VDIAGTOOL V200 Pro WITH TRACKER Full Review and Tutorial

[Music] greetings if you are new to the channel because of this product review my name is Matt I am a do-it-yourselfer based out of Denver Colorado my channel here on YouTube particularly focuses on do-it-yourself Advanced Automotive Diagnostics and thus the reason for the review of this particular tool here which some of you guys think you're familiar with you may have seen this before I can assure you you haven't this is actually new it's not what you're thinking of when you think of the V diag tool this is a new V diag tool with a new feature that we will demonstrate are a lot of things that it does improve on over the obvious competitor which would be the Power Probe equivalent so let's take a look at this tool you guys are probably familiar with a Power Probe you're probably also familiar with the signal tracker from Power Probe this particular tool combines both of those thus the reason it's not what you're thinking because for a while on the market the Power Probe equivalent has been out which of course this tool is able to do but what is new that we are going to also feature in this review is the signal tracking capability that is where I think this has a particular value I do have as you guys are aware the Power Probe 3 I'm pretty sure it is and the ECT I think it's an ECT 2000 I don't remember that would be the signal tracker combined if you were to get a complete new kit I believe that would be like the Power Probe 4 or maybe the Power Probe Maestro now whatever they're up to and the signal tracker you're looking around $300 or so maybe a little more with some of the accessories that I have with my kit as well but this v200 Pro kit $100 for pretty much the complete kit with the signal tracking and the Power Probe like features so let's take a look at what you would get so with this kit we get what looks very much like the Power Probe you will see however there are two wires that come off of this for your test leads one of them of course the ground like you're familiar with if you're familiar with power prob the second one is for the signal tracking with this particular version of the tool we also have connectors to your vehicle battery or you can also swap out and connect it into the cigarette lighter if you wish not quite sure how long the cable is but it is much longer than a passenger car so this allows you obviously the whole trick with this is you are able to have a power and a ground to do your electrical testing anywhere along the entire ire vehicle thanks to the long cord now if you're working on an extra long vehicle or maybe a trailer or something the kit also includes another extra long cable I'm sure the cable's something like 20 ft or so it's really really long probably won't ever have to use that extra cable honestly now you will notice there is another device here and that is the signal tracker one of the main reasons I am reviewing this tool all right this is a little bit corollary to the review but I just wanted to point out that as I mentioned before I don't do a lot of tool reviews but I get a lot of requests for them and I turn down probably 98% of the requests and I actually turned this one down too originally the sales rep is an amazing person named Yuki Lee who contacted me about doing the review about a year ago that at the time was for the v200 system which is essentially just the Power Probe part the power and ground capability and as well as the voltage testing and we'll show you the features very soon but the thing is there's lots of Power Probe clones out there and I just didn't think there was really the value with it and what I told Yuki is the only way I would be interested is maybe if it had some kind of a signal tracker well Yuki did some research and said they are actually working on one at the time sure enough a year later right about the time she said that it would be out of development she contacted me saying hey a year go you said you would review if we had a signal tracker we have one now will you be willing to do the review well of course I have to keep my promise so we are going to do an unbiased review and do the signal tracking and also go over the features of the tool but I did want to mention uh that awesome experience with the company that they followed through kept track of this even a year later Yuki did an amazing job I believe she was promoted actually recently and welld deserved all right let's go ahead and I'm working on a car actually right now let's hook up the tool and look at some of the basic features and then we'll get to the exciting signal tracker capability all right we're going to begin by hooking this tool up to the battery I will put a link in the video description to the Amazon link for the tool make sure that if you are interested in this particular one you get the correct one this kit that I have is valued at $100 on the Amazon link you will also see there is a similar one for $70 that will not include the single tracker that is not the complete kit the $70 one will be just this v200 diag tool the $100 one includes the rest of the kit that we will cover soon all right if we look on this particular model we see we have a twoos onoff switch the first position turns the tool on and it will behave very much like a Power Probe if you're not familiar with the Power Probe what this allows me to do is to have a power and a ground anywhere along the vehicle by pushing up on the switch here we essentially have power at the tip 12vt power from Battery here we can cycle through several features which I'll cover including look at an ac voltage resistance even a diode tester as well by moving the switch down we provide a ground at the tip so if you've got a ground side circuit that you're trying to examine that could come in handy in that case we also have a ground clip here this is useful for testing devices uh light bulbs things like that we'll demonstrate it the second lead on this particular version of the tool is for the signal tracking