Hi, it's product review time again and it's the Agilant 34 61a bench multimeter, a replacement for the venerable old 3401a uh meter which is now about 20 years old or so. This one's a beauty. Huge, big graphical display, lower price point ha. Looks and sounds really good on paper.

Let's see if it Stacks up in the review. let's get straight to it and here it is, the Agilant 3461, a 62 digigit multimeter. Now the 346a of course going to look and feel identical. Um, on this.

just a few Uh features Miss in and a few uh, minor. you know, slightly less in terms of Um specification and stuff like that. But in terms, yeah, they're essentially Um, the review will be pretty much identical for both. and uh, if you haven't seen it I've already done a tear down of this thing, it'll be linked in down below.

So if you haven't seen it, check it out. Yes, this thing is designed and manufactured Absolutely first class as you'd expect. Now, Agilant went uh, to a lot of trouble to, uh, explain in some of their videos on the YouTube channel that uh This was um, uh, designed by a lot of the same people that designed the 3401a all those you know 20 plus years ago and the 3458a and how they have. you know, a ton of experience in this sort of area.

So and how they didn't goof it up and they're very proud of it that it is a proper replacement for the 341a anyway. Uh, that remains to be seen, but it does look and feel Very, very good. High quality, top quality uh rubber surrounds and everything. The tilting bail.

Um, it it works. Okay, not a huge fan of these style tilting. Bales So really, if you got this permanently on a um a bench, uh, like a shelf? Arrangement um Instrument rack? uh, for example, instrument shelf. Um, you know you just leave it uh, folded under like that.

but uh, you know the angles are pretty good on it. Um, it does make a very good uh, just you know, a bench multimeter. If just sitting on your bench like this, or whether or not it's on an instrument shelf, it feels pretty good. And and of course that rubber surround just comes off and you've got your traditional um standard uh mounting points there for your uh rack mount um kit.

You can get a rack mount kit in it, put in a 9in uh rack mount. so not a problem so it's equally at home on the bench and in the rack. So I Do really like the look and feel of this thing. It really does feel like a quality bit of Kit trust me.

Fantastic And the uh color scheme. The button layout's fantastic. The huge Um color graphic display as we'll take a look at uh, soft button? um uh. power switch.

not a uh full but they've got a mechanical uh, front and rear uh terminal measurement rear terminals of course you use for system type measurements, but if you're using it in a uh, traditional bench or instrument shelf scenario, you're going to be using the front panel banana terminals yes, all fully, uh, recessed and we'll take a look at the probes that come with it. It's got um, both 3 amps and 10 amp input Jacks Now the 3 AMP one is for uh, traditional backward compatibility for the 34 Uh 01a, but they do recommend using the Uh 10 amp one. It can give you greater accur accuracy in some respects. You got to read the specs in that detail.

Of course it's got um, four wire resistance measurement. so if your basic volts, ohms, uh, diode, you're going to be using these two. But if you want the four Wi ohms, you're going to use the two sense terminals here. and the layout is quite good.

I Don't mind it at all. You know all. single button interface to all your major measurement functions. DC Volt AC Uh 2 y Ohms Yes, you have to um shift to get to your Uh current the AC current.

but you know they are limited to how many buttons they can put on here. Dedicated Null button: Fantastic. Probably didn't need the dedicated temperature button. could have shift functioned that or something, but you know, eh? it's neither here nor there.

really. Continuity mode: Fantastic. Just a single button. you don't have to shift that.

So if you're using in traditional Uh bench, you know as Everyday Use uh, multimeter, Then the continuities right there. fantastic frequency measurement Run Stop mode and then you've basically got all your data uh, type stuff, your uh, single shot, uh, the null button fantastic, separate um, then your acquire mode, your display mode uh, all your selection buttons and the range button I Like it. they've just got up down measurement ranges so you push range once you go into manual ranging up and down. Fantastic.

And your soft button so really well laid out. no complaints about that at all. And of course that front panel uh USB so you can just stick your key straight in there. you don't have to Fumble around on the back.

you want to save uh, screenshots, capture data, stuff like that. it's sitting up on your uh rack there and well, yeah, you just plug it in, save your data, pull it back out, go to your PC Not a problem. Now on the rear of the unit. Here here's where it's going to vary depending on whether you get the low-end Uh 6 model or the 61.

I Got the 61 with the optional Gpib. Yes, even on the high-end 61 model, the Gpib is still optional extra user installable though. um, I'm not sure how much the actual Uh module costs for Gpib, but if you need it, you pay it. Of course both models come standard with USB, but Lan is optional extra on the Uh 34 60a.

but because it's actually solded directly onto the board. that connector I don't know how. it's sort of, you know, um, user replaceable uh kind of thing. So yeah, I'm not exactly sure what's going on there.

We've got external uh trigger here. we've got uh, the VM comparator, uh, output and uh, the 3461 A has the rear terminals the 60a you won't get that at all. And yes, it does run Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 And for those people who complain about that, well, you don't even notice it, you don't know it's running Windows Embedded CA Some very good reasons: uh, to do to actually use an operating system like this to take care of the high level functionality and stuff like that and know it's not going to get infected with viruses and everything else. Ah man, really, there's a lot of fear.

Uncertain. The IND doubt fud going around about um, items you know, test equipment which runs uh, Windows, but this isn't Windows, it's Windows Embedded C Totally different beast. and yes, by the way, made in Malaysia Now of course one of the big complaints a lot of people have is that this thing just takes too long to boot up and well, yes, I agree, it takes a long time now. I've been told my one has actually, uh, pre-release uh, firmware in it so let's time it.

I'm told the release version is shorter, but somebody on the Forum has one and they said it was 52 seconds. Here we go and yep, my one actually took around about that 52 seconds as well. So I don't know what the deal is there? Uh, maybe some firmware improvements in the future will, uh, fix the boot up time. But yes, if you're using this as an Everyday Use multimedia and you like to switch your instruments off and on, well, you know and use them instantly.

Well, you know, tough titties. Um, you know this one may not be for you if that's your. Overriding requirement is for it to be instant on. It's not instant on.

it's going to take at least 52 seconds. But an instrument of this class is designed for highly accurate measurements. And of course, you can't just switch it on and expect to get those highly accurate measurements. Got to be on for like, you know, 30 minutes? 60 minutes? Something like that before.

