What's in the box

  • AN8008 meter
  • Test leads, rated to the same CAT as the meter body
  • 9V battery, pre-installed

Six months in and it’s still the meter I reach for first, ahead of two more expensive ones on the same bench. Continuity beep is fast enough to actually be useful for chasing shorts, and the True-RMS reading has agreed with a bench supply every time I’ve checked it against a known load.

I opened it up mostly to settle my own curiosity about the fusing, since that’s the thing that actually matters for safety on a cheap meter. Both fuses are genuine rated parts — a 600mA/1000V fast-blow and a 10A/1000V — not the wire-bridge shortcut some budget meters use. The board itself is a sane layout with legible chip markings, not sanded off to hide the manufacturer.

None of this tells you whether the calibration holds up over years of drops and abuse. Six months of daily bench use is what I can vouch for.