Analog Multimeters for Dummies

Analog multimeter display

Not that anyone sells them anymore, but there are still a lot of analog multimeters kicking around out there. If you bought one at a garage sale or on eBay, chances are your antique model came without an instruction manual. Naturally, you'd turn to the internet for help. It would be a mistake, however, to depend on an answer from eHow.com's Ashton Daigle; who we caught expounding on "How to Use a Sperry Analog Multimeter." If you did, you'd only get a partial answer, and part of it would be wrong.

Ashton's "answer," such as it is, has two problems. The first is that, in his rush to collect that ten- or fifteen-dollar stipend from Demand Media, he neglected to mention reading the multimeter's scale at all – and our staff can tell you, from experience, that reading an analog meter takes some training. More, at least, than what Daigle tells you:

"The reading will fall on nine volts..."

Anyone who's actually used an analog multimeter will tell you that you must first select the correct scale and then interpolate between values for the reading to "fall" on some value. It isn't just "read it," regardless of what Ashton says. By the way, Daigle's answer contains a common misconception – can you see it?

"Place the positive end of the meter to the positive post of the nine-volt battery and the negative to the negative post. The reading will fall on nine volts if the battery is good.

Those who know (which does not include Ashton) will tell you that unless a 9-volt battery is completely dead, it will always read nine volts. If you want to evaluate the level of charge in a battery, there has to be a load on the circuit. And then there's that "Place the positive end of the meter...": a multimeter doesn't have a "postitive end"; a multimeter has a positive probe. Just one more case of a dumbass rewording information mined from somewhere else, probably a place where the author knew what he or she was talking about. That's different from Ashton Daigle, which is why the Antisocial Network has awarded him the coveted award of Dumbass of the Day.

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