Just wanted to preface by saying this: using any tuning system without a good Wideband o2 is destined to fail, so in that aspect, the Dobeck at least seems like it could work.
<rant begins> WARNING: Get it out of your heads that "you can't damage your engine" "the dobeck is safe because bla bla bla" and other such mumbo jubmo. ANY device that lets you vary the AFR into the leaner than stoich range has the potential to cause catastrophic damage to your ring lands. Luckily, modern engines are highly tolerant of being lean, but, if yourr o2 were to drift in accuracy say... 5%, and your gas were only a couple octane points off, and the temp of air was say 10 degrees hotter that day than when you tuned the bike. You will be at very high risk of ping/detonation/pre-detonation. TL/DR: NO TUNING DEVICE IS "SAFE" OR "WITHOUT RISK" when tweaking AFRs in high power motors. </rant ends>
Not sure I really care enough to explain in detail why but will if I have to, for now:
All piggyback controllers (as in PC3, PC5, AFR 4, supermegaproductwahteverthe****itscalled), are inferior to TuneECU except one. That one, is not available for our bikes, and is not one of the products already metioned in this thread, so I shall not mention the product name for sake of avoiding a forum war.
TuneECU and TuneBOY, are, and will always be vastly superior to the piggybacks. There is no opinion here, no bias, no agenda. It is straight up fact that the piggybacks will never.... ever..... ever ever ever, using their current paradigm of signal intercept/modification, be as good as adjusting the base map in the ECU. There IS a good way to do piggybacks that improves fueling control, but none of these companies knows how to do it, and I suspect they will never figure it out.
THAT SAID:
Probably the easiest way to get your awesome custom tune is encompased in the easy steps below:
1: Buy TuneECU cable ($8.00 on ebay).
2: Download TuneECU and program your stock/nearly stock bike with the Power-Tripp map.
3: Buy PC5 and setup on bike.
4: Get a "Custom Tune" done on a dyno.
5: Go home and offload the map from the PC5 to your computer.
6: Use the values in the table to modify the trims in the Power-Tripp map in TuneECU, save as supermegamap.xxx
7: Install the new supermegamap.xxx into your ECU.
8: REMOVE the PC5 completely from your bike and enjoy.
Be happy. Now you have a "custom" tune for your bike. Is it safe for the bike? Yes. Will it run better than stock? Probably. Is there still more power to be had via tuning? Absolutely!
In reality, NO tuner who only uses PC3/PC5 and shoots for a target afr, will ever be able to make an optimal tune for your bike, but they can get pretty good tunes for your bike. Having a load cell dyno and a tuner that will use TuneECU directly, that knows how to program for power not target AFR is what you want to find. Currently I know of only one guy in the US that does it..... Power-Tripp.
NOTE: Having a piggyback so you can "lean it out on road trips" is so wrong I don't even have the words. If it is tuned right in the first place, it is already lean in cruise and doesn't have a lot of room to get leaner safely.