I bought this Escitec VA520 at the 2015 Dayton Hamfest. I have lost the business card of the gentleman who sold it to me; if I still had it, I'd send him a thank you note. I can sit down to the bench and measure inductance with reasonable accuracy - something that is vital to understanding circuits. One can often figure out a capacitance or a resistance, but to have a meter that gives me a quick, reasonably accurate L, and a Q at 1 - 100 kHz - well, that has added to my understanding of circuits by leaps and bounds. I've never tried the USB connection yet, but when I sit down to characterize a batch of crystals for filtering I'll give it a whirl and report back here.
It's fairly simple to build one's own inductance meter, and I did so. It's neat to build the circuit, test it against an industrial instrument, and realize one is within 2% of spec. And lately I'm learning to program Nokia 5110s with MSP430 processors from Texas Instruments. So I'll end up with a home brew L-meter with digital readout to sit next to this handsome VA250.
But here's the main point: if I had had a meter in my early days, I would have spent a LOT less time trying to figure out what I had in the scrap bin, and a LOT more time building things with what I had.
The most fun thing (next to measuring my way through an old cigar box full of RF chokes and Philco inductors from old radios) has been to wind a transformer on a core and then watch the measurement change as I adjust the wires. It's fairly simple to rig up a known cap on a breadboard, attach the result, measure the resulting resonant frequency, and confirm the meter readings. It's certainly good enough for the kind of hobby work I do. Once I get that close, I can fine tune a toroidal inductor or transformer by moving the wires around. But it's a real time-saver to measure before I solder, know I'm close, and fine tune later once everything else is in place.
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