Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrewausfa
I'd be interested to know if people with a Selectest and an AVO prefer one over the other and if the Selectest has any quirks.
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The Selectest 50 has encouragingly big and business-like terminal posts, but the 4mm hole in the top is actually quite shallow and leaves quite a bit of typical 4mm plugs exposed. Conversely, the AVO 8's 4mm terminal posts (those that have them) are quite compact and low-profiles but the 4mm drilling is somewhat deeper. I think the latching "reverse polarity" on the AVO 8 V and later is preferable to the non-latching one on the Selectest 50 and earlier Bakelite AVO 8s, it's more convenient when transferring attention from one polarity wrt to a point to the other, but others may differ. I think that the modern advice generally is to avoid handling a meter if possible when measuring high voltage in particular, which seems wise.
The GEC meter does seem to be more production orientated, both "traditional" and "modern" versions of the AVO meter look to be trickier and more labour intensive to make. I actually quite like the AVO 8 V, but inside it looks to be a missed opportunity, something of a bitsa with PCBs and flexible ribbon connections mixed with point-to-point componentry looking unrefined and pre-production in nature. The sort of thing that would have made a contemporary Japanese production engineer think "nothing to fear here".... Both Japan and the US were producing multimeters of 50k and even 100k/V at the time.