Hi all, long time watcher first time poster. I'm looking for some DMM opinions. Here's the full story:
I'm an undergrad EE student who works on lots of projects all the time. A few months back I started saving up to a $400 goal so that I could get myself a Rigol DS2052E for my birthday in July. Not too long after I started, one of my professors was getting rid of some old equipment in various states of disrepair, and I managed to snag some of it - a Tek power supply that just needed some new fuses, a 1MHz function generator, and -the best part- a Tek 2221A 100MHz/100Ms/s dual channel analog/digital scope.
The scope is as old as I am, to the month judging by the manual's first run date, and it has some quirks like drift in the vertical offset, but in general it's been great to have and it gets the job done. It's missing some things: at 100MS/s, the digital functionality is only 100Mhz in repetitive mode, and being so old it doesn't have built-in FFT or any fancy triggering besides rising/falling/edge/level/so on.
So now that I have this pretty good analog/digital scope, I'm less inclined to drop $400 on another that, in many ways, won't be as good. I'll get an FFT and USB connectivity, but I can survive without them, and if I desperately need a better scope for some project, I do have plenty of access through work and school to the right equipment.
My DMM on the other hand is not terribly satisfying, and being that I use that more than any other tool on my bench, I'm thinking I'll skip the DSO and spend the money on a handheld meter. The question is, which one?
I basically want a DMM in the $200-$400 price range that will make me happy and proud to own for a long time. I'm basing most comparisons on the Fluke 87-V, which is what I'm leaning towards for $310 on amazon. I'm also looking at the agilent U1271A ($340, a little higher in the range I'd like to spend), and the agilent 1242B. My thinking now is that the 1242B is, in lots of ways, sufficient for my needs, and where the other two jockey on some specs, it's basically the floor of either of the others. I do lots of rocket work, so one thing that's important is a good temp range (full k-type, -200-1300C), and j-type would be nice, but only the $370 1272A has that, and I'm not sure I want to spend that much. Both the fluke and the lower-end agilent come up short in this area, while the 1271 has a great temp range. So I'm basically stuck between the Fluke: moderate price, everyone loves it, lifetime warranty, great specs, the $340 Agilent: better temp range, mostly the same specs as the fluke, slightly more expensive, 3yr warranty, and the $210 agilent: alright specs (still blows my current Craftsman meter out of the water), AWESOME price.
The other thing I want to make sure of is that I'm not failing to consider any other good meters in this range. If I'm going to be spending $250-$350, are there any lower-end meters that pack in the features I'm looking for? Or do they all basically fall under the won't-last-you-20-years-like-the-fluke-will?
Thanks for the opinions!