Hello, This is the Ts-101 Smart soldering iron now. I Use my Ts100 soldering iron all the time. I've completely abandoned my old Antex iron. This is the iron I use on a daily basis and I can prove it.

You just have to look at the condition of the soldering tip on this iron to know that this gets daily use. So what's new about the Ts101 and will I switch to it? Well, let's put it side by side with the Ts100: I put the tip in. Now one of the changes on the Ts101 is that you've got a spring-loaded ball here instead of the clamp here, which theoretically You Were Meant to turn with a little Allen key. Frankly, I've never bothered and it's never been a problem.

A tip has never fallen out, but that's one of the changes in terms of size. It's about one millimeter longer, so it's really the same size. It's got a bigger screen, so much so that it can actually have two lines of information. But the biggest difference is on the end.

here. The Ts100 has USB micro B, the Ts-101 USB type C and this is USB type-c power delivery. And yes, it can deliver quite a lot of power if you have the right power supply and the right cable and I'll come back to this. you can get 90 watts into this soldering iron.

the maximum power you could get into the Ts100 of course through the barrel Jack 65 Watts Now this 90 Watts rating requires a bit of explanation, so let's go to the manual. This is the DC Barrel Jack If you put 24 volts onto the DC Barrel Jack 65 watts and it'll heat up in nine seconds. That's from 30 degrees to 300 degrees on the PD USB type C. If you can get 28 volts now 28 volts requires PD 3.1 power adapter.

then you can get 90 watts into the tip and that'll give you a warm-up time of just six seconds. But as well as a 3.1 power supply, you also need a cable which supports 50 volts, 5 amps, 240 Watts Epr now I've only ever used the Ts100 at 19 volts, so it's been a 40 watt iron and you've watched me solder occasionally I struggle uh, where a pin is connected to a large ground plane. So yes, it would be nice to get extra power. I could raise my voltage to 24 volts and get 65 Watts But if I had all these uh PD bits I could raise about a 90 watts and get a six second warm up.

If you're wondering what this is, it just pushes onto the front of the iron, the tip goes in and it just provides a bit of on-desk stability I Don't know if you remember this, but I took a Ryobi battery topper it's a tester, added a little 2.1 millimeter Barrel socket and I use that in conjunction with a 20 volt or 18 volt. They're probably about 19 volts because I always take this off the charger so they're always completely fully charged. Pop that on there. So now I'm going to power up the Ts100 and also the Ts101 and we'll compare the displays.

So here are the two displays. Now let me just press the back button on each of them and you'll see why. The new display, being slightly bigger, is so useful. You get two lines on both actually, but on here, the two lines are just in larger font.

Okay, let's try a warm-up race. Uh, just make sure these are both cold. Yes, they are. I Tried this just now and I didn't press the two buttons simultaneously.

so let's give it a try. Both the A buttons up there you go. looks like the Ts-101 is ahead. They're both going to 300 degrees.

There's not a lot in it. The Ts-101 got there just ahead of the Ts-100 Uh, possibly because it's using 20 volts rather than the well. I Would have thought that power tool battery is at least 18 volts. but there we are to turn both irons off.

It's a long press on the back button. long press on the back button. Both irons show you the current temperature of the tip. The Ts-101 has a little warning triangle, but it is very tiny.

So what's new in the user interface? Well, the Ts101 if the iron is on, so I'll switch it on has three user temperatures: so T1 is 300 degrees, T2 is 330 degrees and T3 is 350 degrees. And by pressing the front button, you simply cycle through those three temperatures which strikes me as quite useful. The Ts100 doesn't have that. The Ts101 also has press and hold for Boost so you can see the boost up indicator there.

I Think you can change the Boost temperature. it's currently set to 380 degrees. When you let it go, of course it just drops back to your currently set temperature which is T3 350 degrees. If I go back to T1, this will of course fall back to 300 degrees.

