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Resistor Confusion

salesm21

Help me,

I am currently frustrated with how my night of sorting resistors is going. I have 5 band resistors and cant seem to get my Multi meter to read properly. I have it set to 200 OHMS and the resistor in question color banded from the beginning 1st. green 2nd. brown 3rd. black 4th gold 5th yellow. This according to my little chart should be 51 OHMS. But my meter shows me 55.9. What am I doing wrong? 

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  • Hi Mitchell,

     

    You aren't doing anything wrong. You have read the bands correctly and the meter is telling you the reading that it is measuring. The resistor you are measuring has a yellow 5th band which means it is a 20%  tolerance. This means that the actual reading can be as high as 63 ohms and as low as 39 and still be within tolerance. The 55.9 that you are measuring is actually pretty good for this resistor with only a 10% variance from nominal value. This is unfortunately the reality of the world. We can put exact numbers on our calculations but nature makes it very difficult to to match reality with our projections.

     

    John

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  • Hi Mitchell,

     

    You aren't doing anything wrong. You have read the bands correctly and the meter is telling you the reading that it is measuring. The resistor you are measuring has a yellow 5th band which means it is a 20%  tolerance. This means that the actual reading can be as high as 63 ohms and as low as 39 and still be within tolerance. The 55.9 that you are measuring is actually pretty good for this resistor with only a 10% variance from nominal value. This is unfortunately the reality of the world. We can put exact numbers on our calculations but nature makes it very difficult to to match reality with our projections.

     

    John

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