Um, the specs are actually uh, valid in these things. really? So uh, you know H if you want to switch it on and use it, it's not the best. And yes, I've got a nice little uh Power on message programmed into there for uh, those who get the movie reference now the screen. how does it work on the angle? Um, this is, uh, dead on.

I've got fixed exposure on the camera so um I'm smack in front of it like that. Let's go to the side. You might get some uh, you know, some glare from my uh, lab lights here and stuff like that. But you know, even right at the side, it's pretty darn good.

You can still read it. Let me sorry. Let me get rid of the uh. The numerical display is very, very big.

I Really like it. So there it is from the side, so from the side, it's You know you can read it from almost any angle. Let's go up now. Not a problem.

Look at this. Look at this. this. We're practically right above it and you can still read that.

Not a problem. Right down as you would, uh, get um, for example, on your um, if you had it up on an instrument shelf like that. Yeah, it does change the uh background. Our background is now, um, vanished.

Or at least it has to my eyes it may not have to the camera there. but uh yeah, yeah. there we go. The background color is, uh, vanished.

But that is a really good display folks. Let me tell you, and if you don't like the Uh colors on the display, well, you can actually change them. You can press, uh, shift, go into the utility menu here, system setup, user settings, and you've got some display options. Of course you can actually switch the display off like this.

and it and does actually have a timeout where a screen saver so you can turn the screen saver um, off or on and the uh brightness currently set to 100% there. Um, not a problem, but it's got two color schemes so you can get rid of that blue background like that. So if you get that one and have a look at that down at the lower angle, eh, some people might prefer that. I Don't know.

And of course, why would you want to turn the display off? Well, um, you know you might have it in a uh test, um instrument Rack or uh, something like that, some sort of automated production test system. It's all remotely controlled via Gpib and you just don't want anything um on the displays and it looks like by default when you first. Power This thing on you first get the first user experience is that it does give you the full 6 and 1/2 digigit display, which is excellent, but you'll notice that there's actually a space in here I'm personally not a big fan of that, but I can understand why they've done that because it delineates the um, uh, engineering uh notation portion of this. So we were on the M Volt range at the moment of course, and that's one, uh, one microvolt there.

So that space just delineates the difference between the microvolts and the nanov volts down here. But of course, if you don't like that, you can actually change it. so you can actually go down here into um, the separator down in here can be none. There we go, we've just gotten rid of it.

If you don't like it or you can look at that, put a comr on I Really don't like that one so we'll We'll stick to the space shall we? the default and the um, uh, period. uh, the decimal point. Here you can change that to a period or a coma I mean coma. Give me a break.

Give me my decimal Point Thank you very much. but of course I Am aware that in some countries they do. actually. you know, uh, do these things uh, differently.

So that's why they've added just for uh, some World um, standard compliance. I Guess the Beeper Off and on. Now the Beeper I turn off. but I still get a slight a tiny little beep when I press the buttons.

It doesn't. So the Beeper has got nothing to do with the button beep. And to show that they've really thought about 3401a backward compatibility, here's the Um Scpi or Skippy ID as it's known and you can actually change that to make it fully absolutely. Backward Compatible So your old software doesn't crap itself, it can be the 341a Thank you very much so your old test system software wouldn't know any different that it's talking to the new 3461 A Very nice.

So also in the utility menu here system setup, you got that power on message which there we go. I just added in that I Wanted to add it in the full version but it's limited to I don't know X number of characters over here so I couldn't fit the full message that I wanted in there. had to shorten it. So that's all in the system setup here.

Let's have a look in test, admin and the self test. Here you can do a quick test or a full Test full test. You got to disconnect everything. Let's run a full test.

Boom! Performing full test self test passed. Woohoo! That was the full test. Jeez! Watch the Quick Test not much quicker and of course you can calibrate this thing. but then it says uh locked cow string uh C has it been calibrated 237 times I don't know um but you need a secure code required to perform the uh calibration.

So let's and it can measure the internal um temp or the ambient Temp 24 and it's got quite a bit of security build in here. It is, um, the Landan. We can actually, uh, disable the sockets and the tailet and the web and all that sort of stuff. and Gpib we can lock at USB front and rear.

We can lock all that. Ah, fantastic. Now if you're wondering what this nispom sanitize here is, Um, it's a US military uh thing or something like that. That means it just securely, uh erases all of the data on here.

So now curiously, there's install license here and uh, really? um I'm not sure what licenses they're talking about cuz I'm not aware of this thing having any software licenses. maybe for the future and you can update the uh, firmware here, but they claim that's a restricted function and uh, well, you need the secure code. Maybe it's in the uh, you know, the program in service manual or something like that. It's probably like four zeros or something.

and if you go into manage files here, you can see like all the internal uh screenshots and screenshots and stuff that you've actually uh captured here. And yes, we can just save the screen as a PNG or a bit map. very nice and it defaults to you know the file name, screen one and boom we can just save screen hello. no file specified.

oh what? So I'm just going to quickly check the uh screen capture capability of this. I plug in my USB key didn't tell me I actually uh, plugged it in. but anyway, um let's go into uh Manage files here. So if you want to get a a screen capture, you just go into utility down in here.

Manage files and save screen now. One thing I don't like is that it really didn't detect this USB key and it stored that screenshot internally. If you want to change that, you got to go into store then you got to go into browse see how it's got path internal and you got to choose browse here and then you got to go down and select external. That's hopeless.

That really is store. State I don't want that I was oh, hang on. utility system. uh where are we um, manage files? There we go.

save screen. ah would have been nice. maybe if they had a shift screenshot, um key or something like that. but I don't don't necessarily blame them for not having that though.

but there we go. We're going to save that to external all right now. I can load that on my PC and yes, I did just go and check that and uh, not a problem. Saved it as a 7 uh kiloby PNG file and added the uh date time down the bottom as well which you don't normally get on the screen which is, uh, really quite good.

and unfortunately you do lose that external uh setting when you reboot. The thing. how annoying, especially if you're saving stuff to USB key all the time. And one neat feature for uh, screen captures or for other um, stuff.

If you got you know, 10 of these things in a rack. For example, you know, a test system actually monitoring stuff or capturing data. You can just put a label on here. If we just go into uh, the display here, we can turn a label on and it puts a big nice big label there and there It is.

