Owon OW18E Meter Review

My old multimeter, a Precision Gold PG10B from Maplins (the UK version of Tandy), is now 20+ years old so for my birthday I decided to buy a newer one.

I set myself a maximum budget of £45 (60 USD) and started to look at reviews on Youtube and prices on eBay/AliBaba/Amazon. For that money you are not going to get a professional meter from Fluke/Agilent/Keysight or even one from Dave at EEVBLog. It will be a Chinese designed meter, so you are looking for the best of the rest.

As an amateur I do not really need the professional level of precision, but I do occasionally work on mains voltages so a good CAT rating and some Mains (245V) Voltage safety features would be desirable. A good quick continuity buzzer response is essential and quick settling meter readings. I have never used the hFE facility on my existing meter, and I would not trust the non-contact voltage detector on any cheap meter so both these functions are not required. A diode test that can light up an LED would be good. A frequency counter is a nice to have but not essential as I can always use my Oscilloscope. I rarely use a Capacitor measure, as I have a separate Arduino based component tester, but it would be nice. A 6,000 count meter seems to be the standard now, so that or higher. I would also have liked a fast acting analog bar graph output of the meter reading.

The Owon OW18E did not originally fall within my budget as it is currently shipping from China for around £65. But it did pop up on Amazon UK when I did a search based purely on price less than £50. I found a British Pet Shop Supplier selling them cheaply and more oddly selling them even cheaper under their own brand as a PawMate Multimeter ! Then when a further unexpected 15% discount popped up it worked out at under £40 delivered by Amazon. I could not find a decent review of the meter of Youtube but as I knew the brand from their Oscilloscopes I decided to take the risk. The meter when it arrived was actually the Owon Branded meter in a plain cardboard box.

So I will build up a review here over the coming week.

First Impressions

It is quite big 7.5", 19cm tall. Just as well it has the two fillets either side of the switch so that I can hold it in one hand. The switch has a very positive feel and about 3 seconds after turning it on the meter emits a loud beep to let you know it is awake and ready.

The display is actually quite large, the main digits are 7/8" or 22mm tall. The viewing angle of the LCD however is a little disappointing. Laid flat on the bench the display is quite good, but stood upright on the integral stand and for anything less than 20" or 50cm away the display contrast is poor. With the backlight on it is the same story. Putting the backlight on also switches on the torch function, no separate switch !

Once you work out how to get it in the right mode the continuity buzzer works quickly enough to sweep across a connector or IC, (switch to position 4 on the dial and then use the Select button to choose between Ohm->Buzzer->Diode. Diode mode puts out 3.28V so it can light up most single LEDs (but obviously not multiple LED COBs).

Documentation

OW18E QuickGuide.pdf

Quick Guide

Get your magnifying glass out the physical document is is roughly quarter letter size, 28 pages of content. Dated 2019.11

There is a newer 67 page OW18A/B/C/D manual dated 2020.05 on the Owon China Web site.

You should be able to pop out the pdf file on the left and either download it or just blow it up to a readable size.

Technical Specification

This 6 sides of quarter letter, with even smaller print and covers multiple meters

OW16
OE18A&B
OW18D&E

Click on the image and then open in new tab to see a high resolution copy of the OW18E pages.

Bluetooth App

QRH links to the Owon China donwload web page for the Bluetooth Applications.

For Android this an APK package and you will need to disable security checks to get it to load.

Meter Leads

Supplied are 3 packets containing:

Standard shielded banana plug meter leads, that clip into the rear meter housing for stowage or single handed use.
- 1000V 10A Cat II leads. Note the meter itself is 1000V Cat III, 600V Cat IV rated the leads are not. I assume this is a result of changing regulations as my old meter's Cat III leads are a lot less substantial.
- Triangular shaped pencil finger grips on the probes
- End to end length of 41.25" or 105cm
- Cable length is 34" or 87cm, which is quite flexible.

