Please bear with me. I am relatively inexperienced in electronics and am therefore experimenting with battery operated circuits before moving on to AC powered circuits. Having read the theory, one of the things I want to master, and create with confidence, is a full wave bridge rectifier I tend to learn best by hands on and therefore wanted to create AC voltage from a DC Battery source so that I can then go on the build a bridge rectifier to convert back to DC (albeit at a lower voltage because of the diode voltage drop). I found the following circuit which, I thought would allow me to create 9V AC from a 9V DC battery:
http://www.sentex.ca/~mec1995/circ/555dcac.html
Built exactly as in the schematic , it does work, in the sense that I do indeed get an AC output BUT the multimeter AC reading is telling me that I am getting only 4.5V AC (half the DC input voltage). If I then rectify this with a Schottky diode bridge, I end up with a DC reading of approx 3.6V DC.
Am I missing something here? Clearly I still have much to learn before progressing.
http://www.sentex.ca/~mec1995/circ/555dcac.html
Built exactly as in the schematic , it does work, in the sense that I do indeed get an AC output BUT the multimeter AC reading is telling me that I am getting only 4.5V AC (half the DC input voltage). If I then rectify this with a Schottky diode bridge, I end up with a DC reading of approx 3.6V DC.
Am I missing something here? Clearly I still have much to learn before progressing.