Hi all, found your community on the search. I have been doing an internship at a Mercedes-Benz dealership and have been tasked with figuring out how to use the PicoScope NVH kit as well as where it can be applied. However, the more I use it, the less useful the scope seems to be.

At first glance, the kit seems to provide very good information to the technicians of problems related to the engine, propshaft, and tires. I also understand what the various orders mean. However, in real world testing, the scope seems less useful than I had imagined. Firstly, I am under the impression that the scope is limited in its usage to diagnosing problems relating to the engine, propshaft, and tires only (correct me if I am wrong). We recently simulated a previous customer issue in which the AC unit underneath the drivers feet would create a thumping, like a heartbeat, when the temperature was changed rapidly. However, this was not picked up by the accelerometer at all. Secondly, road testing only seems very reliable if you have access to a smooth roads where a large amount of bumps do not exist. Suspension related problems, or other problems alike, that only appear when the car goes over a bump are nearly impossible to detect using the scope as every vibration value shoots up when the car goes over a bump.

Almost the entirety of our technicians are against using this device in the first place and after using the scope, I am starting to see why. I know that the scope in useful in providing objective results instead of guesswork, but to the technician's credit, their experience and intuition seem to be much more applicable than what the PicoScope can provide. I cannot deny that the data that the PicoScope can provide is extremely useful, both to the technicians and the customers, but the instances in which the scope can be accurately used seem few and far between. The technicians have no problems in diagnosing 9/10 problems with the incoming vehicles and of that remaining 10%, the scope cannot be used in all of those cases either.



If anyone has any advice on using this NVH kit or would like to share their experience in using this kit, please share it in the comments, I would greatly appreciate your insight!