Question

A general purpose electrical multimeter can be used to directly measure what value?

Answer 1

One important measurement that can be made with a multimeter is a resistance measurement. Not only can these be made to check the accuracy of a resistor, or check it is functioning correctly, but resistance measurements can be required in many other scenarios as well. It may be to measure the resistance of an unknown conductor, or it may be to check for short circuits and open circuits. In fact there are many instances where measuring resistance is of great interest and importance. In all these cases a multimeter is an ideal piece of test equipment for measuring resistance

Resistance measurement basics

When measuring resistance, all musltimeters use exactly the same principle whether they are analogue multimeters or digital multimeters. In fact other forms of test equipment that measure resistance also use the same basic principle.

The basic idea is that the multimeter places a voltage at the two probes and this will cause a current to flow in the item for which the resistance is being measured. By measuring the resistance it is possible to determine the resistance between the two probes of the multimeter, or other item of test equipment.