for measuring resistance with the digital voltmeter you will set the dial to the ohms the resistance range that ownsome symbol signifies that and for general purpose use you will usually start with the 200 scale setting and and then work your way up as needed so to test to kind of calibrate your meter you'll first just short the leads together and pinch them together as hard as you can and you should on these Harbor Freight meters you typically can get it down to around see the batteries getting low on this around 0.6 volts or 0.6 ohms I've usually gotten it down to 0.5 point four ish and that is quote-unquote zero but there's a give or take range there what it's doing basically there's a 9-volt battery inside the meter and it is running nine volts through the wire and gauging how much current flows and and using that to determine what kind of resistance is in line so with the resistance of these wires and the connections and everything it is saying that you know it's our zero that will use is the lowest reading we can get when we go to the two-hundred scale and put the leads together so right now it's looking like 0.8 or so 0.7 as the longer you hold it the lower it should get to a point so about 0.7 is our zero if I use this resistor this is just one resistor out of a bulk pack and go just from one end of the resistor to the other it says about ten and a half but remember about 0.7 was our lowest so give or take it's a roughly 10 amp or a 10 ohm resistor and that is correct with the stripes code that's on there 10 ohm resistor I'll use our variable resistor we was used we were using earlier it says on the back it's a 25 ohm variable resistor which is a potentiometer is the other term for that potentiometer so and the points connect to the middle and one of the sides either what either way and it depends on which which way you want the dial to go so we'll connect it there still staying on the 200 range because 225 is within 200 so connect that together and I'm going to try to hold it with one hand so I can work the dial with the other hand which might be interesting ok there we go so right now we're apparently we're at the max settings it's saying 26.2 and then I'll dial it back and there it says 0.7 so there were zero here because remember that's our zero reference and then as we dial it up we get more and more and more resistance up to so 26.5 that's about our zero reference though so roughly 26 give or take Ohm's so that's how to measure resistance for greater resistances just keep increasing the range here up to the 2000 K in the case here if I'm measuring let's go back to this 10 ohm resistor over here all right so I'm at a 10 ohm resistor if I increase it to the 2,000 scale see it rounds it now it says it's about 13 but there's no decimal position like there is here so that's just it's just a scale of how many zeros or how many decimal points you want mm it says about 12 it's just rounding it now it's going to round it more severely and it's it's point zero zero two in the 20,000 ohm scale so that's just how that works and then once you get to a point it will show nothing because compared to that huge of a resistance amount this is nothing this is zero so now I'm going to show you how to use a multimeter to measure voltage now one quick note is that you never want to have the meter set to the ohms or the resistance measuring section and then connect it to a battery because that is like connecting one battery straight across to another battery which depending on how you hook it up could be a could become a bad thing because when you're checking resistance that is using a 9-volt battery inside the meter and and connecting it through the leads to whatever you're testing say a resistor that's going to measure an actual current flow through that system but if you are connecting it to a battery it's trying to actually flow electricity through a battery which is not what you want to do so you can possibly damage the meter or other things if you have the the meter set to the ohms setting but you're really trying to measure voltage and you're connecting across a battery so that's very important basically what you do is connect is select the voltage range that you want to measure you want it to be at or above the voltage you're wanting to measure so this is a 12-volt lead acid battery so 12 volts the next next highest selection I see here is 20 so that's the one I would use 20 is the most common you'll use if you're doing automotive work because you're working with 12 volt batteries generally so you just select that voltage range and then put the negative and positive leads on here that battery is it's actually a very good charge on there it's measuring thirteen point one three basically and you can see what happens if I if I hold these on here and then I switch this to the next higher setting it's just less decimal points in it round it rounds it a little bit and then go higher it still just as 13 it also says high-voltage just warning you that if you're really measuring something in a thousand bolt range you want to be careful because that could be some dangerous voltage you're working with so so that's it and then if you go under that it's going to say overload because there is a higher voltage that you're trying to measure then what they can represent using that setting so it lets you know that you need to turn it up a notch or two so that's checking that I'm going to check this little alkaline one half volt battery that's actually very charged it's one point six three here's a low battery point eight six that's quite dead and then there's one more setting on here it's called the battery check or battery tester setting and it says 1.5 volt it applies what it does is it applies it's it's like internally in them in the meter it is applying a resistor across the terminals of the battery so it's putting a load on it and making it work kind of like putting it across the light bulb it's making that battery work and then it's also checking its it'll tell you of that four milliamp that it will try to flow through this battery or from this battery it will tell you how much of that 4 milliamps it is able to actually get so this using this low I'm going to use the high battery first to charge battery on that setting so it says 4.4 so that's a very good battery because it's trying to do four milliamps out of a good battery it did four point four so that battery is good very highly charged this low battery of that 4 milliamps it's only getting 2.3 so that's obviously you know roughly halfway in the range of 4 to 0 and again check that correlates with the voltage the open circuit voltage of 0.8 out of 0.5 1.5 1.6 so that's just a handy feature there's also a nine volt setting for a nine volt battery and it would apply a twenty they would look for a twenty five milliamp current draw for that to demonstrate measuring current or amperage with a digital multimeter I have set it to the 10 amp 10 amp range here you could go in the DC amps range here um there is no AC amperage range because it's it would be too much for the beater or at least they didn't allow it in this version of it so DC amps but you can see it's only micro and milli amps so very small amounts of current to demonstrate this I'm going to go the 10 amp scale so instead of going here which I would be for small currents you're going to go here in the 10 amp range and there's a fused connection in there it says 10 amps max there's a fuse inside that if you exceed 10 amps it'll blow that fuse and protect this the circuitry or supposedly so 10 amps scale I put an adjustable resistor here so that I can dial it in and show you the amperage flow how much current will flow through the circuit through that load Plus this load and this goes from 0 to up to 25 ohms this says on the back 25 ohms so we will connect it and see how much current is going to flow first I'm going to put this back on DC or on 10 amps so connect it and as you can see the light bulb is barely glowing there's just enough circuit flow current flow to allow that filament to glow slightly at about 0.41 amps DC I'm going to put an aluminum block under the resistor to help it stay cool to help wick some heat away from it so as I so in other words this is taking the brunt of the load this is the the brunt of the load right now this is resisting a lot of current and I can actually feel it starting to warm up right now which is why I put the aluminum block under it to keep it cool if you run it too hot and then just like any component we'll burn out and not work anymore so I'm going to slowly dial this up and you'll see the current is increasing as I'm making this less and less of a resistance and the light bulb is glowing more and more and more as more and more current flows through the circuit so here we're at point 6 2 amps and we're glowing brighter and brighter this is resisting less and less and there I have zeroed out the resistor so now this is no resistance practically we're flowing the full current that that light bulb will allow and it's 0.93 ish amps DC and then you'll dial it back down to point 4 you