Digtil vs Anlog meters

[sallearmourer]

Which do you all think is better and why?

I know which I like is the anlog when it comes to check lames and bodycords. The anlog meter is faster and more sentives to changes

Tim

[DHCJr]

The ones, who favor Digital, usually state it is more accurate. They can get it down to a hundredth of an Ohm at the range that fencing uses, but so what. If you can get it to even 80% accuracy, that would be good enough, we are looking for within a range, not an exact. Also a key point is intermittencies, a digital does not stay steady when you are talking about hundredth of an Ohm, so telling when you have an intermittent wire in a body cord with a difficult takes too much work. It does take as much work when you use an analog. I always say, when there is an easy way and a hard way to do something, why do it the hard way.

[neevel]

The key for me when advising someone is: how much are you willing to spend?. A good, fast digital meter is my personal preference, but ones that have a fast enough sampling rate are also going to cost $100-200 at a minimum. The plus side is that these will do better at picking up reaIly quick breaks (including incipient problems that aren't yet bad enough to affect a scoring machine), since they aren't limited by the mechanical response time of the galvanometer. As Don notes, the fast, high precision ones will also tend to pick up small fluctuations in resistance (as connectors shift around a bit, etc.). I myself have never had a problem discerning the difference between such small fluctuations and meaningful breaks (but then again, I've got a background in experimental physics and EE, with a fair amount of experience using DMMs). If you're doing enough electronics work (armoring and otherwise) to make spending that sort of money worthwile, then that's how I would lean. With less pricey digital meters, the sampling rate is much lower, such that the response time of an analog galvanometer will be better. Certainly, if you're looking to keep it to $30 or so, a basic analog meter is a better choice than a cheap digital one.

One application where an analog meter will often serve better than even a fast, high-end digital is in lame testing. When you move the weight over the lame, it will tend to very briefly 'skip' over wrinkles in the fabric-- a fast digital meter will pick up these skips, and you may have to go over an area again to verify that it was just that instead of an actual dead spot. The slower response time of an analog meter will filter out those skips, while still being perfectly able to catch any dead spots.

-Dave