I'm new to electronics and discovered the falstad.com simulator. I wanted to model this audio pre-amplifier circuit:
So I went into falstad and drew this:
My pre-amplifier circuit on falstad
The output voltage is showing a flat line at about 6V. I was hoping for an amplified signal. So I can't tell if there's something wrong with the circuit I was attempting to model of if I'm just not using falstad correctly?
Best Answer
Two things are going on here:
First, your input coupling capacitor is way too small for that frequency. Use at least 10 µF in order to prevent attenuation at 80 Hz.
Second, and this is peculiar to the simulator, you have no DC path to the output pin, which means that it "floats" up to 6V. You're trying to look at a 100 mV output signal (assuming you fix the first problem) superimposed on that 6V DC bias, and the simulator display simply doesn't have the resolution to show that. Add a 10k resistor from the output node to ground.
With these issues fixed, the simulator shows an output signal that's close to 100× the input signal.