Scott274
Broken In
Hey guys, lately I have been looking into some basics of electronics and I have set my eyes on repairing an old PC PSU (SMPS) and a motherboard I had lying around. But before that I will have to buy a multimeter and I'm not sure which one I should go for.
Looking at the multimeter available online, my budget is about Rs 1000 (definitely not above), most have the usual voltmeter, ohmmeter, ammeter, continuity, diode and a few have capacitance.
My question here is how useful is a capacitance meter when it comes to electronics diagnostics, is it really needed that much. We can use the ohmmeter to tell if a cap is shorted besides visual inspection..
Another query is, the few budget multimeters that do include capacitance have a limited range (20nF to 200uF), is this range too small to be of much applicable use! (for eg, looking at my old PSU board I see, two big 330uF,200V caps and the smallest is about 1000uF,5V cap) both of which seem out of the multimeter range. So is it worth it or is this included capacitance in such multimeters just a selling gimmick of not much real use!?
Looking at the multimeter available online, my budget is about Rs 1000 (definitely not above), most have the usual voltmeter, ohmmeter, ammeter, continuity, diode and a few have capacitance.
My question here is how useful is a capacitance meter when it comes to electronics diagnostics, is it really needed that much. We can use the ohmmeter to tell if a cap is shorted besides visual inspection..
Another query is, the few budget multimeters that do include capacitance have a limited range (20nF to 200uF), is this range too small to be of much applicable use! (for eg, looking at my old PSU board I see, two big 330uF,200V caps and the smallest is about 1000uF,5V cap) both of which seem out of the multimeter range. So is it worth it or is this included capacitance in such multimeters just a selling gimmick of not much real use!?