Hello from South Carolina

Hello to the Community!

My name is Dave Day. 68yrs old, retired, and have been a shade tree mechanic for the family cars for a couple decades. Reasonably hand with a wrench, and have spent years early in my career as an electronic tech, but haven't touched electronics much since. Except for refurbishing my son's 1993 Accord transmission control unit, which has well documented electrolytic capacitor leakage problems and the occasional burnt resistor because of that.

Now that I am retired I want to maintain our vehicles myself and that seems to require bidirectional OBD2 and oscilloscope skills these days.

I am on a smaller budget and will be looking for a good deal on a bi-dir OBD2 scanner, perhaps even used. I am also going to get a scope too. I aspire
to get a scanner and scope for <~$1000 if possible. I'll want the scope to be new but the scanner could be "good used".

Thanks for being here, SD!

Cheers,
Dave Day

Any recommendations appreciated. I have also bought Scanner Danner's book and the Haynes OBD2 book to get me started.

Welcome.

My best recommendation would be a Launch Pros mini and a uscope or a siglent handheld 2 channel scope. With scope accessories, you’ll be in the $1500 range for all that. A non bi-directional tool will cut $500 off that

Welcome to the community! Thanks for joining Also check out the diagnostic tools section for more info on scantools and scopes.

First of welcome good to have you among us.
The Launch Scantool mentioned is ta very capable tool under cuts the rivals on price.

As for oscilloscopes the uScope is a great easy to use tool and it's portability makes it very handy but if I only had one scope I would want more channels.
Ditex make a range of very nice automotive scopes at good price and they are getting good reports from people I trust. They have a website www.autoditex.com and also have an eBay shop as carscope_ditex. Just check shipping and customs prices before. buying.

However if buying both at the same time squeezes the budget I would give priority to the spending on the Scantool as even a basic usb or hand held scope will take you a long way. You could look at the Owon scopes on eBay and Amazon. They do a wide range of general purpose oscilloscopes entry level USB model vds1022i is very low cost and surprisingly good and nice to use and has isolated inputs.

Welcome to the community!
Depending on what kind of cars you'll be working on primarily, don't discount used Snap on equipment like the Verus or Modis family.
They're obviously more attainable if you work at a shop with a snap on dealer, but there's deals to be had on eBay as well.

i second the remarks from noah a used snap-on scanner scope can be had on ebay for a very affordable price and to put it into perspective i bought my verus pro for 1200 dollars if anything goes wrong with it i can send it to snap-on and it can be repaired but the biggest advantage is for someone that is learning how to use a scope and does not have wiring diagrams on hand it is all built into the machine to aid you in that. you can watch SD videos on how to use the versus to get an idea what i am talking about there.