Beautiful. huge big text that you can read from halfway across the room. And by the way, even with that smaller Uh display there, um I could read that thing from the other wall of this lab so you know, 5 m way pretty darn good. And this is where we can change our number of uh digits too.

You can see it's updating like twice a second or three times a second or something like that here. not sure, but uh sorry if we just go into uh display and we can uh digit mask Auto There we go. It's automatic at the moment, but we can force it to 6 and 1/2 digit mode or we can force it to 5 and 1/2 digit Mode 4 and 1/2 and 3 and 1/2 It's going to update really quick in 3 and 1/2 digit mode. Let me tell you and check this out right? I've got it in Auto digit mode 6 and2 digit display mode DC Volts Check out the update rate there, switch it to AC Volts look at that seems to be same resolution but seems to be much quicker updating.

And of course we're in auto trigger mode at the moment and we can just stop that at any time and just you know, bang, run, stop. Or we can just press uh, single trigger and then just take a reading. Bang bang bang. So having a dedicated Uh button for that? Fantastic.

And if we go into temperature here, um, un. it doesn't support just your standard um, you know, K type, uh, thermocouple for example. It uh supports uh two wire um RTD four wire but two and four wire RTD two and four wire the as well. but you know no standard K type thermocouple and it doesn't come with any temperature probes.

Now if we go into our basic DC volts measurement mode here, we can actually select our input impedance. Um, by the way, at 10 Meg or Auto and you'll see in Auto It of course goes into it. You know, gig? hes um High Zed There it is. It's got it on the display.

um High impedance uh input mode. So you're going to see that charge build up and yeah, there you go. You see the Uh display completely build up until it probably goes uh, overload. But that's really handy to be able to select that because sometimes you don't.

You know that's annoying. You don't want that, you just want. give me 10 Meg damn it. Um, and auto zeroing uh off or on if you want to Auto zero your reading.

Generally, you're going to leave that on and your aperture number of Power Line Cycles It defaults to 10, but of course we can do uh. you know we can make our display uh, faster, but you, uh, lose some resolution there. With the lower Power Line Cycles Bingo we've just gained an extra Uh digit that's basically eliminating the Um 50 HZ main sum or 60 HZ. It's going to detect which uh Mains frequency you're using in your particular country.

and of course you can go all the way up to 100 and it's going to be really, really slow. but the accuracy is going to be much much better. And as I said, we can Auto and manual arrange this thing. Um, we can do it via the menu here or the dedicated buttons over here so you can just bang There It Is Manual 1vt It tells you.

Fantastic! So you can just up and down those at any time you like and range puts it back into Auto Perfect. And of course a lot of people will complain. Well, where's the second display on this thing? A lot of other agilant bench meters have a second display so you can, uh, have like a, you know, DC Vols primary AC as a secondary display or something like that. Well, this one doesn't have it at all.

So if you're looking for something like that, um, forget it. This meter isn't for you. It's not a dual display meter. Why they've done that? My guess is that, uh, full backward comp compatibility for the 3401a.

That was their driving design decision behind everything in terms of this instrument. And I guess they just couldn't do it for some reason. One really neat feature is the DC volt ratio measurement. You switch that on and basically Al What you get is a ratio like you're not actually getting um, you know, 10 like a voltage measurement anymore.

You're actually getting a ratio difference of the voltage between Channel one here and Channel two. So you effectively got a second channel on there now. So if you hook it up I've now got for example, it's just jumping all over the place cuz one of the uh terminals is uh, floating. But if we connect that up there, we go.

That's the difference between the two voltages on the I mean ideally it should be exactly one. So I'm guessing the uh why? that's not precisely one. Well, the contacts aren't exactly on the same point. there a minuscule amount of current flowing into the 10 Meg ohm input there.

so presumably that'll go higher if we put Auto Zed interface on. Yep, there we go. It gets closer to one because our input impedance. so there's less current flowing through the wires no matter how minuscule it actually is.

And bingo there There we go. Spot on. Excellent. Now, one feature that's worth a bit of a look.

It's hidden away here. Probe hold in the shift function. Look at this. Ah, we've got ourselves a couple of different readings here.

Look at this right. I'm hooked up a 9volt battery here. Let's disconnect that. It's like the uh touch hold uh capability that you're used to on the Fluke, For example, look at that.

We can store beautiful A Come on, give me a slightly different reading. ah me to good for its own good And there we go. We can store looks like how how many I don't know. Seven, eight different touch hold readings? That is great That is.

Yeah, Eight eight. That's it. Does it shuffle? Yeah, it looks like it shuffles them up so it gives you the last eight readings. A fantastic.

And if you don't like that, beep, Um, you can turn that off and on and probe hold off and on as well. And if you turn that off and it uh, holds the values back in there when you go back, that is a great feature. I Love that that's a winner and it gives you the live Uh display as well I Like unbelievable and of course the last one of course in a nice big display up the top. There There we go.

Fantastic! And you can tell that feature was implemented by somebody who uses touch hold a lot and they just went I'd Love to have like you know, last half a dozen readings or something that' be fantastic and that's just beautiful. How can you fault that? And that brings us to the continuity buzzer. How good is it? Let's test it. Here we go: Ah, probe hold not supported for ratio, current, continuity, diode, or temp.

Oh, there we go. So yeah, fair enough. We got to turn that mode off. There we go.

Oh I can get it to miss it. There we go so it could be quicker, but but yeah, that's not bad. It is the latching type and yeah, it's okay, not 100% but good enough and it's probably just loud enough. It's not super loud, but considering it's for uh, bench use, pretty good I Like it.

Now speaking of continuity and the probes, these are the probes that came with it. Not sure if these are the same ones that come with the lower model one, but these are very, very nice. The 34138 A set very n reasonably sharp. you know, not the sharpest probes I felt but still pretty darn good I Like them they come with, you know, the probe protection, uh uh, caps and all that uh sort of jazz.

They are 1000 volt 15 amp Cat 2 rated Yes, this is a Cat 2 uh rated meter by the way. Uh, forgot to mention that it's Mount 300 volt Cat 2 It's mentioned on the front panel, so you know these bench meters are never designed for. you know High overload use. This one has been designed to survive overloads, but it's not designed to be going out in the field and measure you know, plant and equipment and stuff like that.

It's designed for test instrument racks and lab use where you know you're just not going to get that sort of, you know Cat 3 Cat 4 scenario. So not a problem. but these probes very, very nice indeed. Beautiful.

