TOOL BRIEFING A look at network diagnostic tools and strategies When diagnosing automotive network buses, the age of the vehicle will be a major player in which tool you are going to be using. By Ross Colketf, Contributing Editor O ur shop is known for our diagnostic abilities in the local area. Being confident in our abilities has much to do with the capabilities of our tools, and the know-how to exploit them. As such, we get many vehicles in to diagnose network communication issues. We see everything from bad wiring to bad modules on these vehicles, and sometimes as simple as a missing fuse. However, one technique that is common among all that we encounter is beginning our network diagnostic process with an in-depth interview with the customer. THE BEGINNING OF THE DIAGNOSTIC JOURNEY We try to gather as much information as possible to duplicate the customer's concern. We will then pull trouble codes from the entire vehicle. We prefer to use the Autel Ultra as it will also give us a network topology map of the vehicle's communication systems (Figure 1). Note: I do recommend consulting service information for the accuracy of the topology map as I have seen occasional errors with the maps. This includes bothhttp://www.VehicleServicePros.com