In past 5-10 years, cost of making a decent root-mean-square responding meter has come way down. This is important when looking for the kinds of interference as would screw up digital logic (particularly at the lower and lower voltages). So you want to read that "spike" with reasonable accuracy - though you'd understand a lot more, if you saw its waveshape on a scope, too.

We lazy folk look at it this way: would you rather set up a battery of utilities; see if you can sleuth out mysterious digital events - or just see first, if there's a simpler explanation? (I'll bet lots of good mbs have been tossed.. and lots of wasted hours running logic tests, because of bad PSs.)

And no, Fluke isn't the only choice - but RMS is pretty important.. and a high-enough freq. response as matches the switching freq. - in order to "believe".


A.