Kerry Wong writes:
Getting a rough measurement of the transistor hFE’s is useful when designing analog circuits. Unfortunately, only the lower end DMMs nowadays offer such functionality as it is becoming less and less useful to measure transistor hFEs in a world that is dominated by digital circuitry. Also hFE varies in different biasing situations and the hFE measurements on these cheap DMMs are typically done with a fixed base current (approximately 10 µA) in DC mode. But even with these limitations, hFE measurements can still be quite useful.