I am looking for your experiences, comments, or thoughts on the best automotive scope for a new guy. I do volunteer work and have to go to people's homes or on location many times so I am looking for something very mobile and at a reasonable cost. I have my heart set on a Pico but I can not afford that and it's just too much equipment to carry and set up for quick mobile diagnostics.
I am considering the following scopes and have provided links to the information. If you have used either of these please post your experiences, pros, and cons of the unit and your thoughts.
On a side note, I see Paul using a pop-up canopy in some of his videos, does anyone working in the field use these? I think its a great idea but not sure how practical it is. I have issues with my eyes adjusting on bright sunny days so for me its sometimes difficult to see under the hood. Any thoughts?
In looking at the Ditex Carscope my main concern is the screen size & resolution. It appears to be a tiny screen with a poor resolution where it might be difficult to view an 8 cylinder duel trace waveform.
With distributor ignitions the method is look forrest then find the diseased tree. The forrest is the train of ignition sparks on th screen, a tree is a single spark event. For any 4 stroke engine you need to get 720 crankshaft degrees no matter how many or how few cylinders. Basically set the scope up on the coil secondary wire so you have a train of ignition events filling the screen and then pick out any that don't fit the pattern then use the firing order to identify the problem cylinder which you can then look individually with a faster time base (shorter screen time).
Looking at the ignition spark events as a whole 720 degree train was used more in the days of contact breaker ignition where contact breaker gap and distributor bearing wear had major effects on ignition timing and dwell angle,
" We're trying to plug a hole in the universe, what are you doing ?. "
(Walter Bishop Fringe TV show)
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