I have a lightly modified 2001 Camaro Z28 6 speed. Ss hood, slp intake, ls6 manifold, and true dual exhaust with headers. I was looking into tuners and wondering if any of the handheld tuners you can buy are worthwhile? Like the predator or bama etc. I don’t think the car is modified enough to want to invest a lot into a professional tune job so was curious if the handheld tuners were worth picking up.

 

A completely stock untouched car is worth custom tuning over a canned handheld tune.
I don’t consider a handheld to be a tune at all. They just alter the timing and maybe up the line press for a firmer shift.

 

If that car uses a P01 or P59 PCM, there's free software that you can use with dirt-cheap hardware to tune it.
http://pcmhammer.org

 

I second that idea from NSFW. I have been using PCM Hammer to read and write the tunes and Tuner Pro RT to edit them. As long as you are tuning engines from 1999 to 2007.5 or so, this is not a bad way to go. But its not a fully bi-directional scanner in the same way that HP Tuners can issue commands for things like changing gears in a transmission.

Rick

 

Agreed.

The first step to getting those features added to PCM Hammer is to figure out the right sequence of bytes to send to the PCM. That's the hard part. Creating new buttons or menu-items send those bytes is easy.