ESR Tester, cheap

is

It also comes with the Sun Rise brand on it. Here's some discussion on the product

Looking at the scale graduations in your pic it would appear to have extremely poor resolution for caps in the low ESR range. You really need a meter with an expanded range reading of say 0 - 10 ohms max. Any higher reading is meaningless since an electro cap with 10 ohms esr is useless for anything.

I bought one of these a year or so ago for the purpose of adding it to our ESR comparison page

Made in China of the poorest quality components.

There may have been improvemnets since then but I have no interest in pursueing it.

John AnaTek Corporation The Electronic Repair Center at

You can waste lots of time ..or.. you can just save up and buy a Cap Wizard . I have owned one for years now and it never fails me . The last load of mid 70`s & 80`s jukeboxes i got all had plenty of small capacitors on and in every circuit board & box . I never suspected high quality 80`s jukeboxes to have so many bad capacitors in them . The Cap Wizard made quick help of cleaning up all of these machines of bad caps .

I own an analog meter Tenma. It works ok but for more accurate results you'll probably have to spend more than the 100 bucks I paid for mine.

You are absolutely correct, Ken, the Cap Wizard was a wonderful design as was Bob Parker's design from Dick Smith Electronics.

Note that I use the past tense. I sold both of those units for many years and now both are gone. The Cap Wizard apparantly has disappeared forever, the DSE version of Bob's design may be reincarnated. Let us hope so.

John

small

all

design

All may not yet be lost :-) In a recent post on aus electronics NG, the designer, Bob Parker, replied as follows;

DSE has stopped making kits based on the magazine designs, as you probably know. Jaycar stopped making ESR meter kits in about 1997. Altronics are in the midst of gearing up to make ESR meter kits right now. I've seen a few brand-new DSE K-7214 ESR meter kits on Ebay. ;) Are you looking for one, or just curious?

Bob

John,

Thanks for the comments & link - very informative. Thanks to everyone else as well ...I especially appreciate all the user feedback.

-S

Gone forever !!!! i should then grab an extra if i ever see one . I was thnking of buying an ESR years ago then i walked into one of our small local repair shops where he had piles of junk in boxes all over the place andon top was this Cap Wizard along with one of those small computer monitor testers . 100$ for both .