've got and the traditional uh fluke hardpoint probe, look at the size difference in that. This is just nice and you know, and it's bendy here and it just fits in the hand beautifully like that.

But these things massive. They stick out and they're a don't like them, but their actual fit in there is actually quite nice, quite tight. They do rotate relatively easily and I've got no problems with that at all. Now, as for the USB infrared cereal adapter.

you don't actually get it with it, but it is very reasonably priced. It's like 2530 bucks or something like that. Don't quote me on that, but it's pretty good. It's H keyed in there.

It's a nice design, it snaps directly in like that and if you get the tilting bail out, it sits in there. No problems at all. I Like it. now.

you do actually get a K type Thermo couple for it. It's not nearly as nice of quality as the uh fluke one, but anyway, it, uh, it still works. so let's check it out now as you can see it actually by default does have an internal temperature sensor and it tells me 26.8 de here in the lab cuz I have to turn the air con off so it doesn't interfere with the Audio I don't get that low frequency uh noise. So let's actually go into capacitance.

uh, switch position and go into here and as you can see, the thermocouple doesn't match the internal temperature and I found that is, um, fairly consistent. It and the same probe between the two meters 25.4 and on the fluke 25.4 There you go. so it matches. So the internal temperature sensor always seems to read high and my other thermometers confirm the same thing.

This is internal on the Metra hit and it's 24.8 It is not close to 26.9 in here. Crazy. How does the continuity buzzer stack up? well? Interestingly, it's got a visual and audible alert feature. so if you do it like this, not only does it beep, but it flashes that as well.

But the interesting thing is is that the backlight, the visual indicator is much quicker than the audible. The audible is hopeless. look the but the visual seems to be able to easily capture those Transat but the audible one? very lacking. It is a latching type, but it's very slow.

I Don't like it I Mean surely that's just a firmware thing. Why can't they have the when it lights up, it knows to light up the backlight. Why can't it just sound and latch the buzzer? Crazy! We'll have a quick talk about the Ohms functionality because it really does have very compr hensive resistance uh capability. And let me show you, not only on the high side, does it have a 300 Meg range as standard that's a a range greater than the Uh 30 Meg uh range on regular meters, but it also goes down to a 30 ohm range as well which is fantastic which is 1 milliohm resolution and the auto range on that.

Let's test it 1, 2, 3, oh yeah, 2 and 1/2 seconds or something to get through. but it's got a lot of ranges to get through so that's not too bad. And the great thing about the null capability Delta you can zero that out, but it also goes uh back into Auto range mode as well so it's automatically compensating for that null across all the ranges. Brilliant! And if 300 Meg isn't uh high enough range for you, you can actually go into manual range and it's got Nano seens as well.

And that with a resolution of 01 Nano seens can go up to 100 Gig ohms and we're not done yet. It's got one huge extra feature called Smart Ohm down here. So if we go into the Smart Ohm thing, uh, it's got um, Ohms or Ohms compensation up here on the display and what it does is it actually tests uh, the resistance under test at two different test currents and then it compensates for any offset voltage on the probe so it can detect if there's any offset voltage uh on in your resistance circuit and compensate for that up to depending on the Range uh from the 300 ohm range up to uh 300K I think it can offset up to plus one Vols and Min -.6 or something like that. and uh, only few tens of molts down on the 30 ohm range.

But it's absolutely incredible. And it displays the offset voltage in Mill volts down to 1 microvolt resolution there. And if you, uh, press the jewel button, it'll display the leakage current as well. so you can test leakage current of Dodes or anything like that.

and it displays it with 1 nanoamp resolution. Fantastic! Now I Demonstrate that here. I've got my resistance uh standard here and that's uh displaying 10K But what happens if we put a battery in series with it? So I' got four Aa's uh in Reverse here, which has given me about uh 0. uh, 365 Vols or thereabouts and we'll put that in series with the resistance and see what happens.

and a regular Ohms range. it'sing 6.5 Mega Ohms. it's just crapped itself because of the voltage on there, but let's let's put that into Smart Mode There it is. 10K and it's measuring 366 molts.

