Next step was a little search on ebay and in no time I found the Chinese equivalent of the same idea at around 10$ and free shipping, now we're talking. You can find it on amazon also but the price is considerably higher. Fast forward a few weeks and the package was waiting for me at the post office.
And the ratings state:
- 7 decades coverage with 1ohm, 10, 100, 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M stages
- 1% resistors tolerance. Planning to replace resistors if the need comes with 0.1% tolerance
- 1/4W power ratting
- 250V max voltage, like that would be the case..
It came bulletproof packed. First time I've seen such a great packing, overkill in this case but a nice touch none the less. The PCB work was nice and clean, came with the male 4mm banana plugs and a bunch of extra jumpers. Banana plugs are the cheap ones but good enough and the extra jumpers beats me what they are for because I don't find a use in connecting more resistors in parallel.
With this occasion I had the opportunity to put my newly acquired DER DE-5000 to work. Got it with TL-21 and TL-22 accessories as the TL-23 is overkill for most cases and easy to home make anyway. Plugged the TL-21 alligator adapter, did an open/short calibration and clipped it on the Decade resistor board's jacks with all jumpers set to 0. Total disappointment! 0.8ohms!! That's almost 1ohm, not quite what I had in mind in terms of 0 resistance.
Couldn't find any problems other than, of course, the jumpers. Fiddling with them turned out values from 0.5ohms all the way up to 4ohms which is quite a tragedy. Took a closer look at the jumpers and couldn't find an actual fault with them. The mechanical contact is quite good, there was no sign of oxidation.. that's just the way it is, nothing to do about it.
So what did I end up with? The cheapest programmable resistor with 6 actually useful decades. Not the kind of equipment you can calibrate stuff with but good enough in situations where you need to test and tweak stuff.
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