Um, silicon? uh, flexible test leads on them. Really like it. And I Got a whole bunch of accessories here. we go look at that.

We can uh, plug our probe into there like that fits beautifully over that. Look at that. Look at the protection you get in there and we've got ourselves a little. that's a hook? There we go.

So yeah, I'd prefer it. Maybe if that was a easy hook. I don't like the sort of right angle hooking that, but still. they are excellent quality.

And the other ones are. these puppies long. They come with protection. Uh, caps.

long, thin, flexible, very sharp probes on these things. So let's plug our probe in here. There we go look at that. It's it's kind of flex.

It's not super flexible, but you know it really allows you to get into very tight and fine areas. Very nice and I'm pretty surprised and disappointed. For you know, a meter of this uh capability that the only option in your continuity mode is beeper on or off like you don't even have the ability to set you know, the uh threshold value for your continuity buzzer. I mean you, you get that in the much cheaper you know, uh, handheld Agilant meters.

So I don't know why they haven't added it to this laziness. I guess and another cap ability we got is to show statistics and we can do this in the math mode. We can just go shift math like that and we can turn. Well, we can, uh, turn our null value.

um, off and on. So there we go. We can actually permanently display that. so when we've nled something out, that's rather handy.

DB Dbm. Um, stuff. but yeah. oh, you can set your reference values for all your Dbm stuff pretty good.

and um, but statistics is what we're interested in. There it is it. Um, makes your display smaller once again. I Don't know why they continue to put this um gap down the bottom if you're not going to have anything there and you can clear them and reset them at any time.

Very nice. and as we'll see that math capability, these statistics can be overlaid on top of our histograms and our uh Trend charts as well. And of course another big thing is uh, in the math menu, you can set your limits as well Bingo Look, our display just went from Blue to Red because we're outside our specified limits here. Fantastic! And we can set our span and Center we can have it.

uh beep whether or not it uh, beeps when it um goes into oh, there we go. it should. now shut up if I maybe muck around with the inputs there with my finger. Yeah, it doesn't beep if I do it again.

there we go. And yeah, it's really quite nice. We can, uh, program those limits in and once again, these limits. these math capability can be done on the Uh Trend chart and the histogram as well.

Check out this insanity if we choose our low. like we can choose a low high value or a center span value. uh, depending on what. um, error? Uh, you know what type of limits you actually want.

But like, let's look at this. it pops it up and it highlights that first digit and we can go across here right? But like Gig Volts look right. it's absolutely ridiculous. Gig Volts and this changes the scale like this: Mega Volts Kilovolts right? and we can go Millie Micro Nano Pico Fto where's our you know, where's at? Oh jeez, you know, feature.

Fail there. Ah, ridiculous. Why had that? So I really don't care for the way that they're Shifting the digit there I mean it's a fixed like I Expected when I went into this mode I Expected for this cursor key to actually shift my um, you know my cursor along like that along the digit on the fixed range. but it doesn't.

it shifts it. So let's say we want a 0.1 Mill volts there as our low limit. Then we've got to go into where Is it molts There we go. We're point.

No, no, no, hang on No. we got to go into Microv Volts And then we got to go one hang on there we go. 0.1 There it is. It's gone blue now.

so that's our 0.1 Uh, yeah .1 molts minus it's it. It's finicky. I don't like the way they've implemented that at all. but anyway, we can Now operate that and you'll see that when I shot the probes together, bang, we're within the limits.

Not a problem at all. But once we go outside that bang bang whoop. and of course it tells you the number of failures as well. and well, both the high and low low failures.

Very very nice. I Do like once it's set up I Do like the way it works and with this status display here, it's not like a live thing. It's not telling us, it just tells us that there has been a fail. but it's a bit redundant when you have the fail counts here.

So I don't kind of understand that really. And of course we can add our label there with our limits so we can put our label on this. Fantastic, Ah, beautiful. Now let's do a simple uh check with a 9volt battery here.

How fast this thing actually uh, responds on whether or not it overshoots it all. So I'm just going to go really solid probe into that battery. Bam Straight to it. almost to the least significant digit.

That's impressive and I should be able to repeat that. Yeah, look at that. It's not just a fluke no pun intended there. That's fantastic.

Look at that. Yep. I Like that. Get great measurement confidence with this thing.

as you'd expect with not only an agilant meter, but one that's designed to rep place the venerable 3401a. I Mean everyone you know has had absolute confidence in that thing for the last 20 years and this one looks no different. But curiously though, I've now got it fixed to a manual 10vt range and check this out. See it.

We got an intermediate reading in there, so maybe it's because it's not Auto ranging anymore. It's actually able to get that additional reading in there faster. but of course it does. It doesn't overshoot or anything like that.

It does actually settle. You know it goes bang pretty much bang straight onto the reading, so that's still pretty good. But it does give you that intermediate value in manual range mode. whereas it doesn't do that.

if we go into Auto here we go there, we go. Auto doesn't do that at all. So eh, I guess leave it in auto mode. and if I try that again with 0 2 power line cycles, look at that straight to it.

Excellent. Let's go in there 0.02 So so we're really screaming now look at that. Very nice. A I like it.

OHS let's check it out. Goes up to 100 megga range. By the way. Here we go.

Boom! that's pretty darn quick. That is super quick. I'm impressed with that. Look at that.

and that includes a relay. a manual relay switch as well if you heard that. Fantastic. So that beats the pants off.

Um, almost any uh, you know, handheld multimeter and it has to manually switch that Reay in which takes time I mean that's probably most of the time in there. If it didn't have to switch that Reay probably do it near instantaneously And just remember, we've done all these tests in the auto digigit mask range as well where it automatically chooses the number of digits. I mean if we switch to say 4 and a half uh. digit mode there bang? Look at that.

You know it. there's there's sort of no pen. You're not paying any penalty for using that 6 and 1/2 digit. Well, let's fix it to 6 and 1/2 digit mode.

Look at that. You're really are not paying a penalty there at all for that extra resolution. Fantastic. All right time to get a bit medieval on its ass and see if this thing can survive 240 volts on the Ohms range.

By the way, here we are AC volts. I'm probing my uh directly on the Main's Outlet here under my bench. it's a bit high today. 24, 47 Vols AC still within that spec, we've got AC filtering here.

