Is This Multimeter ACTUALLY Worth $100?

I don't know how to say this, is it near C or near C? Either way, hang around, I'm going to show you guys everything that I tested on this two channel scope, signal generator, and DVOM. Let's take a look. It comes in a really cool case, so let's see what's inside. We got our owner's manual, which, we're automotive tech so we don't need that. We got what looks to be a BNC to alligator clip, so this will probably be for the scope side or for the signal generator. We got our test leads for the actual meter, and then we got our test probes that are adjustable right here. You might want to hang on to these in case you guys are going to be doing some bench work or some really fast cam stuff. For now, we're going to use our test leads, so this way we can test the voltmeter itself and the ohmmeter and ammeter. This is the meter. It looks pretty cool, so let's go ahead and put it through the paces and let's see what's up. All right, so let's power this bad boy up. All right, so when it pops up, we got a oscilloscope here, so let's see, because obviously we don't look at, we don't read manuals here. All right, so we're going to go to multimeter. Sweet. All right, we're in. Now, so it looks like the meter has been set to automatic. I want to do voltage, so let's see if there's anything. Let's try this one. Cool. All right, so we're in voltage. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my bench power supply, so then we can supply voltage, and let's see what our actual meter's reading compared to what voltage is coming out of my power supply. Let's take a look. So I have my power supply set to five volts, and my meter is showing 5.029 volts with a half a percent accuracy, plus or minus three digits, is what the data spec says. This voltmeter falls right into that half a percent accuracy. So, if you're reading a five-volt reference, if it's five volts that's truly coming out of the module, you're going to be seeing roughly about 5.029 volts. Now, let's go ahead and bump it up to 12.6, like a standard battery, and let's see how it responds in that voltage range. Now, I set up my voltage power supply to 12.61 volts, and my meter is showing 12.613 or four, and again, being that it's a half a percent accuracy, plus or minus three digits, we are right within range at the 12-volt mark. So, using this by testing a battery, testing an alternator, this would be a really good meter, and even on the five-volt side, we're still accurate within the five percent accuracy that the manufacturer has under documentation. With any meter you guys are using, make sure you guys read the documentation, even though we always throw it away, because that's how you're going to be able to determine what the actual accuracy reading is of that particular meter. The next thing I want to test is test the resistance using a 330-ohm resistor, then after that, we're going to test some current. To switch the resistance, we're going to toggle to our ohms, and now let's take our measurement. So, right here I have a 330-ohm resistor with one percent accuracy connected across the meter, and my meter right now is showing 329 ohms, so we're spot on when it comes to that one percent accuracy. So, again, if this was a meter that you're using in the shop, I would say based off of the value of my resistor and the value I'm getting on the meter, and the accuracy of the resistor, this meter is actually pretty accurate. Alright, so I went ahead and set up a light bulb here to test current. Now let's go ahead and put our meter into amperage, and my power supply is applying 12.61 volts at 2.057 amps, and if I look at my ammeter, or the meter here in amperage, I'm getting 2.067 when it comes to the amperage reading. The manufacturer says we have a 1.2 percent accuracy when it comes to current draw on this particular meter. Being that the manufacturer gives us 1.2 percent accuracy, that gives us a range of 2.041 to 2.091 of amperage, and the reading is 2.063 or 0.064 amps. This means we're right within the actual spec, and this meter is reading very well when it comes to amperage. Now let's go ahead and take this meter out into the shop, and let's use the oscilloscope portion, and let's see how well it could do with some of the basic tests that we do in the shop. Let's take a look. So the first test we're going to go is into the oscilloscope, and we're going to do a battery starting and charging test. So let's see, it says we're at 10 volts, so I would assume that would be 10 volts per division. Let's see. Oh, cool. That'd be 5, so that'd be 50, that'd be 20 volts for the whole screen, and then we're at 100 milliseconds there. So how will we change that? Let's see here. Oh, cool. So there we go, and we'll set it to about 2 seconds per division, and then we'll go ahead and crank it and see how our waveform looks. So the first test I'm doing is a battery starting and charging test. Notice how here's my source voltage. When I begin to crank, there's my inrush voltage. You guys can see my relative compression humps there. Then you guys can see the alternator getting excited, turning on, and then beginning to charge. So now let's try to figure out how we can use the cursors to measure this. Let's hit the menu button, see what that does. Oh, perfect. So we'll go to cursors, and then X1 and X2. I think that's going to be a time measurement. Then we'll hit menu. There we are. Okay, so we're able to set our cursors here. That's not it. Let's see. Waveform, let's hit select. There we go. So it looks like from the time I began to start to the time it actually took for the alternator to kick on was 1 second. So right there, those are our time measurements. So let's hit menu once again, and let's go to our voltage measurements. Let's see if we can see both of them at the same time. Oh, awesome, we can. Okay, so now we can go to our starting voltage, which was right there at 12.4 volts. And then let's see, how do we change it to the point where it actually began to crank was at 8.8 volts. There it is. So you guys can see that this scope is actually giving us the information like our regular big boy scopes, like the 4425, and it's more just the keystrokes instead of actually like your zoom windows and all that fun stuff. Now, the next thing we would want to do is what's our voltage once the alternator kicks on. So once the alternator kicks on, you guys can see that we have 1344. So that shows that the alternator is working. And all of this was done with the actual NearSee. So let's go ahead and do the next one, which I am going to do a paddle probe on the coil and see how our ignition sequence looks. So let's take a look. Now, another test we normally use a scope for would be a paddle probe. So this way we can check secondary ignition. Let's give it a whirl. Are you kidding me? So that's a no go. The BNC won't fit. So we can't use it for secondary. Let me see if my Pico one will fit and let's see if we can get a secondary waveform with that one. Let's take a look. Let's