Now if you long press the front button on the Ts101, you actually get the tip resistance 7.8 ohms. You also get the current voltage 5.2 volts because the PD only goes up to 20 volts when requested by the iron. When it's just sitting here in its menu mode, it's just running on 5 volts. What's the third parameter? Oh, the current tip temperature? That's right, but it shows you that while it's cooling down anyway, once it gets down to 40 degrees, both of these stop showing the cooldown temperature menu structure.

on the Ts100, you press the back button to go into the various menu elements and then to change an element, you press the front button. So for example, if I want to change the power source 6s, DC 3s and this is just the number of cells of a typical Lipo, so I set this to 5S because that's what my Power tool battery is on. The Ts101, Press the back button and you have 18 pages of setable menu items. Also, this one just drops out of the menu structure after a few seconds whereas the Ts100 seems to be locked into it and then of course you forget how to get out of it.

So back button: the T1 temperature. You can set the T2 temperature the T3 temperature, uh temperature step. Now this is uh in 10 degree increments, but you can set it finer Five degrees for example: sleep temperature, sleep time, idle time, backlight brightness. Oh, that reminds me I haven't peeled off the little display cover so I'll do that.

Temperature units: Fahrenheit or Celsius and number 10 is display direction for right-handed use or left-handed use. Boost temperature: This is currently set to 380 degrees Power Source: DC Or you can set it to a certain number of Lipo cells Min volt. Now that if you set it to a certain number of Lipo cells, you're basically saying what's the lowest you want each cell to go down to and of course it assumes that your battery is is in perfect balance. So how do you change the temperature of the soldering iron? Well, there appear to be two ways to do it.

We can go into. the parameter is there's the T1 temperature 300 degrees. If I long press the front button I Can edit that, let's go down to 280 degrees I Now need to wait for these parentheses to disappear and then I have to press and hold the back button. It appears to save the data.

Now if I start the iron up, you can see my T1 temperature is 280 degrees. but possibly a simpler way to change this is to press the back button and then that says you can adjust the work temperature. Interestingly, it doesn't tell you which one you're adjusting. We know we're adjusting T1 because we're in T1 So we adjust the work temperature.

let's go back up to 300 degrees and I think if I just let that time out, then yes, the tip will change to 300 degrees and my T1 setting is now 300 degrees. my T2 is 330 and my T3 is 350 degrees. and if I stop the Iron by pressing and holding the back button single, press on the back button to check the parameter menus. You can see that T1 temperature is now 300 T2 temperature 330 and T3 temperature 350.

Uh, One other little difference between these two ions. If I tip them over the other way, you can see the TS 100 automatically rotates the display. It has to be at that angle for it to do it. The Ts101 you have to manually set the right hand and left hand usage parameter.

So the question is will I be switching to the Ts-101 Um, yes, probably. But strangely enough, I'll probably do it using the DC Barrel Jack input because one of the things I quite like to do when my iron is sitting in its stand is make little adjustments to the angle that it's sitting at so that I can see the display. And with a DC Barrel jug, you've got that rotatability which you don't have with USB type C. So with the USB type-c cable plugged in I don't really have the ability to rotate that and when I could unplug it and perhaps rotate that now that hasn't really helped, it doesn't let me set the iron to the angle that I want.

So yes, in the workshop, I would probably use this, but with the DC Barrel Jack now, that's very different to if you're out in the field. If I'm out in the field, then you're far more likely to have a power bank available with a PD output than you are to have a 20 or a 24 volt power supply of whatever type. So uh, yes, definitely the Ts-101 if I'm doing field work now. Just a quick note about the Ts80: This soldering iron has a USB type C connector, but you can see on the end there that it's very specifically Quick Charge 3.0 9 volts to amps.

This is an 18 watt iron and it's only 9 volts 2 amps. This doesn't have any other power settings and it's important to note that the Ts101 does not work on Quick Charge Power Supply So here's a quick charge power unit. Everything looks fine until you try and switch the iron on and then it just says low volt. This does not talk Quick Charge 3 and does not request the higher voltages from a quick charge output.

So that's the new Ts-101 soldering iron. You've got the versatility of two different power sources. You've got the three working temperatures that you can simply switch between very quickly, and you've also got press and hold for boost mode everything I think and more than I got with the Ts100. so I may well be using this as my daily solderer.

Cheerio.