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Shhhh it's a secret ;) Signed TEA.

I've been using eBay for decades and never knew that! Thanks for the tip.

They're gonna be going for $800 before long!

I just bought a good fluke 5 1/2 off eBay a few days ago.. Missed the price explosion by a few days... Wow, that was close. - Eddy

HP 3455a ~$200

No shit, after Dave's $50 oscilloscope video I managed to get a scope for under $50 eventually. It's this horrible thing www.amazon.com/Quimat-Oscilloscope-BNC-clip-Assembled-finished/dp/B07D2BPL2V

We should convince everyone to not buy any until they're $200 or lower... That way they'll lower the prices!

I deny any financial gain. Sent from my iPhone in the Bahama's

I love your sense of humor Dave!

Shipping’s where all of Oz gets screwed.

You're welcome

Aye, Herb. He's like Magneto, only his superpower is to manipulate the price of test gear at great distances and vacuum money from unsuspecting nerd-wallets.

@@EEVblog I guess it's now time to start selling my horde of good used test equipment before the prices crash!

Is good for guys that want to sell ah ah ah

Yeah. So funny to see this video 3 years later and half the meters he shows in this video are now double the price (or more). You'd think that obsolete previous-generation test equipment would depreciate over time, not appreciate. I think a lot of people have picked up the hobby of collecting test equipment without actually doing any electronics.

Seems like most specialty stuff on Ebay isn't that great anymore. I was trying to buy some networking gear recently and after shipping is factored in, a used part was only like $20 cheaper than the damn thing is brand new (~$350). And they were selling for that much, I got outbid on 3 separate ones. Ancient test gear like multimeters from brands like HP or Keithley with dubious provenance routinely go for prices in excess of what you could get a modern Siglent or Rigol. I'd honestly trust a brand new Siglent DMM more than I would trust an HP from the 80's sold as untested/for parts.

Yup, I bought a 6 1/2 digit HP & Keithley for about $350 for the two, good luck finding any for that price.

@@ckm-mkc I know have been looking for a keithley 2000 and an hp/agilent E3631A, I could have gotten them for half the price that they are now about 2-3 years ago, drat

I would also say, there are a lot more repair learners wanting to get their hands on things these days...I like that. I don't like that it drives the market up, but I do like that people are learning and trying :)

btw. you can swap the front and back-terminals.

WHAT??? Me thinking something had changed, I go and check out Alltest again. I don't know where you're getting that from. Every single 34401A unit they have for sale is $700, *sold AS-IS and untested.*

Maybe for stuff no one actually wants. Anything useful gets bid up fast. There are no deals to be found on GovPlanet unless you need a $15k Fire Dept ladder truck.

Out of curiosity, how useful are the older logic anylyzers in terms of applicability to more modern digital circuit troubleshooting and protocol decoding? I’ve been on the fence for years unable to decide if that is one of those items for a hobbyist to best buy used, even if several decades old, or whether the money would be better spent on a much newer logic analyzer.

If you need them you will know the answer ;) If you make, service (test) or sell devices you need to be up in resolution and accuracy by a factor of 10 preferably on what you are testing. So a Calibrated or at least 'accurate' better resolution meter on the bench makes sense.

I have any example video, testing a simple 9v battery

It really makes one wonder what the life story of some of that smashed equipment is - so much smashed equipment from one small country just seems very odd! Perhaps the Israelis use test equipment for military test targets?! It just boggles the mind. Although what usually gets me when looking at Israel sourced eBay items (from the U.S.) are the often absurdly exorbitant shipping fees on much of the equipment - like a normally $1,200 used instrument in good condition might have a selling price of $200, seeming like a great deal, but will have a $10,000+ shipping charge! By comparison, other European sellers may only charge several hundred, or less, in shipping for the same item (depending upon actual weight).

@@ethanpoole3443 ... maybe they need a full military escort the ship the item out of their borders. :) :) :)

Yeah, I'd estimate 90% of ebay equipment that's reasonably priced (read, overpriced just a bit) has known problems and the sellers are unashamed liars.

dave you are caught!

A few months ago Dave commented on a silly RU-vid competition thingy with 2 channels out vying each other for new subs... Likely its from his research. Totally legit. - Eddy

He's browsing US products while in Australia because most of his viewers are in the US. Shipping would be 1/10th of the cost for them.

in general, you can't trust single meter. Buy two. Not only they come handy but you can check them against each other - if they agree in measurements, you have a pair of good meters, which is always a plus. If they disagree, well, you know one of them is bad - at that point you can't trust either, so you buy third - to hopefully have 2 good and 1 bad.