Of course we can have uh, uh, 200 HZ and uh, well, you know, like obviously, uh, we're not going to read it cuz we're trying to read 50 HZ here so that's no good. But uh, there we go and we got three HZ so that's a nice little touch to add that filtering. We've got our Auto Range there. but what I want I don't like this extra digit out here.

What the hell is going on here? Get rid of that. That's ridiculous. Bugger that off. Anyway I Want to see if this thing can survive 240 volts on the Ohms range and then come good again? let's try it.

Will the Magic Smoke escape two wire OHS Overload. Not a problem. Let's go back and I'm sure it's still within spec. We haven't damaged a thing because Agilant have actually, um, designed it to survive overloads like that.

Brilliant. It works. Listen to this though, right? 240 Vol Main DC volts. The auto range reays are just going crazy.

what's going on there? Don't like the sound of that. now. one significant change they've made from the 3401a is in the Uh diode mode here. The old one used to be Uh 1vt maximum um, test voltage.

This one is now 5 volts. And of course that allows you to test um, you know, modern Uh leads like this white lead here. So look at the resolution we're getting on that. very very nice.

Um, but of course that could have um, some implications for existing test uh systems where I don't know it could potent that higher open circuit voltage could potentially, uh, damage it or turn on uh Junctions or something like that that it's not supposed to. So anyway, just something to consider. There is no option at all to um, change that back to the 1vt range and if we have a look at the Uh DC Amps mode here 100 micro um Range which have added over the 341e very nice. It didn't have that before.

So 6 and 1/2 digit Uh resolution on this thing that gives us .1 Nan volts resolution I've got it hooked up to my Keithly current Source here set to Uh 10 uh microamps and I can just dial that down a decade. There we go. That's to one microamp and uh, there we go. We're down to 100 nanoamps and I can even get lower than that that? there we go.

that is 1 Nan amp. And of course when this thing says it's 6 and 1/2 digits, well how many count is that? it doesn't actually imply, um, any. You know the actual Uh count value. Well, in this case let's check it out.

Okay, where on the 1 milliamp range here So you might think it goes to point. You know it goes to 1 milliamp maximum, but it doesn't. It actually has some overrange on this thing so let's actually try it and see how far it goes before it switches up a range. I'm going to have to actually go up another digit there.

There we go. Hey, there we go. We just switched to so it looks like it's about 1.2 You can overrange this thing and will it switch back down if I tweak that back. not quite.

if I tweak it back another digit. No, it's got some hysteresis there. It's not going to there we go. It switched down when I went to 1 milliamp.

But uh, there you go go. You'd expect some hysteresis on that, but there you go. It can measure up to 1.2 Any over that. Let me tweak the third decimal place.

Ey. Yeah, there we go. It just went over when I went to 1.2 So this is a 1.2 million count meter. Fantastic.

And you'll notice that, uh, we're on the 3 amp range here. if we want to actually measure high and that we have to fix, switch to the fixed 10 amp range and that is actually fixed. If we switch that over there, it is fixed 10 amp. So there it is.

We have to actually switch our probe over and of course we get no more. Um, low resolution stuff. We can still measure our milliamp, but it's a fixed 10 amp range. Oh well.

so you almost have to ask. um, you know why did they bother adding that fixed 10 amp range? You know, an extra socket on there, relay, switching, and and stuff. You know why actually do that? They must have had cuz 10 amps isn't a huge amount more than 3 amps. I Guess they must have had some um, you know or there was some particular customer requirement to go slightly Beyond 3 amp.

So they've gone to all that effort just to extend it. And here's where we get into some of the neat display and Analysis uh aspects and uh, data logging of this meter built-in enabled by the big graphical display here. Now what I've got is I've got my microcurrent hooked up. nothing on the input so we're effectively looking at the noise here and you can see you know it's just we're just talking a couple of you know digit, it's down in here.

it's just jumping around randomly. but by dis going into our display menu here uh we'll look at the uh bar graph meter later. but now we can have a look at say the trend chart which shows this the value over time. Now it's not showing anything at the moment showing a flat line.

but if we Auto scale that using the auto scale once check it out, we get a Rollin display of this thing versus time. Now it shows the last minute here which I'll get to and uh it. we can see the value jumping around. We can see the noise in there.

It's like a rolling display you might be used to on your oscilloscope. Uh, for example, they can do a roll uh display like this as well and it's great for showing how things Trend And if you triming stuff, how they adjust or how they adjust with temperature and all that sort of stuff. Now as uh, similar as we saw before. Um, you've got the uh, low high values here for your Uh scale here.

Or you do a center span value as well. So you can send a set a center value and then how much you want to span. It depends on how you want to enter it, how you want to, uh, think about that sort of thing. The scales.

Now you might think that this uh uh entry thing works the same as before. It doesn't. This one actually allows you to move the cursor like that and jump it down to microv volts. Look, look at that.

See, we can change that. 200 20 like that and we can go in there and we can change that to look 19.99 and see. And then once you obviously get into the decimal places there, it gets really annoying to you know. see your rain.

So it's better to have you know a nice even range like that so you know it just doesn't confuse you. So you can choose Center or span. Really quite nice. uh.

vertical manual. You can do uh Auto uh. scaling and a default value of course, but we don't want that. we want Auto.

There it is and that works really well. We've got some extra uh Dead Space over here. it's not scaling the window based on um, the uh, you know, the digits entered. It sort of seems to cater for the maximum uh number of decimal places there and then just has all this Dead Space over here.

they should be utilizing that. there should be, may it' be nice if they had a you know this button here that said, you know, go to full screen or something like that and bang it. just you know, um, expanded to full screen I Mean you know, just little firmware issues like that. but I like how they've got the live display up here.

of course, the live numerical display really quite nice and of course we can stop that at any time and then just do a single Um issue thing like that. And of course it takes into account that we've now stopped that for a longer period of time and it's putting in that long time period there. so I like to Waffle on so we'll see a nice big gap there now when I single space that out there. we go and we can restart that and it all carries off where we left off.

And the other good thing is is that we can go back to the trend to uh, go back to our number display here at any time and then go back in and we haven't lost any of our data. Trend um Chart mode by the way, only available in the 61 model, not AA This option is not available in the 60 option. That's really, essentially the only Uh software feature that's not available in the 60. But yeah, this is really handy for seeing um, you know, in this case, shortterm drift and by default, it only shows the last minute there.

