3 ms·
Multimeters here in the UK are almost always yellow (or red less often). They've been mostly yellow as long as I can remember and I've never heard of Fluke.
by Malarkey73 13y ago
Multimeters here in the UK are almost always yellow (or red less often). They've been mostly yellow as long as I can remember and I've never heard of Fluke.
- gjm11 13y agoA bit of googling turns up this forum thread with lots of pictures of old (and not so old) multimeters. A few typical pages: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/540/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/540/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/465/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/465/ Lots and lots of not-yellow multimeters, and the dark-with-yellow-surround ones do generally seems to be Flukes. But not quite all. There are some exceptions here: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/315/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/315/ but I think they may all be recent enough to postdate Fluke's trademark (which I think was granted in 2003).
- rtkwe 13y agoIt's the dark grey/black face + the yellow shell/border that's the problem here. It's really similar to Fluke's usual design.
- phaemon 13y agoI just searched on amazon.co.uk for multimeter and 7 out of 14 of the results have dark face + yellow shell/border. None of them are Fluke. Maybe they did invent that scheme and everyone copied them, but if so, they're not enforcing it in the UK.
- rtkwe 13y ago@phaemon (HN please increase your comment thread depth) a) That's in the UK where Fluke doesn't have the same protections. b) Those are newer, cheap, meters aping the design of Flukes, for that search to mean anything it should look back before Fluke's popularity or at least before they started using the current trademarked design. c) Past just the first page the split gets much more even.
- phaemon 13y agoYou just need to wait a bit before replying. The link takes some time to appear. Your claim that they're "aping the design of Flukes" is unsupported. I haven't seen any evidence that Fluke invented that design or colour scheme, rather than it becoming a fairly common format for multimeters and then Fluke deciding to copyright the design.
- rtkwe 13y agoAh I'd never seen the link appear later before. A lot of older multimeters look like this: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/540/ http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/show-your-multimeter!/540/ or something similar at least once handheld meters with multiple modes started to become an actual item. That whole thread is a decent cross section of multimeters, though it's skewed towards nice older meters as opposed to lower grade meters.