These pretty much never get mentioned, and probably with good reason. Most people work on their car won't ever need one, and if you know that you need one theres a > 0% chance you have a pricey scanner to give you oscilloscope functionality along with a lot of other auto/computer tools. There are only a few places where one would even be handy, but those places tend to be where we spend a lot of time diagnosing trouble: crankshaft position sensor, camshaft position sensor, speedo sensor (ok, we don't talk about this one much), and of course our good friend the O2 sensor.
If you decide that you do want a traditional oscilloscope, you're looking at at least $150, and it's gonna take up some space. For about $90 Amazon now sells a multi-meter/scope combo that looks promising, but $90 was more than I wanted to spend. So instead I found a much cheaper option ($33-$45) in the form of an Audrino-based handheld oscilloscope. Banking on Amazon's return policy, I rolled the dice and bought one over the weekend. The below picture is from their stock photos, but in practice it looks pretty much just like that; it's not a photoshopped screen which is what I expected. There are several version of this on Amazon, this is the cheapest one I could find.
Came with the BNC/alligator connector and a power supply (the amazon link says it doesn't come with the power supply). The instructions kinda suck, but I was able to get it calibrated more or less through their procedure, and then verify against a 9V battery and a 5V phone charger, and was able to see the ripple on it. It has a limitation on resolution of about 200kHz, which is plenty good for analyzing most of the stuff on our jeeps.
I used this to back probe my cam position sensor and was able to get a nice 5V square wave on the display with virtually no effort. For kicks I tested an old speedo sensor with my cordless drill and this is what it looked like, just to show some real output. Conclusion: for $33, this is a pretty good buy if you want to test some sensors while the jeep is running. It's pretty lightweight, so it's the sort of thing you'd want to store in a box in a drawer somewhere and not keep in the glovebox, but odds are you aren't going to need this on the trail anyway.
TL;DR - super cool, good value, but you probably don't need it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SZPY9R9/?tag=wranglerorg-20
If you decide that you do want a traditional oscilloscope, you're looking at at least $150, and it's gonna take up some space. For about $90 Amazon now sells a multi-meter/scope combo that looks promising, but $90 was more than I wanted to spend. So instead I found a much cheaper option ($33-$45) in the form of an Audrino-based handheld oscilloscope. Banking on Amazon's return policy, I rolled the dice and bought one over the weekend. The below picture is from their stock photos, but in practice it looks pretty much just like that; it's not a photoshopped screen which is what I expected. There are several version of this on Amazon, this is the cheapest one I could find.
Came with the BNC/alligator connector and a power supply (the amazon link says it doesn't come with the power supply). The instructions kinda suck, but I was able to get it calibrated more or less through their procedure, and then verify against a 9V battery and a 5V phone charger, and was able to see the ripple on it. It has a limitation on resolution of about 200kHz, which is plenty good for analyzing most of the stuff on our jeeps.
I used this to back probe my cam position sensor and was able to get a nice 5V square wave on the display with virtually no effort. For kicks I tested an old speedo sensor with my cordless drill and this is what it looked like, just to show some real output. Conclusion: for $33, this is a pretty good buy if you want to test some sensors while the jeep is running. It's pretty lightweight, so it's the sort of thing you'd want to store in a box in a drawer somewhere and not keep in the glovebox, but odds are you aren't going to need this on the trail anyway.
TL;DR - super cool, good value, but you probably don't need it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SZPY9R9/?tag=wranglerorg-20