So why it shows 0 seconds there? I've got, You know, no idea. that's just dumb. You know, say 60 seconds or just put a minute or something like that or M you know, minus a minute? I Don't know. it's dumb.

Anyway, um, the the only options for changing that horizontal uh scale there is the recent. so recent is the last minute. Would it be nice to show, like, have an option to show oh, last 10 minutes or something like that. five minutes Or you know to be able to change that scale somehow.

But uh, I can't see a way to actually? uh, do that or you can utilize all of your readings like that. so you can now see that you know. presumably it'll go up to the entire 10,000 readings and then it will roll and um, scale. you know you'll always be able to get if you've already hit 10,000 readings.

Um, that's the other thing. It doesn't show you on here how many Uh readings you've got. Unlike the histogram display which we'll see, it doesn't show it at all. I'd like to see a uh, you know, if you're going to display all, well tell me how many are in there I don't know.

Come on on, give me a break. add that feature Anyway, it's got the elapse time, which is really quite good. and I guess you could work it out based on the sample, right? but you don't know what the exact sample rate is, blah blah blah. anyway.

H geez, just a little touch like that would have been nice, but this is a great awesome thing of course. so this can go up to the time limit uh, enabled by the uh 10,000 samples uh, presumably I haven't gotten that far, of course. and it's great for long-term drifts and things like that. And you can see sort of like the dis compression sort of as it adds data in there.

It sort of. yeah, it sort of shifts the display because it's got limited pixels on there and it's got to, um, do some. You know, it's got to figure out which uh pixels to display in there and stuff like that. but anyway, it seems to work quite well and this is a really handy mode.

It's worth getting this. It's worth paying extra for the 61 model. Um, just to get this uh uh, Trend plot. Really? And as I mentioned before, I think we can still overlay the math stuff on there there so we can get our statistics up with our Trend plot as well.

Fantastic! I Love that. and uh, then if we go back in there we can have our limits as well and can set our limits in there and show it on the trend chart. Ah, thumbs up! Now at first I thought that this sucker did not have the ability to actually set a sample period here because you don't see any options like it' Be fantastic to be able to go. Okay I want to take one sample per minute instead of just being the update rate of the analog to digital converter as it is here.

Now you know, twice a second or whatever. it uh, happens to be like one sample per minute or one sample per hour? and then I want this trend chart to go over like several days or even several weeks or something like that. That' be fantastic. so it's not obvious how to do that.

But if you go into the acquire menu, you can actually set up your uh, well, at the moment the trigger source is set to Auto Um, but we could. We should be able to set this thing up to uh Trigger or sample at a different interval. So here we go. It's Auto delay at the moment.

So if we go into manual delay. aha, look at this. Here we go. Can we? Yeah, there we go.

Millie Let's go seconds. Oh there. No see. it's got this ridiculous entry mode.

again. A for goodness sake. Ah 5 66 M No, No, no, fail, fail, fail. Don't like it.

Ah, it's really quite annoying. anyway. I Want 1 second? God It's not rocket science. Second interval.

Ah Cy Now it'll sample at 1 second intervals: 2, 3, 4, 5, Six. All right. Beautiful. And this is actually quite powerful because if the trigger source is coming from external for example, then you can set the delay after an external trigger.

uh, something like that. So if you're trying to synchronized measurements in a system or something like that, great way to do it. It's got excellent resolution in there. as you saw it's uh, just fantas.

not sure the exact resolution I Me: it goes down to, you know, something ridiculous, but um, that you know there's got to be a limitation, uh, somewhere well, you know in terms of uh, timing, but seems very powerful. and of course you can set the number of samples it takes uh per trigger sample as well. You can set the Um output to be positive or negative on the rear panel there and if we want to save all of the readings that we've uh sampled in this thing not a problem, we can save it to internal or external USB and I just checked the Uh saving of the data there to my USB stick. Uh, took it onto the PC there and it saves it as a standard do CSV Uh file and uh, that and the values in that are of course the the Um: not the actual display value, but the calculated Uh value from the single Precision internal uh math inside the unit so you may be able to extract whether or not it's valid.

You may be able to extract a bit more resolution by uh, sucking that data out I don't know, haven't looked into it and uh, by the way, I should mention uh, the 61a has 10,000 readings memory, the 60a only has 1,000 and of course the trend chart. we can just jump on over here if we don't like our Trend chart. I've set it back to the fastest sample rate on 6 and a half digit. We can then go over to our histogram and check it out.

Once again, we can jump between histogram uh Trend um chart plus the Uh numerical display without losing any of our data. That's great. And here we get a distribution plot. Of course that's what the his histogram is doing.

a distribution plot of our all of our sample data um, over the range. Once again it auto scales here so we can clear that so we can start again and you can see it doesn't look like a any sort of anything at the moment, but it's see it's changing the scale there as we read more. once again. I'm uh just reading the noise from my microcurrent.

here. this is just the noise hanging off that. so we expect it to be a like, you know that Gausian uh, bell curve response and if you leave it long enough, trust me. um I've left this running for quite some time and we get that perfect you know, that sort of Gausian uh response to our noise there and of course the different bins in here.

This will, uh, change. We'll notice this, uh, change as we go on. Hopefully if we get some more. uh out.

Oh, there we go. I Just touched it. I Just yeah. I just fiddled with it.

We got some outliers out there, there, we go and it's rescaling. One thing it it. it tells you the number of bins here, but it doesn't I mean you know we've got OD values here. You know, because it's Autos scaling minus 17 microvolts to 6 microvolts.

Here, it doesn't tell us. um, you know the uh, the width of the bin in microvolts? It'd be nice if it was said. you know, wear 1.5 microvolts per bin or something like that, that would be. you know that would be useful I mean it tells us our Center but you know I mean that's a trivial thing to add.

so uh, really? I'd love to uh, see that and I don't know why they haven't added it, but anyway, we're up to like 208 uh samples. At the moment it'll go to 10,000 and then we'll get a rolling average of those. uh, 10,000. Just keep on going.

Once again, a live display here. Yes, we can turn on our statistics math on top of the uh, histogram there. Oh, fantastic. Don't accidentally hit the clear readings button because you'll lose all your data.

You know that's one of the disadvantages of this. You can't just lock it out or uh, something like that if you accidentally touch it. Oops, you know you've uh, screwed yourself. Here we go.

uh, statistics off? Hide. There we go. We're back out. now.