this will allow you to track a particular wire if it is open we will cover that in a little bit to activate that feature we move to the second position which puts a signal tracker Trace down this wire one thing I really like the signal tracker Trace is along the lines of a milliamp or so perfectly safe for computer circuits one of the things that I really like about tools like this is that you can tell if you're on a power ground just by touching it without having to do any settings on the tool let's take a look so it no danger to the circuit if I touch a ground we see the screen turns green indicating that I'm on a ground it also measures voltage off the ground so if I'm doing a voltage drop measurement that can be very very useful obviously if I go to a power we see the screen turns red there's a little audible tick that indicates that the tool has detected a change here and we can see it gives a power reading 12.3 volts here it's also really good if we're going to test fuses with the nice sharp tip so just that in itself a lot more convenient than using the oh meter a lot more functionality than the test light because I can move my switch up here and I can power things uh let's see it looks like we got a relay over here all right I literally have no idea what this relay is for but if I wanted to test it and find out we can very easily do that one nice thing also little headlights on here make it easy for me to look at my relay map here looks like we've got power here we do flip that around we'll show you just touching it there we see I've got my 12vt power there my load side is going to be right there and if I push the button which technically whenever you use a tool like this one tip push the button first and then touch the device that way your Arc isn't generated in the device which can actually wear out the switch sooner we're going to see what this is it's probably the right yeah God scared me um so we can easily test the relay Port right there we use the tool to easily identify you see how easy that is and this one also has a lot more versatility as we saw we were able to measure voltage and apply voltage if that was a groundside device we could have just simply grounded by pushing down and provide a ground activate your groundside switch devices if we press the button we can cycle through these other fun fun as we see so here we're on the DC voltage the next button will get you to the ac voltage you can see it also gives you a frequency reading maybe we could do this on an alternator let's go ahead and do that real quick and do an AC test okay I think you can see it on the screen there sorry it's upside down we can see our maximum and minimum ac voltage output and we also have you can see a frequency reading there in kertz 2 khz there now not exactly a scope for doing a ripple test but uh that can be useful all right pushing the button we move to our next feature which is the ability to do resistance checks so I've got a couple of resistors here this one I believe is a 10,000 Ohm resistor and we're just going to go ahead and measure a resistance check here all right we should just be able to touch this to the resistor and you can see just about 10,000 ohms right there all right um I did try this up to a million Ohm resistor and that was a bit beyond the range it showed out of limit uh let's do um let's try this here's a 100,000 Ohm resistor let's see if it'll read that 100,000 ohms okay our next test is going to be for a diode right here I've got some dodes I am willing to bet no other review of this tool or any tool like it has done diode testing what the hell is a diode so pushing our button here that gets us to the diode testing diode only allows current One Direction so we should only see current through here if we are in the negative to positive orientation here so let's go ahead and line this up and we are in the correct orientation so we see our forward bias there that tells us this diode is in the negative it's a positive Orient a if we flip it around we will not get a reading at least we shouldn't get a reading and you see we don't get a reading at all so now we know we are in the reverse bias here the orientation of this diode is in this direction and the diode is functional we also hear the confirmation beep as well and that pretty much covers the functions of the v200 circuit probe tool now we can get to our signal tracker device and one thing I want to do before we do the signal tracker device I just want to talk about a couple of things on this tool if you guys are listening over there at Via diag tool just a couple of recommendations okay honest review here as you can see I have no problem using this tool this is very very easy to use very powerful very versatile there are a couple things I kind of wish that it had that the more expensive competitor products do have um that I do kind of like it's not a deal breaker by any means one of them I wish that there was some settings that you could do to have a permanent audible tracker this way if you're doing something where you're dealing with an intermittent circuit and you're not in front of the probe because maybe you're under the dashboard or something it's kind of nice to be able to set up some of these tools where when power applies the beep stays on and that way it's not that little quick beep or tick that you may not hear because of other noise going on or something like that so uh that that would be something nice another thing this is really really minor and it's not a very common thing keep in mind when you push the button up you are putting 12vt battery power to the tip which is the idea so if for example I want to test this light bulb here well then that's awesome and very easy one thing I kind of wish that this had was the ability to put an adapter on kind of like the Power Probe does which would put 5 volts to the tip and that way I could test different 5vt reference circuits and things safely you wouldn't want to do that with the 12vt really really minor but it just would