Emona in AU charge AUD187 to do a 5.5DMM calibration, so I guess for 6.5 maybe less than AUD300.

If you have reference standards, you can check them against those.

I am waiting on a price (due today) on getting my 34401A and 34461A calibrated by Keysight in Oz. They offer two levels of Calibration ISO and a NATA (NIST) traceable version. I will drop some details in the EEVblog thread when I get them later.

Calibration adds significant value. Another business Dave didn't talk about as much is people who buy "for parts" test equipment and then test/repair it and send it out for a calibration. You can easily double or even triple the value of some items selling it as tested and traceable calibrated versus unknown.

They are great for measuring high impedance low voltage DC sources without loading them down (at lower DC voltages their impedance is often spec’d at “greater than 10 Gigaohms”). They do four wire resistance measurement which makes for very accurate readings even down below milliohms, which can help trace the location of shorted components on a circuit board. They tend to have much higher selectable update rates and include configurable averaging, auto-hold and other features that make getting stable readings quickly and seeing fast changing variations much simpler. They can often be interfaced to PCs or other equipment for data capture or to expand their functionality. They are typically very accurate and hold their calibration reliably for decades (consider how accurate a voltage reference is required to get a useful and accurate 6.5 digits!). My 6.5 digit Keithley 2000 bench meter is the ONLY used piece of test gear that I paid a premium on to obtain an NIST traceable calibration certificate for to ensure it was fully functional and well within factory tolerances upon receipt because an accurate bench meter often becomes the centerpiece of calibrating so much other used test gear.

I upgraded from 4.5 when I needed to use multimater for finding pairs of transistors matched enough to be used in exponential converters of analog synthesizers (the musical instruments).

I feel much the same with respect to my Keithley 2000 6.5 digit multimeter. Enjoy your 196!

Right! :-)

He's in Australia. Australia has only got one or two Mondays a month. :D

They are on my channel instead now, eh Dave😉

My only big complaint with GW Instek is their universal refusal to release proper repair and calibration manuals for their products. Sometimes you can get lucky and find where somebody has scanned such and placed it online ... but in most cases you are going to have to reverse engineer the test instrument and design your own calibration procedures because you won’t get any help from the manufacturer if some adjustment is out of spec short of sending the used instrument back to the factory for kings ransom in shipping and service fees that often greatly exceed the original sale price of the instrument. That may be something that some may wish to factor into purchasing decisions since it makes repair and adjustment much more difficult than necessary.

I have heard about this! After I found the manual and read up about the calibration key (er, short) I'm not terribly afraid of having small inaccuracies. It settles down a lot when it gets warm. Almost everything I do doesn't require being super-precise (I build little radios and funky clocks most of the time). It's as precise as I need, really, and if it's out of whack it's consistent when I check against my other meters. It was cheap and I can always upgrade later. Your points are well-taken, though, and I did a lot of reading at the blog before deciding on this thing. If I need more or better precision I can always upgrade later on. I'm just glad to have something I can trigger that has a secondary display and some storage slots to help with matching components. I have the simple needs of a novice. If I grow up one day, maybe I'll get more fancy.

And he's hinting at being "paid" in free gear.

Beauty!

And still tried to down bid. Bravo. Lol

Well, cigars made of dollar bills obviously!

It means that the highest digit doesn't go all the way to 9.

It's not just about accuracy, resolution is incredibly useful. See the video I recommend

@@EEVblog Thanks Dave. I use a 20 dollar Instek gdm-8135, so you can see how I was confused, lol. PS..White Knuckles.....(weird screen name)

Try tracing a down a shorted component on a dense circuit board with many hundreds of components and no available schematic with only a 3.5 or 4.5 digit two-wire multimeter and you will fast appreciate the four-wire resistance mode and sub milliohm resolution of a 6.5 digit bench meter. The ability to quickly and reliably resolve down to the microhms range greatly simplifies determining where on the board you are “hot” versus “cold” and often gets you to within just one or two candidate components. Then there is the benefit of being able to use a 6.5 digit bench meter as the basis for testing and calibrating many other bits of test gear in your collection. And if you are working with lower DC voltages then the “greater than 10 Gigaohms” frintbend impedance offered by many bench meters can be a real lifesaver on high impedance circuits where the usual 10 Megohms impedance of a multimeter would have significantly loaded down the circuit under test, significantly altering your measured voltage. Bench meters also support configurable update rates and averaging parameters that makes getting quick and stable measurements both easier and faster.