Screw off tip shrouds

Shrouded screw on crocodile clip extensions for the standard meter leads. Whilst these are a good idea they are of very poor manufacture. The clip assembly is a threaded collet pushed over the 4mm socket on the crocodile clip and held in place by a pair of opposing punch marks on the collet. On the black lead this joint failed and came apart on first use. The clip that did hold was punched at 90°'s to the 4mm socket's seam, the one that failed was punched directly over the seam which simply opened and closed leaving a single weak connection point. Get the soldering iron out and weld them before you use them
K-Type Thermocouple leads with 4mm banana plugs

Power

The OW18E uses a standard 6LR61 Alkaline 9V battery. So will have a limited operating life compared to a multiple AA Cell meter.

Measure the currents....

Measure the lowest operating voltage....

The meter will automatically power down into standby mode if you leave it for 30 minutes (as long as bluetooth is not enabled) but it will still consume reduced power in standby mode. So if like me your meter can sit for weeks in the tool cabinet between uses, then use the OFF switch.

Non Contact Voltage (NCV) detection

DO NOT TRUST this meters NCV function. My one simply does not work - It is just a random beep generator. Supposedly capable of detecting 90-1000V AC my example does not detect live cables with UK 240V 50Hz even when they are held against the meter.

Frequency Hz

A quick test with my Rigol DS1054 Oscilloscope's 1V 1KHz test signal shows that the meter takes about 2 seconds to settle on 0.9999 KHz

Using a (fake) XR2206 1MHz Sig Gen on 5V square save (anything above 83.5 KHZ output is too noisy !) with the output measured on the Oscilloscope.

230 Hz input read .2304 kHz

4.99 kHz reads 4.994 kHz

83.5 kHz reads 83.48 kHz

Whilst testing frequency I thought I would see how the RMS Voltage measure worked out - and it does not.

With a 3.00V Peak to Peak 200Hz Sine wave I get 1.088 V RMS (expected 1.061) that is OK

With a 3.00V Peak to Peak 5KHz Sine wave I get 0.258V RMS (expected 1.061) 5.006 kHz that is not good !

I will have to rebuild the 12Mhz function generator to do some higher frequency tests....

Resistance

As I do not have any calibrated standard components this is purely indicative !

The time to measure a resistor varies from just under a second for MΩ's up to 3 seconds for single figure Ω's

What we are seeing here is that the meter always starts to measure in MΩ, and when presented with a much lower resistance it will get no reading and it switches down to the next range and tries again. This means that a measurement of a 5Ω resistor will cycle down through 7 ranges 200 MΩ, 20MΩ, 2MΩ, 200KΩ , 20KΩ, 2KΩ, and finally 200Ω before it gets a reading. If you start by manually selecting the correct Ω's range then an individual reading is less than a second.

Shorted leads with crocodile clips shows 00.17 Ω

2M2 - reads as 2.168 MΩ

220K - reads as .2126 MΩ

47K - reads as 46.82 KΩ

2K2 - reads as 2.214 KΩ

5Ω - reads as 05.09 Ω

Capacitance

As I do not have any calibrated standard components this is purely indicative !

The time to measure a capacitor varies from under a second for pF's through 100nF and multiple seconds for µF's, through to 10 seconds for 2200µF's which sort of makes sense as larger capacitors take longer to charge up and the meter will have to step up through the ranges. It did also show that some of my cheap Chinese Electrolytic's have either dried up or have false values printed on them !

2200µF 50V Electrolytic - Approximately 10 Seconds to get a reading 2105 µF

680µF 63V Electrolytic - Approximately 6 seconds to get a reading of 670.9 µF

47µF 16V Electrolytic - Approximately 6 seconds to get a reading of 56.47 µF

1µF 5V Electrolytic - Approximately 2 seconds to get a reading of 1.0215 µF

100nF Ceramic - less than a second to get a reading between 93.23 nF

10pF Ceramic - less than a second to get a reading of 0.0860 nF

Temperature

As I already have single and dual type K meters (for 3D Printing and balancing central heating radiators) this is another function that will get little use.

From selecting the °C/°F range to getting the first reading takes about 1 second, thereafter it seems to be quite reactive. However if you live/work in America or any other °F region then sorry - this meter defaults to the °C range and will forget that you have changed it to °F as soon as it is switched off.

Bluetooth Logging

tba

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