Review and teardown of the Thurlby 1905A Intelligent Digital Multimeter was designed and manufactured in the 1980’s by Thurlby Electronics Ltd. The meter is a 5½ digital manual ranging multimeter with keyboard programmable computing and data logging facilities. The basic accuracy is ±0.015% on the D.C. ranges.
Hi Louis,
I found a Thurlby 1905a multimeter in my late father’s craft room. It still works very well and is accurate enough for my hobby measurements.
Unfortunable the foil keybord didn’t work, but when I watched your video I got the necessary hints to do a “bypass” and now I can also use the log and computation functions.
Pretty cool if you remember the possibilities of 1983 …
With best regards
Franz
Hi Louis,
I have a 1905a which I recently acquired on eBay. It is a very sound meter despite its vintage and, although not calibrated for some years it does seem to be in spec and reliable. I am planning on bringing out the serial output header so I can log some data. The secret 6.5 digit mode is an extra bonus feature.
I also note that the there is an interesting feature on the panel – above the Ohms and A mode switches there is a bracket symbol and another *. Both Ohm and A keys can be latched down together. The manual makes brief notes about the ** keys as for ‘future development’ . I can’t determine if this key combination actually does anything – i wondered if it might have been for preliminary work on a 4 wire mode?