With no experience tuning of any kind I think I'd feel better with autotune and the pod 300
If you only wanted to tune the 100% column from 6000 rpm and up, that's still about 20 cells. NOT easy to reference between the trims table and the fuel table. Unfortunately, you can't overlay two tables or even have both on the screen at the same time. So you just accept all trims and let AT do the math. Then go do another run and repeat the process until your not getting any trims.
With no experience, you could make small adjustments safely checking AFR right after. Manually adding or subtracting a few units from your fuel table is no big deal. It's not dangerous if you add or subtract a bit too much. Autotune even does this and that is why you must do several runs--to allow AT to correct itself. The deal is that AT is a lot faster than you are and it has no choices to make. It applies the trims to the fuel table with 100% accuracy. Autotune eliminates the frustration of human error.
If you go with a datalogger, you will have to view the log file which is a list of time and AFR. Then change tabs to compare that to the fuel table which is a matrix of TP and rpm. Confused already? Think having two laptops on the bike now starts to make sense? Before we had Autotune, I'm sure that was the only way to self tune. You could do it too but it would be a slow cumbersome process. Then again, you only have those 20-some odd cells you're worried about. My opinion is that datalogging and manual adjustments will be much, MUCH more meaningful after you understand how Autotune does it. That's the stage I'm at right now. Even a pro tuner would let his equipment do all it is capable of before making manual edits.
If you have Autotune and a laptop, you don't need the POD for anything except for datalogging. ....and if you just let AT do the tuning, datalogging is probably not essential right away. Datalogging is valuable for finding spots in the map that AT has not fixed yet--and you can see exactly how much these spots need to be fixed. You restrict your AT by selecting min/max % trims for safety but that will also restrict AT from fixing some cells that are way off. you might have some bad spots that don't get worked out until you have done many runs. ...so data logging is good for positively identifying these areas instead of just letting AT whittle away at them slowly. I see some lean spots way up high in rpm on my data logs. I would never see them on an AFR gauge. They are probably only a few tenths of a second but I believe they should be fixed before going to nitrous.
Just trying to learn all I can before making any purchases.
that's the way to go. learn first, buy second and avoid the expense of upgrading to what you should have bought in the first place. As long as you have people willing to run their yappers, you can save a lot of $$.
I thought possibly if I had a way to data log I could send the log to a tuner and him tell me what fuel trims to do.
That would be what a tuner would do
after dyno tuning. Check the dyno tune against the real world. If it was a tuner who was very familiar with the stock mapping of the 14 and the map you are currently running, no doubt he could nail it down pretty close after a few datalogs were viewed and manual adjustments made. Probably a lot cheaper to just let him tune it but if the map you have now is good, your idea could work. If you're going to go that rout, you might as well try it yourself first. You'd just be adding a few units of fuel at a time and then checking AFR again. Basically doing what AT does albeit a lot slower.
'08 MIDNIGHT SAPPHIRE BLUE Now Deceased