This will NOT test in-circuit...the old Cricket did, but I must admit it was a seldom used feature. (Yes, some old-skool devices did in-circuit testing.)
10x the price, and while cool, the usefulness in repair work is damned low on the scale.
I ordered directly from Peak in the UK. Paid for the meter and the nice Case Logic case to store it in. It shipped very quickly...I believe I had it in about 10~12 days. There are some US distributors, but their pricing is whack, so I went right to the source...
You are perfectly welcome in the thread...it's just that I could not see myself desoldering a transistor and humping it over to a curve tracer. In general, a simple diode test catches about 75% of failures, something like the Peak meter ought to bump that to perhaps 85%, and ponying up $800 in an attempt to push that percentage to 90~95% doesn't make a lot of financial sense to me...at least when most of my work is done on 35+ year-old gear, where the old transistors may test just fine 'now' but have intermittent issues or are simply going noisy (both big issues with vintage gear, and something my meters and your CT are essentially useless for). Instead, I've invested a lot of time into having reliable and serviceable new replacements for about any transistor that I might possibly encounter. While that has meant an investment much larger than an $800 curve tracer (which I'd love to have anyway), the bottom line is that the gear has to get repaired and a CT just doesn't get me there, while lots of spare parts do.
