My first post!!! :-) I'm a newbie to this forum and to the Land Rover world.

I just purchased a 2008 LR2 and am quickly realizing how convenient and cost effective it would be to have a proper diagnostic tool. I have searched through a lot of different posts from various Land Rover forums and have found a lot of useful but possibly outdated information. Most have been from the 2008-2010 range so I'm not sure if it's still valid.

I'm looking for a diagnostic tool that will tell me what's going on under the hood, clear codes, reset maintenance intervals, and program certain functions that usually only a dealer can adjust.

I have seen good things about the Hawkeye tool. It seems to be the leader for Land Rovers but not the cheapest thing in the world...I guess nothing that really works is cheap though. Are there any others that can compete with Hawkeye? Anyone have experience with the Auto Enginuity product?

Thanks for the help!
-Rob

 

Bare bones basic is the $70 Ultra Gauge, which can read codes, reset codes (from ECU), display live data, and have an alarm point you set for that data. Going the other direction you have the Hawkeye and Nanocom, etc.

 

the maintance light can be reset by hand.

 

I took a quick look at the Ultra Gauge and although it is a neat device I think i'm looking for something that does a little more than that. So I guess the Hawkeye it'll be....one day.

I've read about reseting the maintenance light manually, although I haven't tried it yet, I'm sure it works great. Funny how I asked about that at the Land Rover dealership and the guy told me it simply cannot be done. Gotta love it when people lie straight to your face. I would assume a guy who has "owned Land Rover his entire life" would know how to do something like that or at least know there is a way. Oh well.... He has helped that dealership lose another customer.

 

I recently purchased a used Innova 3130b code reader on eBay. This is a discontinued model, but has all the features I need. It displays the code(s), along with a brief text description on the device screen. It can also reset the codes using an erase feature which turns off your Check Engine light until another code is triggered.

Optionally, I can connect it to my PC via USB cable. Using the software available for download from the Innova website, it will produce a PDF report of the codes and some other engine information it captures. It's pretty slick!