Atlas Semiconductor Tester DCA75

[derick007]

I am considering purchasing one of these (£116). Comments/advice/suggestions would be welcome.

 

[tunedwolf]

Do you have something specific that you will be testing regularly and that is awkward to do by other means? If not then my advice is to either spend the money on the Atlas ESR meter instead and use a good multimeter and your nose for testing your general semiconductors. Or, spend the money on a half decent branded, second hand but good condition, current limiting bench power supply. Either option would be better "bang for buck" so to speak

 

[dr pepper]

You can get pcb's off ebay from china that do the same thing for 1/5th the price if you can manage to bash a box for one.
I have one its very usefull, and it does caps and resistors as well.

 

[HiTech]

The Peak Atlas testers are very good for the money-- I have used them without major issue. They offer a package I believe of 2 or 3 testers that range from testing ESR/Cap value to solid state components and a LCR tester. My only gripe about them is they are small, the leads are short, so they flop around when trying to connect to components.... often the tester itself ends up inside the unit under test, the leads are that short. I don't own any Atlas testers for that reason but I can't say anything bad about them overall. Be very cautious on those Chinese produced knock-offs on eBay-- lots of sub-quality stuff with little to no protection and reliability issues. Uni-T is one Chinese company that's producing nice testers. I own one and it's the size of a handheld DVM, solidly built, good performing, reliable, and can interface to a PC for batch testing and documenting the results.