It offsets that. Brilliant. There's a bit of error there, but jeez, that's pretty darn good. I Love it! And in diode mode, can it test a white lead? You bet it.

K And in diode mode, it's also got this smart or Auto diode mode. so you put it in auto mode and it automatically tells you and it pops up and says good on the display and displays the voltage. and if you got it backwards, it'll still do it as well, but it'll tell you it's negative up in the top display there and the threshold voltages for good and bad are 0.3 volts and8 Vols So Within that it's good and outside of that it says no good. One thing I like about the temperature probe is not only do you get it with it, but it's .1 de C resolution.

Uh, the accuracy isn't that good. it's only like plusus um 1 CR 1.1 or something like that. But still, the resolution is excellent and of course it can do Delta temperature as well. so you just null that out and Bingo and when it comes to frequency measurement, it is actually quite powerful.

It'll work in both Uh AC mode uh DC mode because this has AC plus DC true RMS uh capability and it'll work in current mode as well. So um, if you're in any any of these modes, all you got to do is hit the Herz button at the top here and you can get the displayed Uh frequency in Hertz, Kilohertz and then the Uh and pulse width in milliseconds as well. And the duty cycle excellent and does that actually work well? Let's try it. I Got a square wave at 1 khz with a Uh 2.5 Vol Uh offset.

The duty cycle is 20% It's displaying 1 khz. let's go in there and it's displaying the Uh pulse width and you can swap between the Uh that's the negative going pulse width of8 milliseconds. We can swap that 2 milliseconds on the high and you'll see it change over there. There's little enunciator there that shows that it's going high and bingo, there's our duty cycle of 20% and if we wind up that, let's go all the way up to 80 and it's 80.

Seems to work just fine, but that pulse width does seem to be off in the presence of high DC offsets. at low DC offsets it's fine. at high DC offset of 2.5 Vols it does actually jump up. It's not accurate and it claims to have a range up to 1 MHz at 40 Ms Peak to- Peak input and it does just that.

So let's adjust it down until we and it starts to lose the plot at just over 25 MTS or so and upper frequency at 1 volt loses the plot at about 1.7 MHz. And of course, with the dual display capability, it can display Uh Hertz as well at the same time as J voltage and can also display Dbm as well. the value the reference value of which is set up in the Uh setup menu we saw before and it's got a low pass filter mode as Well, on both the Molt and the Volt range. so you hit that and bingo, you've got low pass filter 1 khz that's for uh, taking out any switching noise and things like that.

And there's actually a whole section of the manual dedicated to all the different dual display uh capabilities it has in all the various ranges of the thing. It is actually quite powerful once you add that second display. Let's try the mobile phone test no no problems whatsoever and let's try the capacitance range and uh, it's got one POF farad resolution which is excellent. allows you to measure low value caps.

and can we, you know, mucking around with the probes here, it seems pretty stable. I like it and we can null that out. And let's try and measure a few caps. Okay, compared to an Agilent used 1733 C LCR meter measuring a 39 paa far cap 38.5 paa farads.

Let's try and probe it with the 1272a and well, no, that's a big fail nothing. How about 100 peaka farad cap? Let's try that. I've disabled the null on here, so no, it's hopeless. this thing hopeless for measuring low value caps.

Now the crazy thing is its quoted spec is 1% plus 5 digits on the 10 nanofarad range. and we're on the 10 nanofarad range. And as you can see, our 1 nanofarad cap is pretty close to spot on. But and I've got no offset null on that at all.

And really that is. you know that's like 7% out, 6% out. You got to be kidding me. No, we near it's slowly climbing up, but geez, 5% out? That's nowhere near it.

