Checking Voltages on Vintage Radios

Video Transcript

Hi I'm Larin Parker with Expert Village and I'm going to show you how to check voltages. This is another great way to diagnose things when you have no idea, what's going on. You turn it on and you get no result. We are looking at the back of this radio again; this short wave radio and once again I want to find ground. With batteries that's easy, it's going to be the flat side of the battery. If I pull this out you can see that, this is the side that's flat, this is the side that has the little bump on it. That flat side of the battery, I'm going to clip my lead to a piece of bare wire that connects up with that flat side of the battery and then I want to clip that to the black lead of my multimeter. Then I'm going to use the red lead of my multimeter with one hand as a probe. I go ahead and I set my multimeter onto DC voltage which is voltage and it has this little line with some dots underneath it. That means we are looking for DC voltage and not AC voltage. AC voltage on these guys are primarily dealing with power coming out of the wall but when you're dealing with electronics within a circuit you're usually looking for DC voltages. You just kind of trace from the red wire here coming from the battery, that's obviously going to be our power, so we can see right now it's a little bit of power coming off of it. If I turn it on, I've predicted it's probably going to get a little bit bigger. We can see it was three volts there and let's see, let's just check it. At certain points right there we've got two point nine five and we can see that there's actually electrical activity. When you find a zero or something like that you need to check and make sure that zero isn't somewhere that's suppose to be connected up to power. How do you know that's something is suppose to be connected up to power? Probably the best point if you reach this scenario, the best thing to do is to get on line and look for some technical documentation. Look for a schematic, look for a service guide for your particular model of radio or amplifier or what have you and it will show you where specific points are to test for voltages and what this multimeter should read. Just use an alligator clip to clip to ground, and then always remember to use one hand at a time to avoid electrical shocks and just probe little bits of this circuit and make sure that everything is up to spec according to the diagrams you get off of the Internet.

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