I bought a Red Devil River ALDL cable to datalog my wife's 1987 Camaro with L98 350 TPI. I believe this car should have the 165 ECM. I tried WinALDL and it won't connect at all. Now I'm using TunerPro, but still having trouble with the datalogging process and getting connected to the ECM. It connects pretty randomly, and I've only been able to get a couple short datalogs out of it before it disconnects.

I searched the forums and found a lot of people saying the 165 ECM is finicky like this. I also found someone that had trouble like this with the Red Devil River ALDL cable and bought a Moates.net cable which worked fine.

Anybody got more feedback on if this really is a 165 ECM issue or if the Moates cable is somehow better?

 

Go ahead and buy a Moates cable and save yourself the grief.

The Red Devil cable is known problematic, and there's no support to rectify it, unfortunately.

the '165 can still be a bit problematic to connect to (using North American masks), but can be connected to and datalogged fairly reliably, with some tweaks to the ADX file.

 

The 165 ECM is $hitty to datalog with. It wasn't really designed to do it except for factory (Assembly Line) use. There isn't even any information on live data viewing/recording in the factory service manual for the 165 cars. Just trouble codes. GM never intended for even dealerships to use it in that way. Yes it is capable in a very limited way, but they disconnect all the time and the data rate is SLOW. It's not fast enough to pick up transients - only general trends. That's one reason that tuning with 165's can be time consuming.

GD

 

the Red devil river cable never worked for me. I made the mistake of recommending to a few people. Big mistake on my part.