One thing it doesn't have is like the ability, uh, to go in there once you've uh, finished all the readings, go in there and set cursors and zoom in, and um, you know, and tweak the display or, uh, something like that. Now, unfortunately, we can't change our bin in here on the uh fly. It's a auto at the moment, but if you go in there and you choose manual, well, it actually, uh, just resets that. but you can set up all the bin stuff you want.

Once again, low high values for the bins and then Center and span and the number of bins so you can fix it if you know exactly what you want. So there you go. I've manually fix this now to be much nicer. plus 50 microvolts minus 50 microvolts, zero in the center there and 100 bins total and it'll just fix on that and continue to, uh, change the vertical scale.

Um, depends, you know, on the number of uh, you know, hits in that particular bin. So it utilizes the full screen. Once again, would have been nice to be able to maybe go to full screen mode. you know, jump out.

You know, full screen. Thank you I Don't know. a small little nitpick, but of course once this, uh, once all your data is captured and you're happy with it and everything. Of course you can press, run, stop, and you can save it to your USB stick.

But really, to do any analysis of this well, you've got to go dump it to a PC and uh, do it that way. It's not like we can go in there and say you know how many items in that particular bin and blah blah blah blah blah and stuff like that. So you know, really, you know it's a nice visual um display, uh, tool. It's a, you know, it's absolutely fantastic, But any sort of detailed analysis on the data, no, you want to shuffle off to the PC And of course, this is useful for seeing the distribution of your uh references and stuff like that.

So I'm actually looking at my um, uh, really high Precision uh reference. uh, standard down here at the moment. So this is my resistance standard and of course I've just started. We're only up to, you know, 140 150 odd samples.

but once again, we can start seeing the distribution in there. We can start seeing that Gausian distribution of course. One thing you got to be careful of is when you measuring Precision stuff like this. I mean we're talking a 1K resistor here.

So the contact resistance. You got to be careful not to touch any of this. So watch what happens if I Hey there we go. Look, it just shifted.

See that the display just shifted over because it just, you know, added an another item or two to some bins over here and uh, you know, really? Um, you've got to be very very Whoa. Look at that. I mean you know we're only talking a small amount 9999991256 You wouldn't actually get that issue though. But uh yeah.

I mean it's once again this highlights. um, you know what is what is the width of our bin there? It doesn't tell you right. We've got these oddb values here: 9999991256 Of course that's Z to 100. Uh, 100% basically.

and it shows that we got no bins out here. So basically the greater the slope of that line indicates that there's more items in that particular bin. and there's not much out here at all. so that can be useful for those who need it.

And of course, if we go into display here, we've got our bar display mode as well for those who like a bar graph display. and of course we can go in there. it's default at the moment, so it's just showing the actual reading duplicating that. But uh, if we go into manual here, we can set the once again, the low high uh value of that or we can go Center and span so we can actually go in there.

and and let's do it. Can we There we go 1K Center And then we can span a low value we want. How do you bloody world Do this? All right? We want a small value, so there it is. There it is.

We got a tiny little value like that and that should. Why isn't it doing what we want there? I Don't see any way to get a center null on that thing either. So I don't know how handy this bar graph display is. quite frankly, not.

uh, not that impressed with that at all. It's a bit gimmicky, so check it out. I'm in uh, vaults mode here and you know we've got a center and span and we can set those values. But why? It's not starting from there and then like like, what's going on there, what's going on with that bar graph? Look, it's like it's it's stupid I Don't like it at all.

It doesn't seem to do what I want? What the hell? Why is it showing? Sort of like a start over here, going to like a pointer at zero and like, what's the point of that I Want it to be in the center and then the Barra to go Boop Bo boop boop back and forth with the center zero in there. Give me a break. Hopeless very disappointed with that for that to be one of their big four display selling points I Expected better functionality out of that bar graph display. Maybe it's just a pebcak error, but I've looked at the manual and it doesn't really tell you anything more than what I'm already doing here.

So I don't know. Actually, the manual does show this thing starting in the middle and then going out like that, but I'm bugged. If I can get it what there's Maybe I've got some firmware version that doesn't have it or something like that I don't know and check out if we go into the frequency mode here with bar graph on. then it gives us a logarithmic uh response on the frequency here.

I don't know if that's gimmicky or actually useful. Anyway, you've got three filters on here on the frequency 223 Htz and three different gate times. A second, 100 milliseconds and 10 milliseconds that will give you your most resolution and Just for kicks I thought I'd hook it up to my EDC voltage reference here and uh I've got it 1vt dialed in and it was um, spot on 1.0 before H it's dancing around a bit. Depends how I do the connections down here I can you know? touch them a little bit and you know? we're really down in the noise when we're talking about the last digit down there.

But it's basically uh, bang on compared to my um HP 3457a here. and uh, that's very, very impressive. Yeah, my Keith Le up there is, uh, fairly close to my 3457a down here. but of course I'm going to trust this um Agilant one better because it's in Spec and it has a better Um spec then both of these units.

Now we're looking at uh, you know, 90day spec I mean I'm not a cow. This is just really mucking around here. We're not doing serious measurements, but on the 1vt Range the 34 61a, we're talking .3% there. plus7 we'll ignore the plus7, we'll just go for the 003 and if you do the calculation on that at 1 volt, that is, um, 30 on the last.

So it's the second last digit there, so that could be nine, uh, 70 and it would still be within spec. But anyway, it is bang on. As you'd expect for these things, these things are typically well within the spec. I Mean, you know it's It's even well within the 24hour spec, which is uh, .2% plus uhle 06.

So you know? Ah, not a problem. Why do I even bother testing that? But a lot of people ask for it even though it's a pointless test on one unit with like, ah, even if we're at a cowb, what does it tell you? Whoopy dooo, It's within spec. Of course it is. It's an agilant bench meter for goodness sake.

And of course I can just dial up my last digit here and Bo look at that Beautiful. Not a problem. in fact, let's take it up to 10. See what we get on 10 here? and uh, there we go.

It's going to take a little bit to settle there, but uh, it's pretty darn close. Look at that beautiful Bingo Spot on. And if we flip that sucker to negative there, bang on. and my 10K reference resistor 99.999 43.

