Russell, On Wed, 10 May 2006 00:11:31 +1200, Russell McMahon wrote: >... > But, if, for under $NZ9 you may occasionally want to test fuses (car or > house), see if a plug is live, a bulb really blown, a torch or transistor > battery dead or alive etc - then read on. Bad news is that they won't tell you the shipping cost for us foreigners... I bet it's at least 4x the cost of the thing, but I'm not prepared to order one just to find out! >... > Main shortcomings: > > No continuity beeper on low ohms (a sad loss ;-) ). This one knocks it on the head for me! I reckon at least a quarter of the times I pick up a meter it's to check continuity, and without a beeper it's a right pain, so I don't buy meters without it any more. >... > MAY fail catastrophically on mains measurements if large fault voltage > spikes are present. This is true of most cheap meters. I have used many > extensively on mains measurements over many years without problems.It can > happen, but the dangers from making mains measurements are far higher than > any risk from the meter. I couldn't read the maximum rating on the thing itself, but it looks like it may be 500V. If so, that's really too low for measuring the mains - a cheap meter I have beside me, which was only about 50% dearer than the one under discussion, has maxima of 750VAC and 1000VDC, and I'd have thought that was about as low as you'd want to go. Thanks for the pointer, but I think I'll pass this time. I do rather like the look of their $38 palm meter, and the $30 backlit one, but the latter is for personal callers only, and the airfare rather wipes out the saving! :-) Cheers, Howard Winter St.Albans, England -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist