Aye lads, I know some people here have this clamp but it hasn't been any talk existing here about this clamp meter
So i bought this clamp meter a month ago and i'm fairly happy with it except for 1 small thing ... I realized i bought the WRONG one right after ordering!
I wanted the True RMS version which is the UT204 and didn't realize the 'A' stood for having the temperature scale above the UT203 which was a bummer for me
First up i want to talk about some oddities you usually won't find in a clamp meter : RELATIVE and not ZERO ... but fair enough the UT204/A is cheap enough as a clamp that i wouldn't worry about that.
But well it's got HOLD (Which is pretty useless) Relative and a fairly good side rotary knob (Kinda like the ones you find on a 11X fluke meter)
I don't have any accuracy references as many factors go into account like where i position the wire and the REL offset ( which is important in electronics, 2.01A offset is a bit misleading) as well as much copper is actually inside (1+ohms for a 1meter wire sounds suspicious doesn't it?)
Inrush? Supposedly you won't find such luxuries here, it's like a NoFrills (yeah ... supermarkets here use this branding for the cheap stuff ...) Clamp Meter with everything you need, DC and AC amps.
The very good portion of this clamp meter is that it can do DC and the NOT so good thing is that it only has 10mA resolution ... not too good but i guess you can't get cheap and decent with 1mA resolution to boot because that requires a tighter area in the hall sensor to work properly with better accuracy but this meter is much more useful than a GTC CM100 1mA resolution clamp meter
Want Inrush want TrueRMS and ZERO-ing? Get the UT207 (No temperature) or the 208 which IMO looks nice to me, if you want capacitance the UT209 solves that
That aside i shall talk about quality
It feels pretty good though, just slightly below the quality of a UT61E's body which is oddly tough for a 50$ meter
How much tension is in the clamp? Quite a lot, to prevent accidental unclamp and that's a good thing to me and the pressure certainly isn't uneven
Probes? I think they aren't bad at all, it's not AWG18 but really it's just for voltage, fairly flexible too
The leads are made of PVC and trust me, it's good PVC and certainly the probes themselves quite sharp too, CAT I 1000V rated is abit of a downer but really it's not faked ratings
Carrying Bag? Ah. That's not bad too.
Oddly these are all physical details (Yeah, the seller decided to give me a catalogue too)
The meter's functionality itself
Resistance autoranging is fairly quick although not as quick as the UT61E and i'm not surprised, i have seen much much, much worse (VC99! Slow as a wet wick!)
Continuity is quite fast but it's not latched so ... i'll fit UT-L07s or a TL-175 on this meter and see how it goes
But there's a few issues i have with the positioning of the ranges
This is a clamp meter isn't it? WHY THEN UNI-T DID YOU PUT THE DAMN CURRENT RANGES ON THE END! But yeah even fluke does that ...
Apart from that i like that this clamp meter has capacitance
/ What's the chance of using a clamp meter to measure capacitance?
Handy i know but it's a feature that's never used on a clamp but certainly it's useful if you happen to be Dave recently? Checking current possibly while checking capacitance of a possibly dead aircondioning motor start cap
How about temperature then? That's a nice bonus. Don't need another meter for this but you can use this to check the ambient temperature or something in the vicinity like a coil temperature off a fridge or aircon compressor
DC/AC volts is a good addition too as stated by SeanB. As well as continuity
Nice screen but the font is a tad too small ... Not that i have problems viewing the screen but it can be a problem for people with presbyopia
What else do i like about this meter? Well i was fairly surprised when i found out they used PCB mount battery clips on a low-end clamp meter like this
Want a teardown?
Oh sure you can have