EDS Leakseeker COMMENTS

[diydidi]

Hi guys.
I saw a review on this tester. It can help detect/find shorts on circuit boards. Does anybody own one of these testers?
Is it worth the money? What other ways are there of finding shorts on pcb's?
Lets get the discussion rolling......
Here's the link: "LeakSeeker 89 Short Locator by Electronic Design Specialists"

[Jazz P Bass]

'Distance to short'.
Looks pretty cool.

I wonder if it would also be usefull for testing cables.

[Mick Bailey]

Is it worth the money? Only you can decide that. It depends how much value you associate with the benefits (efficiency, time and money saved etc), compared to the cost of the unit and how much you'd use it.

You still need to know where to be looking for a short, and that it is a short you're looking for. So, you're back to a knowledge of the circuit or schematic and you must have deduced that there's the possibility of a short causing a fault. By the time you get to that level with audio gear, you've generally got a good idea where the fault lies, or down to a narrow range of possibilities. Also, you need to know where the tracks are running - especially on a double-sided board, so that you would know which pads to probe with the test unit.

With tube amps you also have to consider that a short will sometimes only show up under full operating voltage, especially capacitors, or arcing between tracks. They test fine on the bench and break down under stress. That unit won't show that up.

I think it's also worthwhile considering the failure modes of components - for example, resistors will usually fail open, so most resistor faults will go undetected.

I can see it would be a nice piece of gear to have, but for me it would be lower down on my list because I don't get many situations where I couldn't locate a shorted component once I'd analysed a fault and done the basic legwork that would be necessary in any case to use that particular test unit.

Things like a shorted rectifier diode/ parallel snubber cap combination? while the solder sucker is out and the board flipped over I'd just replace both if there was any ambiguity. Quicker than getting the short tester out and wondering if the calibration is correct for the track thickness. And cheaper, too.

[nickb]

Doubt it'll be much help with anything over two layers. That, I think, will be the vast majority of boards.

[Enzo]

I don't think many of our guitar amps get over simple two sided boards much. Maybe a DSP card might.

But I have to say, I am aware of products like this, and the need rarely comes up. Most of the shorts I have to find are components - like a shorted rectifier or something. I don;t need special gear for that. Now imagine a logic board with a hundred ICs all with 5v rails in parallel and a bypass cap at every IC. And something somewhere is shorting that +5 to ground. You might get lucky and find an IC getting hot, or one with a crack in the top. But a shorted bypass cap can be elusive. So a machine like this explores the world of very low resistance. it can tell you where two traces are shorted together. That is really what it is about, two traces shorted together.

[diydidi]

Thanks guys! I'll stick it out a bit longer before deciding to purchase. Just been getting a lot of gear lately with shorted multiplexers, opamps etc. Most of the time they don't even heat up because the gear they are in use low current switching regulators that drop out completely.