Thank you all for the responses.
I had been chasing the source of an annoying little hum and ended up back at the cartridge. Admittedly I'm nitpicking but even a tiny hum can be annoying. My multimeter is of the older analog scale type and generally I use it as yes or no when it comes to ohms. I noticed that the cartridge has an open circuit between ALL of the different terminals (really sounds great except between songs). As I had a nearly new dl-103 I measured that as well, completely different measurements, what I expected would be correct. Nothingness between the positives. Perhaps this humming cartridge is supposed to have an open circuit between the positives though this seems really unlikely as it's a dl-103r (rebuilt canti etc) so probably pretty similar. Regardless, it needs to be looked at.
Long story short (no pun intended), installing the stock 103 fixed the problem and seems to have sustained no damage from the abuse.
Thankfully these are relatively inexpensive cartridges but I will certainly refrain from such measurements in the future.
Kind regards,
Mark