If you do anything with electronics or electricity, it is a good bet you have a multimeter. Even the cheapest meter today would have been an incredible piece of lab gear not long ago and, often, meters today are lighter and have more features than the old Radio Shack meters we grew up with. But then there are bench meters. [Learn Electronics Repair] reviews an OWON XDM1241 meter, and you have to wonder if it is better than just a decent handheld device. Check out the video below and see what you think.
Some of the advantage of a bench meter is just convenience. They stay in one place and often have a bigger display than a handheld. Of course, these days, the bench meter isn’t much better than a handheld anyway. In fact, one version of this meter even has a battery, if you want to carry it around.
Traditionally, bench meters had more digits and counts, although that’s not always true anymore. This meter has 55,000 counts with four and a half digits. It has a large LCD, can connect to a PC, and measures frequency, temperature, and capacitance.
Our bench meters usually have four-wire resistance measurement, but that does not seem to be the case for these meters. It does, however, take frequent measurements, which is a plus when ringing out continuity, for example.
The meter isn’t perfect, but if you just want a bench meter, it works well enough. If we had the space, we might opt for a bigger old surplus Fluke or similar. But if you want something new or you are short on space, this might be fine.
If you want to know what you are missing by not having four-wire measurements, we can help you with that. If you get any of these cheaper meters, we urge you to upgrade your probes immediately.
i have two of these. i bought them for the USB interface. it’s pretty trivial to automate measurements with your favorite programming language (python). they’re useful for automated measurements of things that take days or weeks to happen, and cheap enough to dedicate to one project for that length of time. there are cheaper DMMs (handheld) with serial ports (a couple of models from Tekpower), but their batteries can weak down during a very long measurement
I’ve an OW18E (coincidentally made by OWON as well) handheld meter. Great feature is that it will do data logging that you then pull down over bluetooth. Bought a 9V USB rechargeable for it. Obviously an issue if you want to log for 6 months, but a week should be fine.
i made a little wooden pocket on my workbench so i can mount my ‘pocket multimeter’ beside the oscilloscope. it’s easy to read, doesn’t get in the way, and doesn’t tend to get pushed off onto the floor when i make a mess of a prototype. always thought ‘bench meters’ were dumb but i’m a believer now, just for convenience. if you’ve struggled to read your meter sitting in your lap while you’re probing someting up on your workbench, you need to rethink!
My problem was I wanted something that could never leave the desk. Then one day I seen a “Multimeter bluetooth alarm clock radio bench meter” and decided I had to have that :D
I thought you were joking, but I googled what you said anyway and… well… how is the multimeter bluetooth alarm clock radio bench meter?
I have one of these, it’s just a repackaged hand-held meter. But the fact that it sits nicely on the bench is the reason I got it. I love it for that. IMO the Bluetooth speaker bit is gimmicky and the sound is mediocre, but I’ve already got some decent speakers in the lab. Mine has the ability to do measurements over Bluetooth to an app from the manufacturer, but that’s not something I’ve ever felt the need to do.
Reaching behind it to hit the power button was a pain, especially with it on the back of a deep bench, but I installed a small relay and a jack so that I could have it remain battery powered for isolation, but power on with the rest of my bench equipment.
I made an extension for the probes, there’s a jack for them under the front of the bench now, so I don’t have to have the wires running across the bench top from the meter to my project. If I ever need to worry about measurements that might be affected by such an extension, I can always move the probes straight to the meter, or more likely just get one of my other meters out. I have several.
The bench meter probably my most-used piece of test equipment, and I’m really glad I got it, even if it is just a hand-held meter in a box.
Another happy customer here. The bluetooth speaker I have literally never used, the clock is useless since it drifts about 5 minutes per day, but as a quick and easy meter that is always where I expect it (unlike the portables that always decide to migrate when I need one) it’s perfectly usable. I don’t need the insulation most of the time so the power button doesn’t bother me, it’s just plugged into a usb hub on my desk. Bonus is it was about half the price as the meter discussed in this article (via Ali), although the one mentioned above does look a bit more professional.
I was thinking of buying (at least) one of these when it was brand new. But in the end, it’s not a real “bench” meter, but more a handheld meter (with a handheld chipset) poured into a bigger box and bigger display. It also has some issues in some ranges and measurements, but I forgot the details.
Data logging (an important feature for bench top DMM) is also severely limited for this meter. Owon did not want this one to compete with it’s more expensive meters, so it took those functions out of the firmware.
For data logging purposes, it’s quite easy these days to build a small system with a microcontroller and a few MB of memory, or even an uSD card. You can build a dedicated device, or make it more universal, with ranges set with jumpers or some other simple method.
For a (good) benchtop meter, I also demand quick auto ranging (something like 200ms though all ranges) and this Owon is also quite atrocious for that. I once had to work with a benchtop Fluke meter at work and I hated the thing. It may have been reliable and accurate, but the 4 or more seconds wait for each measurement gets really boring when you work all day with the thing. That waiting can accumulate into a 1/4 of an hour over a single workday. It’s so nice if you can put a probe on your test object, then look at your DMM and the reading is already stable.
