So for any of you that use or have used scopes before like the Autel or Pico I have a question.
I intend on picking up the AESwave pocket scope some time in the future and would really like to use it for compression tests, however the pocket scope itself says that it’s not to be used in anything more than 40 volts. Can the pocket scope handle a bigger amp clamp for testing the starter/relative compression or is that going to fry my scope?
An amp clamp shouldn’t send any significant voltage to the scope. Amps are not volts. As an example, look at https://www.aeswave.com/current-clamp-60a-ac-dc-with-bnc-p9417.html, where one of its settings is 1mv/100ma, so a 40 volt meter should be able to read 40000 times 100ma or 4000 amps. Note that I’m not saying you could use that particular clamp with your pocket scope, nor that you could connect it, and it can’t read more than 60 amps so would be inappropriate for your starter checking, but it should give you an idea of what scales you are dealing with.
Would it work for a compression test?
Probably not, because I imagine that the starter motor will be drawing more than 60 amps during cranking. Note that the scope isn’t likely to be fried even if you feed it more than 40V. I’d also wager that the current clamp’s internals will just saturate at over 60 amps so it’ll never send a signal greater than the 60amp value(60a/100ma=600mv, or 0.6V)
It looks like the current clamp I linked is actually >included< in the ‘master’ set, btw.