All right. How about we get close to the top of the range of the 10 Ner? We got 8.2 Narad here it's 8.23 Let's probe this and see if we get close to our 8.23 Okay, now we're within spec, but lower values. No fail. 82.9 Nanofarads, 84.1 Let's jump right up to 6.3 M farads or 6300 microfarads or thereabouts.

Let's give it a go. It's ranging ranging. That's not too bad at all. It's you know, it's not reading the same, but it auto ranged up there pretty quickly and is capable of measuring large values like that.

Because the test frequency is going to be different. There's going to be quite a significant error up there, but seems to work. And just for comparison, the fluke measuring the same one: 7,400 7300 microfarads and I've got a 10 microfarad ceramic 9.21 9.22 maybe 910 9.9 That's that's way out of spec. This thing supposed to have a spec of plus minus 1% plus like a couple of digits on all ranges.

It doesn't seem to be anywhere near that. Just for another point of reference. I've got the I LCR meter at 120 HZ 9.27 microfarads. So the Agilant is way out there.

it is. It's doesn't seem to be anywhere near the Uh spec that it claims. Let's check its absolute accuracy I Know this isn't a really good test because we've only got one unit, but a lot of people want to see this sort of thing. Spot checking ranges: I've got my 10K Ohm Precision reference point 05% 50 PPM resistor and it's basically spot on.

I've also got a 1K uh .01 uh% 100 PPM resistor and once again, spot on to the almost to the least significant digit. and I've got my Precision DC voltage standard set for 10 volts. it's 99.999 to the least significant digit and I can tweak that up one digit at a time, no problem. So let's wind it down to 1 V and Bingo spot on to the least significant digit.

I Like it and it has the input jack alert as well. You put in micro amps and it really kicks up a stink and if you plug it in the amps, it kicks up a stink as well. and current right down on the Uh. lowest part of the Uh micro amp range seems to be within spec as well.

It's I'm feeding in 999.9 Nan amp there or .99 microamps and it's pretty close. And as for the burden voltage, it claims less than 40 m volts on the 300 microamp range. And it is. It's only 30 MTS drop and it claims 0.4 volts drop on the 3 milliamp range.

Is it? Yes, it's only3 and it claims 80 MTS on the 30 mamp range and it's well under that. And worst case is 66 Vols at 300 milliamps, Which is less than the 1V claim. So you know as far as Burden Voltage goes, it's not too bad for your average multimeter. Now, as for the bandwidth here: I've got it set to a volt RMS and I've actually got that up to 96.

Now as for the frequency here, um RMS I've set it to 1 Vols and it only Um specifies up to Uh 20 khz at 2% plus like 20 counts or something, but it's still going at 100 khz. It's starting to drop off at 6 700 800 and why not go to all megahertz? There you go and if you want low signal level I Got 50 molts RMS there and let's turn up the frequency that's 32 khz, 50, 76, 100, KZ and we're still hanging in there 200 Yeah, okay, it's dropping at about starts to drop at just over 100 k, HS or thereabouts. Now, as for trigger hold capability, it's got the equivalent of the touch hold functionality on the fluke. It's one of the few meters on the market that actually have that and it's got various trigger modes which are very flexible and also in the Uh data loging capability.

It's got manual and auto trigger as well. so if we hold that down and we go into Auto hold mode and we probe this bang There It Is It locked straight in just like the Luke Auto hold and there's no need to press it again. It'll automatically take another reading and lock it in as long as you wait long enough. I think it's like half a second or something.

it'll lock in each reading. It's excellent and it'll do that as I've demonstrated in another video which I'll uh Link in here and and it's great for automated measurements. I measured a th000 resistors with with this thing using this Auto hold and data login in no time at all. I'll give you a quick demo of capability I'll turn on data login mode.

