I think I see what's going on, maybe... There's no smoothing capacitor in your diagram. I bet there's a reasonable smoothing cap on the input of the regulator circuit though. When you measure without the regulator you measure the average of the rectified waveform, which is still dipping down to zero between each half cycle so you measure a lot less than peak, possibly less than RMS even? When you connect the regulator there's a capacitor present so it peak-detects and reads >50% higher. This is the relevant reading. If this is too high you have the wrong transformer. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jai Dhar" To: Sent: 09 February 2003 17:11 Subject: Re: [EE]: Rectifier Question > My apologies to all - I forgot the picture (my webmail works in an odd > fashion). I did not expect anyone to chase links by any means, so my apologies > again. Here it is. > -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body