be something that would be kind of nice to have and increase the full functionality of the tool now let's go over to the signal tracker very important I just want to bring the elephant out of the room here the signal tracker is going to be a really cool addition but it is only able to find opens so competitive trackers that are far more expensive by the way far more expensive will be able to tell you whether you've got an open or a short to ground just connecting the tool right up this particular tool is going to be useful for tracing the wire along an open obviously a short to ground you could use just with your v200 but tracking that wire you would only be able to do it with an open wire now that is still hug hugely useful for an extra $30 another thing that I really like this long flexible probe is a huge improvement over the current one that I use for the Power Probe the Power Probe is a little bit bulkier than this without a long signal antenna like this and it's very difficult to get it into tight spaces this tool is a market Improvement for that reason the other thing I really like quite honestly is the ability to use just the v200 to send my signal tracker through rather than breaking out the ECT uh is it a ECT 3000 or 2000 I don't remember it's a whole different tool separate from the Power Probe and with the V diag tool it's all with the same tool so let's go ahead and Trace some wires all right to use the tool for the signal tracing functionality we're going to move the switch to the second position this disables the v200 pro output but what it is doing is it is sending a signal down this red wire that can be tracked using your breaker finder tool so if we just turn the breaker finder tool on you can set the sensitivity with the dial on the side here and if we push the button here we can already hear that as we near this wire you can hear the signal all right all we need to do is connect this to any wire in the car and of course that will Trace down that wire as long as the wire is open we're going to be able to hear that sound if this wire connects to ground then the signal tracker does not work it is not a short finder it is an open finder I just want to be very clear about that and point that out if you were looking for a short you're better off using your functionality on v200 and seeing that you have ground but again you wouldn't be able to trace that wire so just want to be very clear on that so you know what you're getting but still very useful let's go ahead and test this out okay in this scenario we are going to trace a wire let's say that we've used our v200 tool we have determined that we've got an open in a wire and we want to track that wire to the open and we're going to track this all the way to the computer so we simply use use our same tool here hook up send our signal into the wire that we're tracing and as we move down the harness and this is where this tool really really shines this harness goes all the way back here and I would have to take everything apart if I were to use my Power Probe tracker because the Power Probe tracker is pretty much just the unit here but here we've got this long antenna here that will reach out I can reach way back along the firewall and you can hear the signal here the the best thing to do is to try to go perpendicular to your Tracer wire rather than along side of it you really want to try to go perpendicular let me get on this wire harness here it's so far back I wouldn't be able to show it on the camera but you can [Music] hear we're still on that same wire now that wire is going to come all the way around and it's going to go to the computer so let's say we determined our open is at the computer well one of the problems is we've got three major cables here we don't know which one of these cables has our wire of Interest we could pull it up off a wire diagram of course or we can just use our V diag tool tracer it's not that harness it's not that harness so we know our wire ends up in this harness and that would allow us to more easily track our open all right I believe I failed to mention there's also an instruction manual included in there who needs that all right the V diag 200 pro circuit probe and the signal tracker $100 for the complete kit again for that price despite a couple of the shortcomings of it I really really think it still provides an excellent value as an entry level for a do-it-yourselfer who wants this capability but the $300 something dollars for competitor items is out of the question really really like the long flexible tracer on the signal detector that in itself I'm going to be using this to detect my open circuits this is so much an improvement over the Power Probe I actually think this is worth it just in its own and remember you also have all your accessories included with the kit on my Power Probe I had to buy these separately by the time I got the signal tracker and all the accessories I have for it yeah it was uh it was about triple the price of just this tool so something to really consider if you're in the market for the Power Probe like device and a signal tracker all right I do want to close out by saying that I am not compensated on sales of this device so if you are interested in the device that is totally up to you the compensation I got they do allow me to keep the tool which I'm very grateful for in exchange for this video review but I am not compensated on any sales or anything so I really am bringing this to you because I thought it would provide value for you guys who may be in the market for multi-function electrical testing and signal tracking like this so thank you for watching this review I hope it was helpful we'll see you next time

Channel: Schrodingers Box

Views: 12,686

Keywords: powerprobe, power probe, ECT2000, ECT3000, open circuit finder, wire signal tracker, short circuit finder, automotive electrical, electrical tester, how to find short circuit, short circuit testing

Id: fSBrwwm8F7A

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024