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Building the AADE LC Meter

 

Building the AADE LC Meter

Filed in Kits on Mar.06, 2010

There is a really nice Inductance/Capacitance Meter available from aade (Almost All Digital Electronics).
This is the AADE L/C Meter IIB.

It comes as a kit and takes a couple of hours to build.  When you are finished, you have a nice tool (rather than the kludge I had for capacitance before) that can read .001 to 100 mHy (most units measure to 150 mHy), and .010 pF to 1 uF (most units measure to 1.5 uF). It is auto-ranging, and has a one-button calibration feature.


 

First, a look at the Kludge I had for capacitor measurement before this:


 

This was built from an old ARRL Handbook Circuit.


 

This circuit worked OK, but required a VOM for the display, and a “reference” capacitor for calibrating on each session.
Now that I have the AADE meter, I can reuse the nice hardware from this box for future projects.

Now on with the AADE Build:
Here are the parts straight out of the bag:


 

First, I sorted the parts, so that they could be easily found.


 

Now, it was mainly a matter of identifying the correct parts and soldering them in.  I used a little rubbing alcohol on each joint to clean off the rosin flux from the solder as I went.


 

Then I just had to install into the provided case.  Here it is measuring a 0.35uf capacitor from my junk box…


 

I look forward to using this to measure toroids that go into the various receivers and transmitters that I build in the future.

Migrated Comments:

3 Responses to “Building the AADE LC Meter”

  1. Ansor Says:
    November 20th, 2014 at 8:24 am

    Kits have really chgnaed too. I built a little single band SDR radio a couple of years ago to get my feet wet with surface mount components (SMDs) It was a lot of soldering with a real fine tip soldering iron and a really strong magnifying glass. But it worked just like it was supposed to.The Elecraft I’m working on now has zero soldering! Everything plugs together like building a computer. It’s a lot of work but an extremely nice kit!

  2. Greg Says:
    August 19th, 2019 at 7:00 am

    Hi I'm emailing you in behalf of my parents who own RF parts, and Diamond antenna, we have 7 tons of sangamo micas that we've had for 30 years that need to be inventoried, do you know if the l/c kit is still available. Thanks Greg

  3. wb0smx Says:
    August 19th, 2019 at 7:32 am

    Hi Greg. Unfortunately, the AADE LC meter is no longer available. If you only need to determine the capacitance of the mica capacitors, one of the many electronic component testers on EBay can probably do the job. They are cheap and easy to use. Search for “LCR Component Tester” and you will get many suggestions on EBay.
    Good luck… Randy wb0smx

 

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