Finally ditched the DMM for a oscilloscope on intermittent faults

I used to swear by my Fluke 87 for everything, chasing those ghost shorts by voltage dropping every pin. Then last March on a CRJ-200 in Denver, I spent 8 hours on a flap position sensor that would fail only under load. Multimeter showed nothing, continuity was fine, I was ready to call it a bad connector again. My lead tossed me his Rigol scope and said 'stop guessing, watch the waveform.' Twenty minutes later I saw the noise spike on the reference voltage every time the actuator kicked in. Now I always break out the scope for anything that smells like a moving component, not just static checks. It's slower to set up but it ends the back-and-forth swapping parts. Has anyone else made the switch and felt dumb about the time they wasted before?

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1 Comment

butler.finley11d ago

Stop guessing, watch the waveform" is backwards. You still guess, just faster.