Oscilloscopes for automotive diagnostics?

breckjensen

Hello,

I have been using a USB scope but realise just how little I know about scopes and feel the need to back track and get some basic general info before committing to a potentially costly purchase of a bench type scope. I hope someone can find a few minutes to guide me here, please?

I am currently using a Dataman USB scope for basic automotive diagnostic work, looking at injector and coil waveforms, reading the outputs of cam and crank sensors, both Hall effect and magnetic, watching thermistor voltage outputs, and looking at throttle position sensor outputs, etcetera. It is not an automotive specific device like, for example, some of the Picoscopes, but this has perhaps worked to my advantage, as rather than pushing on screen menu buttons to set up scaling automatically, I have had to think about what I am trying to measure and do it manually. It has helped me get a basic grasp of signal levels.

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