Editing Voltmeter (section)

== Amplified voltmeter ==
The sensitivity and input resistance of a voltmeter can be increased if the current required to deflect the meter pointer is supplied by an amplifier and power supply instead of by the circuit under test. The electronic amplifier between input and meter gives two benefits; a rugged moving coil instrument can be used, since its sensitivity need not be high, and the input resistance can be made high, reducing the current drawn from the circuit under test. Amplified voltmeters often have an input resistance of 1, 10, or 20 megohms which is independent of the range selected. A once-popular form of this instrument used a vacuum tube in the amplifier circuit and so was called the vacuum tube voltmeter (VTVM). These were almost always powered by the local AC line current and so were not particularly portable. Today these circuits use a solid-state amplifier using [[field-effect transistor]]s, hence FET-VM, and appear in handheld [[multimeter|digital multimeters]] as well as in bench and laboratory instruments. These largely replaced non-amplified multimeters except in the least expensive price ranges.

Most VTVMs and FET-VMs handle DC voltage, AC voltage, and resistance measurements; modern FET-VMs add current measurements and often other functions as well. A specialized form of the VTVM or FET-VM is the AC voltmeter. These instruments are optimized for measuring AC voltage. They have much wider bandwidth and better sensitivity than a typical multifunction device.