Thinking about buying a new multimeter and was wondering if autoranging type was worth the extra.What are the benefits?
Great for checking through a pile of mixed resistors. Mechanical range switches are often the weak spot on a cheaper meter, autoranging gets round that.
I love mine, it's so much more convenient to be able to just stick the probes on something and get a reading. Like cpemma said it's great when you're taking a lot of different readings. I guess it just comes down to how much you use it and what you're willing to pay.
I got mine from Maplins. Wait for the sale --you can then get a Blue Arrow autoranging meter with backlight, temperature probe (a must for PC modding) and the facility to hook it onto a PC serial port and use the accompanying software, all for less than £60,--. Built like a Fluke, but an utter bargain by comparison.
lanester, all us engineers love our flukes... , ya auto ranging is the way to go as long as you have the $$
Not that much more. Have a look at Rapid's own-brand range, the 955 I went for with autorange and an extra bargraph display is about £29, the 328 otherwise similar but with manual range, temperature measurement added but no bargraph, about £23.50. It was a toss-up, but I already had a temperature meter so autoranging tipped the balance. The Maplin meter roll1 linked is also a good price, but it doesn't do capacitance measurement which you may have a use for.
Capacitance messurement is usually ****, even on more expensive multimeters. Autoranging is great, but cheap autoranging multimeters could have problems in the lower ranges because of bad resolution in the sensors. I have tested several instruments ranging from $8 to over $100, my opinion from this is that unless you want extreme precision, you can go with any instrument for ohms and DC volts, for DC amps, you probably want an instrument from $30 and up, for all other ranges i reccomend brand meters. I was given 2 fairly nice meters, APPA 95 and 97R, they were "broken". One had some graphite in the probe detector for the 10A jack and just beeped at you if you tried to messure anything but the 10A range, the other one had a small shaving of cupper that had shaved off and shorted 2 tracks. Both work perfectly after "repairs", 97R is an autoranging meter, wich is nice, but it allso allows for locking a range wich is useful for some applications.
