And with mercury you have to have the "chip" for the engine your are working
on that plugs into the DDT. The chip for my Mercury 280 is about $230 above
and beyond the price of the DDT.
..
"Billgran" wrote in message
...

"Jon.boston" wrote in message
om...
Is the Mercury Marine scan diagnostic bus readable by the car ODB II
tools? I have a Optmax 2000 235HP with the check engine light on..
It's going to take over a week to get the repair people to walk 100
feet to my dock and plug the tool in.


The Mercury DDT is a propriatary system, and a very expensive one at that.
They
now have laptop software, but it is set up so it cannot be used by the DIY
type person, as it has to be "reregistered" often.

ODB II diagnostics are only for cars. Even the electronic fuel injected GM
engines in inboards or stern drives use a diagnostic different system and
interface..

Evinrude FICHT, DI, and E-TEC are the only service friendly engines for
the
do-it-yourselfer. For the FICHT and Evinrude DI motors, you can use an
ordinary laptop, reasonably priced software, and an easliy made or
inexpensively bought interface cable. The E-TEC engines use a PDA and the
same cable. The PDA can also be used on most '99 and later FICHTS and
Evinrude DI outboards.

Yamaha and Suzuki need a laptop, but their software is expensive and they
use an interface cable that has an addtional black box wired into it so
one
cannot make a cable for himself.

Bill Grannis
service manager