Let me guess... When you measured the current you placed the probes in
parallel with the AP and the wall wart?

This would be wrong.

You probably just damaged the wall wart and not the AP if this is the case. 
You're lucky if you didn't damage your meter.

Current is measured in series.  Meaning that to complete a circuit the power
has to pass THROUGH your meter.  To measure voltage you would measure the
output of both the terminals of the wall wart in parallel.  You must,
however remember to move the probes on the meter from the current
measurement location to the voltage measurement location.  Most meters have
2 seperate locations for each.  The current measurement jacks are internally
connected together while the voltage jacks are a very high resistance.

To figure out wattage in DC the correct formula is V * I = W where I is
current.

The best way to understand this is that current is the measurement of
how many electrons pass through a certain point in a second (electrons in
motion) or how many coulombs per second.

1 Amp = 1 coulomb/per second
1 coulomb = 6.25 X (10 to the 18th power) electrons

1 coulomb can also be a measurement of voltage which is just potential
difference.  So the difference of 1 coulomb (electrons not in motion) between
to points would be 1 volt.

So if you had a potential difference of 5 coulombs and the flow rate was 2
coulombs per second this would translate into 5 volts at 2 amps or 10 watts.

Make sense?

Dan.

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 12:17:59PM -0800, Roberto Ramirez wrote:
> ok this might be a dumb question but, how do I measure the current from my
> ap? I already tried to before and fried my ap. I have a digital multimeter,
> do I have the unit on? I measured the output from the wall wart to be 5v @ 5
> amps for 25w but the ap says 5v @ 2 amps. Im using a dwl-900ap+
> 
> --
> general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/>
> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
--
general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/>
[un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless

Reply via email to