It's got 1,7 samples already in here, but it's on auto hold mode. I've got my little resistor prober here I built up for a previous video and bang I can go through and just add each one directly on like that without having to touch the meter. Brilliant! One of the powerful features of this meter is that it does have 10,000 data points, sample memory, and it's It works brilliantly and it's got very various Auto and Trigger hold modes available. I Won't go through them all, but I've put it, you can cycle through its uh, trigger hold capability here and so you can probe something and then manually take a trigger if you want and bang.

and you can take trigger points and it adds them and automatically increments the counter up there And then you can cycle through that data later on the unit itself or you can upload it to a PC And if I want to view the data that I've stored I press the view button and hold it down here. I'm in View mode tells me I've got 1,3 events and I can cycle through them there. they are all thousand of them or I can upload them. Great feature I Love it and it works very well and it's quite intuitive now.

I haven't got time to try and prove this, but I swear there's a bug in the auto powerof feature. Even if I've been using it, it'll just sometimes just like switch off like a minute after I stop using that function. It's it's crazy I reckon there's still bugs in there somewhere. Don't like it.

Now there is one feature it doesn't have. uh that the Fluke 87 has and that is a high impedance mode on the Molt range. It's just got 10 Megs or 11 Megs on each range. Regardless, it's got the low impedance mode over here.

great for getting rid of ghost voltages on Mains but no good for uh, sometimes that Precision work where you need a very high impedance input doesn't have it. And one of the big features of this meter is the ridiculously fast screen updating I believe it's about seven times a second just like the old escort designs and you could almost say it's too quick to actually see the digits change and well, whether or not you think it's too quick or whether or not fast updating capability is a great thing. it's up to you, but it is ridiculously fast. Probably one of the fastest handheld meters on the market.

And really, as you can see, the bar graph doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot quicker either. Like the updating is just. it's just phenomenal. And as far as ranges go DC M volts it goes a range better than the Fluke.

Here it's got 30 molts uh, full scale which gives you one microvolt resolution excellent and it'll give you that on AC as well as DC. And of course it's got your uh, regular, mid, Max, and average modes as well. and it's got uh Peak detection down to 2 50 microc uh, similar to the fluke, uh Peak detection. So to switch this on.

The great thing about it is the dual display is it shows you the timer up here, how long you've actually been timing that min max value for and there's the average and it just works quite well. I Like it, and with the dual display, you know how much time's gone by. Now if we turn on data, smooth in here. I've got the smoothing function.

you hold down the shift key when you turn it on and as you can see the update, the screen still updates very quickly, but it is actually uh, smoothed out that value in uh software. It probably would have been nice if the display was capable of maybe a slower um update speed in smoothing mode perhaps. And as I've showed before, you can change uh, the Uh number of the smooth in uh value in the setup menu and the setup menu allows you to change a whole bunch of stuff as I said and it is very, very flexible. 4 to 20 milliamps Uh current capability Uh current Loop which you have an auto alert you can turn off and uh, it's the backlight interval auto power off DB references and it's just it.

really. the data hold the data login mode you're currently in that auto hold function similar to the fluke thing, you can actually change how that actually operates and very flexible. Beast Indeed. Let's do an overload protection test Mains on the Ohms range.

let's give it a go. Not a problem. Oh no. I spoke too soon.

look it's out. Look, that's supposed to be spot on 10K after that Mains test What Fail Have I killed it 1.01 I've done something to it. It didn't like that at all. Ah, have I killed the meter? Yeah, look I've permanently changed.

This thing is no longer in Spec I killed it Mains On the OHS range. fail. What a heap of crap. Check it out on the short, the probes together 6 OHS Now on, that's by Shor in the damn probes.

it was like 60 Milli Before now, it's 6 Ohms. Something's gone horribly wrong. Thankfully I haven't killed the DC range. It's still spot on, but the Ohms range, definitely out of spec now shorted out the probes a couple of times and maybe it's charged up something inside so it looks like I haven't permanently killed it, but certainly putting Mains on that Ohms range.

