bigclive
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- Jun 21, 2009
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Just got one of the Socket and See meter sets to try out.
One niggle... The battery contacts are the usual spring arrangement except for the two connections that go to the PCB. Those are just flat spring strip and when I dropped the first battery in it was a loose fit. One quick adjustment with a pair of long nose pliers and the batteries fitted snugly. This was the case with all three meters.
I had a mooch inside all of the meters. They follow a standard pattern with a processor card and a power card. There are no "adjustments" inside for calibrators to use. It must all be done digitally with storage of calibration values in non volatile memory.
They employ an odd feature which has a capacitively coupled thumb electrode that looks for potential difference between the mains earth and the ambient earth through your body. It's to detect when the incoming mains supply is reversed making the buildings "earth" live with respect to Terra Firma.
The loop tester only does low current (15mA) loop tests. I didn't spend too much time looking at the circuitry of the power side, but there is a big ceramic resistor and what appears to be a thyristor. My guess is that it fires the thyristor close to the mains zero crossing point and uses the power resistor as half of a potential divider with the loop impedance being the other half. Given the resistor value and test current, that would mean the resulting test voltage level would be extremely small. I'm hopefully going to test it alongside another brand to see how the readings compare.
First impressions are that the meters are well designed.
I'll report back after I've used them in anger.
One niggle... The battery contacts are the usual spring arrangement except for the two connections that go to the PCB. Those are just flat spring strip and when I dropped the first battery in it was a loose fit. One quick adjustment with a pair of long nose pliers and the batteries fitted snugly. This was the case with all three meters.
I had a mooch inside all of the meters. They follow a standard pattern with a processor card and a power card. There are no "adjustments" inside for calibrators to use. It must all be done digitally with storage of calibration values in non volatile memory.
They employ an odd feature which has a capacitively coupled thumb electrode that looks for potential difference between the mains earth and the ambient earth through your body. It's to detect when the incoming mains supply is reversed making the buildings "earth" live with respect to Terra Firma.
The loop tester only does low current (15mA) loop tests. I didn't spend too much time looking at the circuitry of the power side, but there is a big ceramic resistor and what appears to be a thyristor. My guess is that it fires the thyristor close to the mains zero crossing point and uses the power resistor as half of a potential divider with the loop impedance being the other half. Given the resistor value and test current, that would mean the resulting test voltage level would be extremely small. I'm hopefully going to test it alongside another brand to see how the readings compare.
First impressions are that the meters are well designed.
I'll report back after I've used them in anger.
