I finally switched my opinion on digital panel meters after talking to a old timer

Had a 30 year tech at a hangar in Phoenix tell me analog gauges are still better because they don't glitch during power surges. He showed me a failure log where three digital units went haywire in one month after a lightning storm. Is it really worth fighting the industry shift or am I just being stubborn about what I grew up with?

2 comments

2 Comments

miles_perez8h agoMost Upvoted

...and that's the thing about lightning strikes, they don't care how new your gear is. I've seen it too, especially in older buildings where the grounding is shot. But here's the other side of it, those old analog gauges are a pain to read if you need a precise number, you're just estimating. Maybe the real answer is mix them together, use analog for the critical stuff that can't glitch and digital for the fine tuning and data logging. That's what we did on some irrigation panels out here and it worked way better than all one or the other.

blairm358h ago

Yeah, that mix approach is exactly what I ended up doing after a lightning strike fried my whole digital setup a few years back. @miles_perez you hit it right on the head with that "critical stuff that can't glitch" point - I put an analog gauge on my main power feed and it's never let me down since. The digital stuff is great for logging and fine tuning like you said, but when a storm rolls through I'm way more comfortable watching that needle move than hoping a screen doesn't go blank. It's not perfect but it's kept me from losing my mind on those humid summer afternoons when the sky starts looking nasty.