Alex Kilpatrick wrote: > It is a digital meter. The 100 mA fuse is probably not there to prevent > a fire. :-) Actually, it is. It's for when you forget that the meter is in current mode and you put it across a voltage source. The fuse prevents the test leads from melting in your hands. A 500 mA fuse works just as well as a 100 mA fuse for this purpose. > I assume it protects sensitive electronics that measure small current. > The meter will measure down to uA. It's actually fairly easy to protect the electronics from overvoltage faults. You need to do this anyway, as the fuse cannot possibly blow quickly enough to protect them. I'll grant you that many RS employees are fairly dim bulbs, but in this particular case, he did *not* give you bad advice. As far as being "horrified" about a change from a 5A to a 6.5A fuse, there's the QC point of view and the engineering point of view. From the QC point of view, it is manufacturing's responsibility to produce the product that engineering specified. *Any* deviation is a cause for concern. However, from an engineering point of view, fuses are very sloppy devices. If you've ever looked at the percent overload vs. opening time curve for a typical fuse, you'd understand this. They don't even specify a minimum opening time, just a maximum for certain levels of overload. They sometimes even promise that the fuse *won't* open for certain small overloads (like 125%), so you know what kind of design margin you have. The actual difference between a 5A fuse and a 6.5A fuse is way down in the noise. -- Dave Tweed -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads