Do I need a DCA55?

CheapSuitG

CheapSuitG

The TubeSchemer
Santa reached out over the weekend asking for my list. One of the things I thought of was to upgrade my FNIRSI LCR-1. I know the DCA55 is more accurate and offers more than the LCR-1 but I kind of like the built in testing slots.

Am I strange?
 
CheapSuitG said:
Santa reached out over the weekend asking for my list. One of the things I thought of was to upgrade my FNIRSI LCR-1. I know the DCA55 is more accurate and offers more than the LCR-1 but I kind of like the built in testing slots.

Am I strange?
Click to expand...
I have both and use both
I use the Huntington audio breakout/zif adapter for my DCA a lot. The LCR is always at arms reach though. Good for quick sanity checks
It would be cool if one of the PCB peddlers around here would make a zif pcb and maybe offer a quality socket to go with it. The socket with the Huntington board is Ali trash. Kinda disappointing for the price he charges
 
For germanium I like ZIFs or leads with grabbers/hooks to reduce handling time.
You don't want to have to force it into something. Too much heat...
The DCA leads are just too short for repeated use and you don't want to break them. I'd rather they build it with banana jacks.
I have some longer leads with male DuPont on one end and hooks on the other.
Put all the transistors face down and spread eagle then work through them without touching.
But, we aren't measuring h
fe
, only hFE, so do t get too caught up in it. Most modern datasheet don't even list the former anymore. They pretty well track together on modern stuff but for audio/amplifier Ge and Early Si, this wasn't always the case.
Use your ears.
 
Personally, I prefer having the leads over a built-in slot. You will run into trouble if you keep hooking/unhooking them to transistors, but that's also not the optimal way to use the DCA55/75. I hook mine up to some of the longer breadboard jumper cables from Tayda, plug whatever I'm testing into a breadboard, and then just plug/unplug the jumper cable. It makes it way easier to measure germanium transistors; if you are measuring a bunch, you can plug them into the breadboard and by the time you've plugged in the last one, the first one is back to room temperature.
 
I have a dca55 and use it quite a bit. But i have a few regular builds that use germs. Thats about all i use it for is just measuring germaniums. You could probably get away with a rg keen strip board build to do the same thing if all your after is hfe and leakage. I dont remember the last time i measured a silicon
 
PedalBuilder said:
Personally, I prefer having the leads over a built-in slot. You will run into trouble if you keep hooking/unhooking them to transistors, but that's also not the optimal way to use the DCA55/75. I hook mine up to some of the longer breadboard jumper cables from Tayda, plug whatever I'm testing into a breadboard, and then just plug/unplug the jumper cable. It makes it way easier to measure germanium transistors; if you are measuring a bunch, you can plug them into the breadboard and by the time you've plugged in the last one, the first one is back to room temperature.
Click to expand...
I just grab the leg with the lead and never touch them.
 
The Fnirsi one has some known bugs that they can't seem to fix with their (comically bad) firmware updates. One being that NPN transistors show the same pinout no matter how you insert them. Capacitors have weirdly rounded up quite a bit too. I wouldn't trust that tester with anything - you're much better off with a TC-1.

I like the DCA55 better for transistors, but for diodes I stick with a simple multimeter over either one - the testing conditions on other testers produce much higher Vf than you would expect from say, a Ge diode.
 
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