It didn't like it for a while. Let's try it again and here we go. We got 240 volts and let's switch it over to the Ohms range and oh, let's switch it to the DI mode. What the hell, and the cap mode.

see if it recovers has it. Yep, it's recovered. Now let's try the Ohms. We'll jump straight over to the Ohms measurement here and there you go.

Ah, it's not as bad as before, but you definitely saw that before. it was way out. So oh yeah, there we go. 10.17 k.

Maybe if we short the probes out for a while, Look, look at that. 1.7 Ohm. There you go and it's dropping it. Yeah, something is charging up inside.

It looks like we've got to let that discharge and uh, somehow. I Don't know what the internal mechanism is, but it's got a recover after that. That's not so great I Don't like it. And as for the battery compartment here, you'll be pleased to know it does use four Aaa's instead of the 9V battery.

There's two screws here which you open up and we can get inside to access not only the Uh battery, but the fuses too. And if we open that up, we've got uh, self Tapper screws in here and they're captive so you won't actually, uh, lose them into metal inserts. Fantastic! And there's your four uh, Aaa's and access to your two HRC capable fuses: 11 milliamps and 440 milliamps. And because this thing is supposed to be dust and water resistant, it's only Ip5 four.

so it's not like a fluke 28 that you can actually go and uh, take it through a canyon or anything like that. but it does actually have an o-ring in there which is excellent which helps keep out the uh dust and all the uh crap. And also if the thing explodes, it helps. uh, keep some of the explosion in too I guess so it really is quite a nice designed battery compartment.

You couldn't ask for anything better than that. And of course, Aaa's instead of 9vs. Some people are still a fan of the 99 volts, but the triple are good and it's actually not made in China It's made in Agilant Factory in Malaysia Okay, we're going to measure the Uh battery consumption and the low battery Dropout voltage. This is the voltage going in.

this is our input current here. it's currently and I've got it set to my 10K measuring my 10K Precision resistor. It's still a bit dodgy from that overload. uh, incident.

it sort of doesn't really recover all that well. but anyway, let's wind the wick down and the manual says it should drop out. Uh, start flashing the battery symbol at 4.4 Vols does it? No, it's still not still showing one bar, but at there you go. 4.3 it's starting to flash so that's just under 1 volt uh per cell, which is pretty good I would have uh 1.1 Vols per cell.

Would have preferred to see 1 volt uh down to at least 1 volt per cell to use more capacity of the battery. but not too many complaints about that and it's still only drawing 4.2 milliamps. um, at the lowest value and up at 6 Vols It's still drawing about 4.2 and it claims a 300 hour battery life. Ah, a good Alkaline AAA cell is going to have about 12200 at least 1200 Mah capacity so it's almost there at 4 milliamps uh consumption.

so it's not too far off. so I'm going to say that's pretty good. Uh, it's going to be good enough and backlight on 55 milliamps. And if we take a look at some of the basic specs here 05% uh, plus five coun as it's DC Vol uh Banner spec down.

at 30 m volts, you add on 20. that's um, actually technically better than the Fluke which is 05% plus one, but only in uh 3 and a half digit mode in 4 and half digit mode. it's plus 5 uh plus 10 counts the fluke so slightly better on the DC volts accuracy, but there's not much in it really because the thing with the fluke is that they have been proven over time to actually greatly exceed. There are Banner specification and based on this one unit here, the agilant seems to do the same thing but doesn't have that history that the fluke does.

And as for the Ohms: 2% + 5 uh digits very similar to the fluke once again. DC current 2% plus 5 on par. It's almost as if they took the spec one for one from Fluke and decided to match it. Now, as for the AC specifications, it's outdoing the fluke cuz it'll specify up to 100 khz whereas the fluke will only do up to specify up to 20 khz.

and it's doing possibly a little bit better on the Uh specs as well. So I guess you can say the performance beats the fluke in the AC department. and something the fluke doesn't do is true RMS AC plus DC And well, the fluke doesn't do it. the agilant does.

