Non-destructive testing of the Keysight U1282A.
Great testing, Joe! I only wish you had put in the chamber the meter with the same Hycon chipset to see if we could further isolate the root cause of the issue down to the processor/chipset itself (my best bet, since the meter became "frozen") or another component (XTAL, voltage regulator, etc.). From where we see, there is a chance that Brymen's chipset might be better fabricated than Hycon, but we can only speculate.
Thanks.
While I do provide several opportunities for viewer's to offer their suggestions BEFORE conducting these tests, "hindsight is 20-20", "Coulda Shoulda Woulda", "it is what it is" all come to mind. Now if you are planning to repeat the test, one viewer had asked about injecting a signal at a fixed frequency to see if the meter's clock is showing down. This seems like it would have some merit and something for you to consider. I am sure a few of us would enjoy watching it but for me, I've seen what I wanted to see.
Another aspect: when you rotated the switch after the low temp tests, was the meter already back at a specified temperature of at least -20ºC?
From the video, the meter was stored at -40C for well over an hour and then thermal shocked when I rotated the switch to ohms. From the video we can see the internal temp was reporting -24 when I tried it again, then 0.
The reason is that the material might have become brittle at such low temperature and rotating it might degrade it (microfissures?) which would add another variable to the rotary switch tests.
If Keysight's choice of materials have a problem with these few rotations, that's really poor. From my early days we designed to -40 operating temps and we used plastics in many of these designs. Many of these parts were not stationary. Now, don't get me wrong. Seeing that glass filled spring fail prematurely as it did doesn't give me any confidence in their mechanical designers abilities. Still, I also have no plans to start treating this meter with kid gloves. If the plastics fail because of the temperatures, vapors from the gasoline seeping into the plastics, from the UV off the sun, or the shock of being dropped so be it.
Obviously one shouldn't expect my home hobby testing is going to be conducted like a professional PV test where we may run 50 samples under a very controlled environment. Of course, the costs in setting up such a lab and the time invested in conducting such tests would far exceed what I would be willing to donate. I suspect this is why we don't see many reviews doing much more than collecting free meters to unbox and give their 5 star professional rating. Doing even the small bit I show takes a lot of time, effort and resources.