Electrical and Electronic Measurements – A Beginner's Guide

Exercise caution when working with high ac voltages from the power grid, as these can be extremely dangerous; only certified professionals or supervised learners should proceed.

Explore a dc power supply with ammeter and voltmeter displays, controlled by voltage and current knobs, operating as both current and voltage sources with 17.4 v no-load and 3.01 a.

Explore how a digital function generator operates, switchable waveforms (sine, square, triangle), and how it sets frequency, duty cycle, DC offset, and attenuation for test signals.

Demonstrate operating analog electromechanical voltmeters and ammeters, including AC and DC voltmeters with selectable ranges, calculating volts per division, wiring correctly, and interpreting scale deviation for accurate measurements.

Explore digital measurement devices, including general purpose multimeters and an LC meter, with probes, displays, rotary switches, ranges, and safety notes for measuring resistance, voltage, current, frequency, and capacitance.

Demonstrate watt meters and energy meters that measure power in watts and energy in kilowatt hours. Explain current and voltage loops, scale constants, polarization, and LCD readouts.

Learn to operate a CRT oscilloscope, adjusting focus, brightness, and vertical/horizontal controls for two channels, with trigger synchronization and calibration using a 500 mV peak-to-peak, 1 kHz square-wave calibrator.

Operate a digital oscilloscope and compare it with a CRT scope, exploring screen zones, vertical and horizontal controls, synchronization, and automatic and manual time-domain measurements.

Learn to measure dc voltage with analog and digital voltmeters in parallel to a supply, noting analog 16 V, digital 15.98 V, and polarity effects on a 9 V battery.

Demonstrate measuring AC voltage with digital and analog multimeters using a signal generator and 50 Hz grid source. Set ranges, connect with BNC cables, and compare readings to assess accuracy.

Measure dc voltage drops across a 1 ohm and 10 ohm series circuit acting as a voltage divider using a power supply and multimeter, noting polarity and range limits.

Measure voltage drops across identical loads in series with an AC supply using a multimeter, then disable the source and measure across each load to confirm 103 V per load.

Demonstrate ac current measurement in a series loop with two bulbs with equal power using digital multimeter, analog ammeter, and clamp-on meter, confirming consistent loop current around 0.21–0.215 amps.

Measure active power with a mechanical analog wattmeter based on the ferro dynamic system by wiring the current and voltage circuits and confirming correct polarity.

Demonstrate direct and indirect methods to measure active power using an energy meter, an ammeter, a voltmeter, and a stopwatch; compare pulse-based readings with v×i×time calculations to validate accuracy.

Learn how to measure active resistance with a digital multimeter across resistors, fuses, switches, a light bulb, and alloy samples, using range selection and continuity checks.

Measure resistance in a live ac circuit using ammeter in series and voltmeter across the supply; compute about 950 ohms from 225 V and 0.236 A.

Measure very low resistances indirectly by turning a power supply into a current source and reading the voltage drop with a voltmeter across manganin and brass objects, applying Ohm's law.

Learn to measure capacitance and inductance directly with an AOC meter, adjust ranges for accurate results, and measure polarized electrolytic capacitors, non-polarized capacitors, and transformer windings.

Learn to measure voltage, peak-to-peak, amplitude, frequency, and period using a CRT oscilloscope connected to a signal generator, with practical steps on triangle, sine, and square waves.

Explore how to measure phase difference between two signals using a delay block and a digital oscilloscope, showing how frequency, period, and time delay define phase delay between channels.