And as for the capacitor specs, well, it's pretty much just like every other multimeter. They suck on capacitance ranges and as you saw, was pretty horrible, horrible and didn't really me it. specs on quite a few of the ranges and the manual does have this. the update: uh, measurement Update: Rate in AC and DC Volts seven times per second.

Absolutely phenomenal, but look, 14 times per second in Ohms range. Oh goodness, why do you need it that quick? I Don't know, but hell man, 14 times per second. That beats almost any handheld meter on the market pretty much. And uh, even on Diode Range 14 times per second AC and DC current seven times a second.

This is certainly one of the, if not the fastest handheld meter on the market. And check out what else you get in the Box you get a certificate of calibration telling you you know when it was cow and you also get a cow sticker you can apply yourself. But not only that, you also get the measured values Brilliant! So you can actually see your particular instrument, how far it is out like 8% there, when it should be 2 on the 3K Ohm range and things like that. So this gives you a lot the confidence that your individual meter um, is actually going to perform to spec I Love it and this sort of thing is worth serious money and they give it to you and Just for kicks.

We'll stick it in the thermal oven and we'll take it up to 60 and see what happens. I'm measuring my 10K Precision resistor and we're up to 38 C inside and as you can see the internal temperature sensor in the meter. only saying 35 so it's lagging quite a bit, but we haven't uh, changed readings at all. Still spot on.

so we're now at 45 Inside the Box the internal temperature sensor is saying just over 40 in there and we've only dropped that one significant uh digit effectively. or uh, maybe two. but I don't count the uh, the plusus one. So really, that's a almost a 20 uh celsi rise at least inside the meter.

and uh, yeah, there's not much difference at all. but that's what you'd expect because this meter is rated to uh, meet it spec up to 50 C Well, it's sumary time. What do we got here? It's street price for this thing is about 370d us and unlike the fluke here in Australia you don't get ripped off. You can get it for about 430 bucks from Trio Smart Cow Who supplied this? So if you're looking to pick one up here, get it from them so you're not getting gouged in.

Australia So it's a $400 Basic Class: Uh Instrument: 05% uh Accuracy class dual 30,000 count display display. It's probably one of, if not the fastest handheld meter on the market in terms of update speed. Some people may not like that, though you can't slow it down is very quick display updating 10,000 uh count data logging capability with a cheap USB interface Downsides of this thing: Well, as you know, I didn't like the probes. you might like them I Personally didn't Firmware issues: I'm still getting the occasional lock up on this thing and stuff like that, but hopefully those sort of things will get fixed with time.

You can download the firmware via the USB cable, so if you do have to upad update it, it's only 30 bucks for the cable and you get that data transfer capability as well. But the features in this thing are brilliant. Ah, there's not much not to like. really.

It's got a three-year warranty. comes with the cow certificate with all the measured values. Oh gee. Overload protection though.

I Don't like that thing that's happening on the Ohms range. Uh, there when you overload it. Don't like that recovery thing at all. Doesn't build up a lot of trust and that's probably the thing with the flug.

People have been using it for 20 plus years and you build up a lot of confidence in this thing. It just works. It's very simplistic. They've tried to throw every feature in this thing under the sun.

They've had a few issues with it. They're dealing with it slowly, get better over time and well. I Don't know. you know overload issues and stuff like that.

I If I really had to depend my life on a meter I'd still pick the Fluke 87. It's simple, just works this thing. Fantastic bang per Buck though. Gee, you know, 3year warranty.

Uh cow certificate with all the measure values 400 bucks. It's hard to go wrong. so you got that sort of money to spend. You could do a lot worse than this.

I Like it I think I'm probably going to recommend it over the fluke. Possibly depends history I Love the Fluke Do I love this. Not yet but I'm warm to it I like it catch you next time.