give it another shot. Here's with the Pico. Sweet. That works. All right. So let's set the meter up and let's get a voltage reading. We'll hit channel two. Get my big face out of the screen. Do it again. We'll turn that one off so that we're going to have one channel. Go back to channel one. I'll set this to DC. All right. And let's give it a whirl. All right. So the scope set up. Let's see if we can get a secondary off of our ignition closer. So here we got a secondary. You guys could see the KB isn't really showing very well or comes and goes. Try another cylinder. You can see a good burn and then our spark KB but we can't really see our KB as a whole there. So let's move on to the next one. Again, we still got spark KB and we also have our burn time that we can measure but we can't see our actual KB. Another cylinder and I'm going to try to pause it so that way we can measure it real quick and then we can see how it's responded. See, we went ahead and took some measurements here on the secondary where the scope's not doing a really good job of getting the KB because we're using the Pico, the tool for paddle probe. The attenuation is for every one millivolt is one kilovolt of KB. So right here, as you guys could see from the bottom of our mass to where the spark starts, our spark KB, we're looking at a delta of about 11 millivolts. So if we were to follow the attenuation, that would be telling us that we're somewhere about 11,000 volts before it starts burning. It's quite high but again, we're not 100% sure because we can't see most of that KB. The other thing, we're actually doing a measurement of the burn time and our burn time here is 1.5 milliseconds. So we have a good burn. So we're able to measure the burn time which is actually the most important thing when it comes to secondary ignition analysis other than the actual KB. So for that, it's not too shabby. If you really want a really good accurate reading and something that you can zoom into and see a little more of what's happening within the waveform, obviously you want a scope that has a better buffer that can store more capability and give you better resolution. As of right now, from what we could see, it's actually doing okay for the type of scope and most importantly for the price for the actual scope. So we're going to do one more test here that's pretty common in the industry and then we'll go from there. The next test I set up was a cam crank correlation. Blue or channel 2 is going to be my crank sensor and yellow or channel 1 is going to be my cam. So right now, I have it at 10 milliseconds per division. If I go lower, you could see that the refresh rate on the scope is pretty awesome. The problem is, is being that this is a handheld unit, if I go into a larger time base, which most of us would probably use, notice how the scope loses a lot of its clarity and also begins to show rather glitchy when it looks like the waveform. So now let's go how most of us would actually do this, somewhere around one second. So that's one second per division. Notice how the waveform looks really wonky. This could be due to the refresh rate or the actual buffer that's not large enough to store that much information. So that's why we lose clarity on the actual waveform. And if we go back down to 500, again, notice how the waveform looks rather wonky. So again, there's not enough buffer space for that information. There's 200, there's 100, there's 50 milliseconds. See how it loses? It gets distorted, then it starts getting back to normal there. So it takes it a little while for it to recover from the time change. And then here, I'm at 20 milliseconds, which most of us would probably use on the standard scope. That's 10 milliseconds, and that's where we're able to see it. So this wouldn't really be good, in my opinion, for depth. If you're going to do a long capture, it wouldn't work very well. But it does give you a quick verification as to, do you really need to pull out a big scope? Do you have a cam crank signal on this particular vehicle? So I hope this one helps. Let's go ahead and set up another test, and let's see what's up. Doing is a CAN bus, CAN high, CAN low. And then notice I also, it has math channel capabilities. So if we go hit menu, and I scroll down, you can see we have math channel. What I did is I did channel A plus B, or channel 1 plus 2. What that's going to do is if for some reason we have a shorted to ground CAN bus, which I'm going to simulate right now. So the purple is actually changing. And by using the math channel, we're going to be able to see that. And this is actually a pretty good function that this tool has, that it has the ability to do the math channel. Now obviously it doesn't have decoding like your Picos and your ATSs. But you're able to get a good idea if that CAN bus is actually working. So it's a pretty handy tool for quick and easy. And for the size of it, you can't go wrong. Well guys, that's it for the 2C53T. In my opinion, this is a really good tool. If you're just beginning, and you're trying to get into scopes, and you're in the market for a voltmeter and a scope, this would probably be a good fit for you. Now if you're an advanced scope user, kind of like I am, then you can't expect this small profile to be just like your 4425 or your ATS scopes. It's just not possible. Now there were some hiccups that I saw while I was testing it. And hopefully if NearSea is actually watching this, maybe you guys can make some adjustments to it. I would say maybe give us the ability to zoom. Maybe a larger buffer where we don't lose the accuracy of the waveform. And the refresh rate if we can kind of bring that up just a bit. Even if it means increasing the price. Now, if you're wanting to get into scopes and you don't want to break the bank, this would probably be a good bank for your buck. I believe there's about $140. It is a really good tool. I mean it was able to do most of the things that we do in the shop, such as CAN bus. You guys saw the ignition. We did a battery test. So it stood up pretty well. The accuracy with the voltmeter compared to what documentation says is spot on. So it's not bad in my opinion. So I hope you guys really enjoyed this video. Make sure that if you guys want to see some more, let me know in the comments what kind of videos you want to see. And also let me know your opinion on what you thought about this particular scope and meter, especially if you already have one. If you don't, let me know in the comments what scope you're using and what got you into scoping. Now, also make sure that you guys share this video. Let other people know about what we're doing here at Master Automotive Training, including testing some of the new tools and gadgets. And then also make sure you guys turn on the notification bell. Make sure you guys subscribe. So this way you guys hear every time we drop a new video. So I really appreciate you guys hanging around with me today. Hope you guys enjoyed this video and I'll see you guys on the next one.