Tenma 72-9385 Multimeter Unboxing and First Look

For Father’s Day 2014 my two daughters gave me a couple of lovely cards (one of them a Mark Fixes Stuff shirt, complete with a tie I would never actually wear) and a proper upgrade for the bench: a Tenma 72-9385 digital multimeter. It’s a budget meter, around £24 at the time, but a clear step up from the £3 to £5 meters I’d been using in my videos. This is me opening it for the first time and trying out the features.

What’s in the Tenma 72-9385 box?

Tenma is one of those brands sold through Farnell and CPC in the UK, and the box gives an address in Springboro, Ohio, so it should be easy to find in the States too. In the box:

Operating manual
Test leads, flexible and much nicer to hold than the cheap ones, with little caps to keep the dirt out
A multi-purpose socket block
A point contact temperature probe
A 9V battery

Tenma 72-9385 digital multimeter box contents with manual, test leads and temperature probe — Everything in the Tenma 72-9385 box

The temperature probe was the bit that caught my eye, as it could be useful for showing overheating chips in repair videos. The meter itself is a salmon or butternut squash orange, with a non-slip rubber holster and a fold-out stand. There’s no backlight, which I count as a plus because it won’t eat batteries.

Tenma multimeter test leads with protective tip caps on the bench — The leads are a big step up from my cheap meters

Fitting the battery and first tests

There’s no separate battery door: you pull off the holster and undo the screws to get inside. With the 9V battery fitted (bottom posts first is much easier), I tried the diode and continuity checks on a rusty screwdriver and a safety pin. Both beeped happily. The rotary switch also covers frequency, ohms, volts, milliamps, capacitance, transistor testing and a hold function. One nice touch for anyone new to meters is that the display tells you which sockets the leads should be in for each range. It does keep saying “connect test leads”, which I need to read the manual about.

Tenma 72-9385 multimeter on its stand during a continuity test — Continuity and diode checks worked straight away

Trying the temperature probe

The temperature probe plugs in via the multi-purpose socket. Once set up, it read around 23 degrees on a warm day and 32 in my ear. I have an Amstrad with a stuck RAM chip that I plan to check with it.

Tenma 72-9385 multimeter with the point contact temperature probe connected — Testing the point contact temperature probe

All in all I’m really pleased: lots of features, a big clear screen and much nicer leads. That said, I’m not knocking the cheap meters, which have been accurate and reliable for me. Thank you, girls.

See a meter in action in how to test a 7805 regulator in a ZX Spectrum with a cheap multimeter, or the rest of my kit in my top 13 tools for fixing stuff.