Wild Bill wrote:

I haven't tried one, but floppy disk drive heads are sensitive. I was
reminded of a circuit in a magazine (many years ago) that used a floppy head
for a pickup.

Some questions. How are you going to position it against the trace
accurately? What about double sided, or multilayer boards?

The problems with using AC to find shorts is that you get false peaks
and dips from the inductance of the traces, and the characteristics of
the components. Another problem is that some parts self destruct with
only a small reverse voltage so you can damage a lot of parts while
troubleshooting the board.

I used the DC voltage drop & sensitive digital meter method on boards
that people couldn't fix with AC, then had to find the parts they
damaged. The whole idea is to find and fix a problem quickly, and
reliably.

--
We now return you to our normally scheduled programming.

Take a look at this little cutie! ;-)
http://home.earthlink.net/~mike.terrell/photos.html

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida