This is weirding me out, and I got sick of updating my same post, since no one responds to it, so pardon this message if it needs to be somewhere else.
After getting my spark firing, I noticed that my RPM was a little erratic during cranking (at this point I still have not started the car). I'm running... 1.0.73, I think. I looked into getting a shielded wire for my trigger, but couldn't find anything except for 24ga. I bought it, because a friend of mine told me it works fine for his Megasquirt setup. After hooking the little bastard up and grounding it, I got no rpm at ALL during cranking, then once in a while it would chime in with a 177rpm or so, then back to zero.
I figured I had crossed a wire, or allowed the inner wires to be grounded to the shield or something, so I started testing. I get like 260kohm between the shield and both wires. I try another strand of the same wire, and I get the same thing Should I be getting an actual resistance measurement between the shield and the wire? I check for voltage from my pin27, which is where I'm hooked up to, and I get like .2 volts. I slowly rotate my cam while my gf checks my voltage, and as the sensor runs over different teeth, she reads varying voltages from .4 to .5, to .2. I cut the wire and check voltage on pin 27, it's about 2 volts. I decide that the resistance between the shield and wire is allowing some sort of voodoo witchcraft inductive short, or maybe there's just a short in the wire.
I took the wire out of the shield, inserted a new conductor into each of two big sleeves of shielding, grounded one end of each shield to the head, and connected the trigger up in the same manner as I had it originally, before I noticed the erratic rpm signal. Nothing doing. I'm getting the exact same results no matter what I do. This is great news for my wiring ability, but WHERE do I go from here? I'm totally clueless.
Humbly yours,
Alec