Free Zone Advanced Organization

I have been fooling around with building a better meter. Here are some of the animated gifs of what I found. Please forgive the jerkiness, I do not have a camera tripod.

 All of the tests were done by locking a stop on the ta set postion, and then accelerating the ta to the stop fast as possible with the thumb. The resulting movements were then photographed, and added into the gif picture.

The first gif here is of a standard mark 6 meter. Upon acceleration, the needle goes to the pin on the right side, and then gradually settles down over about 2 seconds with gradually decreasing swings.  I used the fall position on this meter as set to make the gif, as when accelerated to fall, it would continue to the pin on the far right.

The next gif is of a good mark 5 meter movement grafted onto a mark 6. The response is better, but still swinging wildly on set. Settle time about 1 second.

The next one is of a mark 5 meter driving a mark 6 crappy movement, but with the needle cut off, and replaced with a very light, flat movement, with the addition of a anti-bounce resistor. As you can see, the response is much better. Settle time is about .75 seconds.

And finally of course is the best that I could build, a totally new meter, driving a modified Mark 5 Movement, with the needle cut off to reduce the mass inertia. Settle time is about .24 seconds.

This particular meter is a pure joy to drill and audit with. There is no mistaking any read. It either reads or it dosent. You can call a 1/8" read with total certainty.

 I hope that you may find this page of some use. The wild swinging of the needle is only one of the flaws in the Mark 6 meter. It can be markedly improved though, by replacing the movement.

This last picture is all of the beasties. The bottom left is a totally new meter in the mark 5 case.