“Good” benchtop meters can take >1000 samples per second these days. nice for logging relative to other events and trend plotting. My Brymen is not that quick, but at least it has a quite usable bargraph for tracking changing signals. Something else this Owon can not do properly.
But still, it is a quite hackable meter. The DMM chip with optocouplers is on a separate PCB and can be repurposed for “other tasks”. And I also like the big color display.
In the end, I bought a Brymen BM869s. It is a (big) handheld meter, and about the best you can buy under EUR200. And because it’s my best / most expensive meter, I also use it as the reference for my other meters. I have a lot more confidence in the Brymen than in the Owon presented here (Although the used chipset is not bad). There is a project on EEVblog that uses a PIC uC to make the serial output of this Brymen meter (sort of) compatible with SCPI.
A. <$ 350 HP 34401A is the best ‘bang for the buck ‘. Arduino Uno based GPIB to USB $10 with box and connectors running AR-488. THAT’S a proper bench meter. It’s your basic touchstone. Old units with very long run times and regular recal are super stable. You just need a good voltage reference to measure to correct hobby level error. My best 34401A Is the one with lots of hours. The pretty,shelf queen NIB looking one is the least stable checked against an LT1000.
Generally speaking the LM 399 references in those meters are super stable after long aging. For <$125 a 3478A is a great choice for a very high grade meter. Same reference, less ADC range. 5 or 6 digits?
The displays are a bit plain and the 3478A needs an LED backlight. But, look at the price value! Those are “Don’t pay more!” prices. A bit of patience will provide that class of meter at 20-30% less less than stated based on cosmetics and luck.
Those are “bench meters” against which you compare your other meters. That’s the concept. It’s your primary reference. Usually 3 1/2 digits are enough. Sometimes not. But you sometimes need a lot of dynamic range.
Do you need a bench meter?
Well, it’s complicated.
I have too many bench meters, and too many handhelds. The oldest I have are Fluke 8000A bench and 8030A handheld (ish…) and both, at 3-1/2 digits, are well within spec., but can’t compete with anything 1990 or later.
My HP/Agilent/Keysight 34401A and 34410A are the go to units for many things, including logging and picking small changes from larger baselines. The fluke 45’s are benchtop workhorses, though not stellar even by the standard of the day, but match or beat this OWAN in some respects, for about $40US. I won’t get into the 3478, other Flukes and so on. All are workhorses and serve a purpose.
Handheld is a different breed. Less concern for absolute accuracy (Why there are 5.5 and better handhelds,I have no clue. for most all use cases, the extra digits over a 4.5 or 3.5 are nothing but noise) but more for versatility. My go-to is an older AC/DC 3.5 digit volt/ammeter (clamp-on) from the late 1990’s (craftsman branded) that still gets a cal every year. One of the few things I don’t do in house, since it is used for code-compliant welding work in the field (confirmation of weld current, and its mate from Fluke for voltage) and needs tracability with proper uncertainty spec. 3.5 digits well exceeds the requirements here.
I laugh when my friends in auto repair brag about their 5.5 digit Snap-on’s they spent way to much money for that have never seen a cal check. They laugh at my Adafruit 3.5 digit student grade meter, but it checks smack on with my in-cal 6.5 digit Agilent, while their’s don’t.
“Do you need a bench meter?” is the wrong question. The right question is, “what instrument will give you the measurements you need?”
I got my BK Precision 40,000 count handheld for readings that didn’t go to crap below about 2mV and 1mA. The Keithley bench meter was the least expensive thing that would measure low microvolts and nanoamps at the quality necessary for a job.
I also have a pile of $8 analog needle meters that I use to monitor less-critical values when testing circuits.. does the supply rail dip when the load changes? Do I see fluctuations here when something is happening over there? Is the relationship between the input and output more or less what I expect? A circuit under test might have five or six meters connected so I can see the whole signal path once. In that context, resolution is far less important than the relationships between patterns.
Anyone serious about electronics should get a meter in the $50 range for its convenience and good quality readings. After that, nobody should spend more than $50 on a meter without knowing exactly what feature they’re paying for, and why they need it.
For me a bench meter has the advantage that you don’t have to worry about inaccurate measurements due to a dying battery, or because the usb-rechargeable Crona can’t provide the advertised 9V.
I have a bench meter, but what I want does not seem to exist in a cost-effective way.
I have plenty of shelf space but very little bench space, and what I want is a row of nice and compact usb or network connected instruments that I can import into python or display on a monitor. I love the formfactor of this.
https://hantek.com/uploadpic/other/images/c0f0604a-69d8-4b36-bef7-f50a69da02fc.jpg
But anything affordable is terrible accuracy and reliability, and decent quality usb instruments are obscenely expensive compared to used bench equipment, so to bench equipment I look, then quickly find out that I will have no space for it, and then back to my handheld meters I go.
At least magnets make them easy to put up on the shelf and out of the way, but my god do I ever hate batteries for equipment that never needs to move.
I noticed bench meters tend to stay on the bench rather than wandering off overnight, usually to reappear around lunch time the following day. Score one for rackmount kits.