To answer your question, No I have not used any of the hand-held programmers. However, I got a custom tune done on my 2005 truck with a 6.0 a couple years ago and I can honestly say that it is the best money I have ever spent on anything for my truck. The tune is typically cheaper than a hand-held (obviously depends on who you get to tune it vs which programmer etc.) and the tune can net better results than the programmer because it is done for YOUR truck and is not a generic type of program that is loaded on the computer. Also, it can grow with you if you decide you want to make those small upgrades a little more serious, because most tuners will alter the tune for free or a very small charge. Another benefit is that with the custom tune you are able to change most anything you want that the computer deals with (for an example, of many other things, I got the torque management removed and made transmission shifts more firm, with accompanying transmission mods of course), and to my knowledge, that is not possible with a hand-held. To sum it up, in my opinion a custom tune is better than a hand-held in many ways, unless you really want to be able to do it yourself.
Hope that helps some.
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