Which looks to be no longer available. Is the "Blue" meter equivalent
with "modern" cosmetics?
I'm not sure; it looks pretty similar to what I have, though. One page is
quoting their price as $149 for an assembled and tested model, which seems
excessive. I definitely didn't pay that much for mine.
The Peak Electronics ESR meter that Fred mentioned is cheaper and does more
stuff. They originally had a bit of a design flaw, though, in that you had
to press the Test button each time you wanted to check a capacitor. The
usual service "workflow" for these instruments involves quickly checking
lots of capacitors across one or more PC boards, so this was a real
forehead-slapper.
(That's also why I don't think much of turning the job into a vector network
analysis problem, interpreting X/Y displays or phase difference readings or
anything else. With any good ESR meter, the difference between a bad
capacitor and a good one is usually unmistakably and immediately apparent.
When it's not, you're going to have to take the capacitor out of circuit
anyway.)
I see on Peak's web page ()
that they appear to have corrected this in their current ESR60 and ESR70
models. I've never used their ESR meters but I have their Atlas DCA
semiconductor analyzer, and it's come in handy many times. If I needed a
new ESR meter at this moment, I'd probably buy theirs.
Don't neglect the value of the ESR meter as a generic "low ohms meter," too.
The Bob Parker meter is good at helping locate shorts by allowing you to
observe how the resistance between copper traces changes as you move the
probes around. Hopefully that's true of the revised Peak Atlas models as
well. You can indeed make two-wire resistance readings very close to 0 ohms
with these gadgets.
-- john, KE5FX
