Fluke has lost their mind

Sometimes I also question their design decisions. I have the Fluke 8845A bench meter. It puts out around 10V (!) in the ohms ranges. That will easily blow reverse Vbe of a modern RF transistor which is often 2-3V abs max. Some might just zener and still kind of work but their noise figure and possibly hfe might then be shot. The old annealing trick by crunching a burning cigarette butt on top of the transistor won't work well anymore since they are flea-sized plastic packages, and almost nobody smokes anymore.

My cheapo Harborfreight meter applies less than 300mV. So right now on an RF board I am using a $5 meter because the $1000+ meter isn't up to the job.

At the very least I'd have expected Fluke to provide aselectable lower voltage while sacrificing accuracy. Being off by 0.1% in the ohms range sure beats blowing an unobtanium RF part.

I paid $275 for an original crispy flavor(*) Fluke 87 in about 1989.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) apologies to the late Jim Thompson

I should add that I'm very fond of these DMM probes:

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

When Fluke took over Philips Instruments, they tried to sell me a replacement for my Philips PM2518. The salesman was talking rubbish about the Philips putting out RFI on the test leads and the Fluke 'specification' sheet was just a glossy advert full of glib phrases that were obviously designed to cover up the limitations of their meter.

I wrote to their technical department requesting a proper specification sheet and received another copy of the advertisment - so I wrote again saying "Have received advertisment, now please send specification as requested".

The next day I got a 'phone call from their chief salesman. He was furious and told me I was a fool not to buy one of their meters and nobody expected a specification sheet that showed up where the meter might lose accuracy (the Philips specification *booklet* had graphs to show the areas of greatest and least accuracy). What a way to treat a potential customer!

I bought another Philips before Fluke could stop their production.

I was just probing a very tight board with a sewing needle.

torsdag den 9. november 2023 kl. 23.58.20 UTC+1 skrev john larkin:

that is basically what these are,

Yes these are very good probes, but the reverse banana style for the very old Simpsons didn't fit.

Cheers

Darned board. ;)

Phil Hobbs

Cool, a $1300 handheld DVM.

Imagine cutting the needle in two, splinting it back together but bridging the gap with a 950 ohm 0603 resistor, and soldering a coax center to the top end. You now have a tiny many-GHz 10:1 probe.

At most signal levels, such probes don't need a ground.