Let's compare that with the 3457a. Yep, almost the same. awesome. And if we check the resistance again on a fluke, uh, 5450 a resistance calibrator.

there we go. It's um, pretty darn close. Well well with In Spec Although granted I don't actually know the calibration status of this sucker. but anyway, it's good fun.

Now let's see if we can see the power on uh, drift of my calibration standard here. so let me switch this on and then we'll clear this so we'll start again and it's in. Overload at the moment takes like 5 seconds or something to uh, so we can Auto scale that. look at that we can already see it ramping up like that.

Check it out there we go and looks like it's well, we'll have to autoscale that again. Quite nice. You can see the turn on the switch on performance of this voltage reference. This calibration, uh, voltage reference standard here.

Beautiful. I'm going to stop that and now we can capture that data and you've got to remember too. We're looking at the least significant digit down in there and look, it's not changing at all. but we should be able to see something on our histogram and our Trend chart.

There we go, look at that. We can see some little noise fluctuations in there, so it seems to have greater resolution than. uh, that was me. um just overloading thing.

Let me change that again. we'll clear it and we'll Auto scale that. There we go so it has greater resolution. It looks like the trend chart is showing the Uh single Precision uh floating Point calculation from that uh Delta Sigma like um, true volt.

Um, what is it? Multislope 4 conversion ADC in this thing. So there you go. So we'll uh, leave that run in for a bit and we should. Maybe we'll get a bit of a histogram going there, but you can definitely see it on the trend chart.

Very interesting. So of course, if that is the true uh resolution of the ADC in this thing, we can actually see even though that, um, you know, the main Uh display, the main number display like that 6 and a half digit display is not moving at all. But um, if the ADC is actually better than that, um, then of course you know it's not going to make a difference in terms of accuracy, but in terms of resolution and possibly the data you can extract from this thing. uh, via the external um, you know via the Uh data either you know the land or the Gpib or whatever.

or when you dump the Uh CSV file to Dis, you should be able to extract better resolution. H Very nice and here it is I've left it running overnight and let's have a look at all the data. This is just the recent one. of course it.

it looks like it has drifted a little bit. let's have a look at all and haha look at that. That's where we started last night. So this is like uh, hang on, uh how many records it doesn't uh doesn't tell you.

that's really annoying. see like a how many records have we got on there? It's should be able to tell you that lapse time 16 hours, 15 minutes and uh. anyway. um there's you know there could be like 10,000 records in there or something and uh, you can see it started up here and then it went a little.

there's a little jump in there, it sort of recovered and it drifted down and down and down. Little bit more sort of noise in these parts around here. I'm not sure what's uh going on there. you'd have to uh extract the data and then uh, zoom into it I guess but uh, it's starting to recover back up like that I mean that could be a simple uh temperature thing overnight as the temperature uh drifted I and I would have had to record the Uh temperature with it get some correlation.

It's pretty good here in the Uh lab though. it is pretty stable, so who knows. maybe that's the just some inherent uh drift in the Uh reference or the meter I don't know I haven't checked the specs to see uh, which one is, uh, which one's going to uh, dominate there. But anyway, that folks is very fascinating and you can exra the data out of that and you can learn an awful lot.

I Just found one really annoying thing I Went to screen capture that again and it didn't automatically increment that number to two I had to manually go in there and change the file name I find that really annoying. It knows that there's already screen one. uh, do PNG on that external disc. So why didn't it auto increment that number? Anyway, what we can do is also have a look at the histogram for that because we're not going to lose our data and there it is.

Look at that you can see multiple Peaks there and how it's like shifted over and then given us another Peak and another and then it's continued to give us another one. So that is really fascinating stuff you want to look at it and correlate with Uh temperature and other uh drift parameters for the meter and all. the Uh device under test which in this case is a calibration a DC uh Calibration lab standard then Woo! Lots of anal is to be done there I Love it! And once again, you can see that the range here is not really huge. so we're getting it.

Looks like we're getting resolution above and beyond our 6 and A2 digits. There, we're getting that internal floating Point calculation Precision Because it's not like the ADC uh spits out a 6 and a half digit number. it actually, um, the internal Uh processor actually calculates a single Precision floating Point result from that. So uh, you know you'd have to to go into the complete operation of the ADC whether or not it's valid.

but I think you're going to get some increased resolution there from your ADC Brilliant! And by the way, what's up with this? 10 here? Look, we've got 10.0000 precisely there in the center and then it's got 10 up there. 10 What? 10 Mill volts, 10 microvolts? What? What is it I don't know. Is that some sort of bug? And by the way, this is where got to be careful doing uh, you know, really precise measurements like this. I just got I was just uh logging here.

We're not. uh, in all of it, there's all right there. it's been. uh, sort of.

you know there was a period where I stopped it there and then it's been running overnight again. but uh, let's have a look just now. just like a a minute or two ago before I stopped it I came into the lab, switched the lights on and boom look at that. Just be careful when you're doing Precision measurements like this.

you can get noise like that that introduced induced into your test system right? I'd better start wrapping this video up. I Think it's been going for far too long? I think we're already at an hour already. so um yeah. I'll try and wrap it up as quickly as possible.

uh I As you no doubt see, it's hard to fult this meter. It's really they've implemented it really well and you get a lot of confidence with this thing. Let me tell you, it's a excellent replacement for the 34 uh 01a. It's um, meets it spec for spec feature for feature and adds a whole and adds some new feature set on there which uh works really well.

Few operational issues with it of course, but uh eh. Love the really big screen, it's working. Fantastic! But one thing that is lacking on here which you will get with competing units like the uh uh, Modern Fluke and um, Agilant uh sorry fluke and Ryo models is that um, they have capacitance measurement. No capacitance measurement on here.

Why in the multimeter for the next decade? I Don't know why they didn't add that is there's some technical uh reason why they couldn't do it well in the architecture or something like that I know they wouldn't just add like a piss pow uh cap measurement? uh to it. they wouldn't uh, bother doing that. but I don't know or is it just marketing said no, we're not going to bother with uh, the capacitance mode. So if you need uh, capacitance measurement, if you want a full featured bench uh, multimeter for general purpose, uh, stuff in your lab, then well, this one may not meet your Uh criteria because of that lack of uh capacitance mode.

but in terms of you know, uh, system functionality like that, it's not used uh, very often where this uh meter is uh, designed to be used in uh, you know, programmable test systems and uh, stuff like that. although capacitance is very ha