> Tom, > > Suggestion would be to use the band buttons or to enter the frequency > on > the keyboard. > > This basically means that if you want to listen to something on say > 17.049, you can just enter 17[Enter] and it will go straight to 17MHz. > Then you can mousewheel up and down the band (all the way up to 1MHz > steps .you just cant mousewheel up/down the 10MHz step). >
This is an area I have long been concerned with and which (for good reasons no doubt) has not made it to the top of the list. The manual entry of frequencies needs, IMHO, some rethinking not just for SWL but for regular operating as well. The first and most important principle, already mentioned, is that the user _seldom_ wants to move a great distance in frequency. Sotto vocce, one presumes that in many such cases, the existing band buttons or saved frequencies might be used for many of these. The second principle that is not, to my understanding, implemented or planned is that typing a frequency should _only_ take effect when the mouse is over the VFO A _or_ VFO B displays. I have many times wanted to directly type something into VFO B. To my knowledge, this can't be done without doing the A<>B thing and then A<>B after. Awkward and, in some scenarios, counterproductive since you might be listening to A. It hurt us a couple of times in the DXpedtion to have the frequency change when we happened to have the focus slip from N1MM to the PowerSDR and then typed a number. There's workarounds, but it should be harder to make this mistake IMHO. Frequencies disappear fast in a contest. For now, I would settle for the typing to only matter when the cursor is in VFO A's area of the screen. That would help a lot. The third principle is that there needs to be an "undo" (perhaps the Esc key) that restores the frequency to whatever it was before one started typing. Moreover, the change should not take effect until the typing is completed (with, for instance, the enter key). Similarly, an incomplete typing (no enter key) should either do nothing or revert after some sort of time out, implementor's choice. Now, I think this works well for ordinary operating and I think it works nearly as well for SWL. Even there, when I do it, I don't do "gross" changes very often. And, if I stumble onto some station that isn't on any SWL list, I'd hate to lose it because my pencil hit the keypad. For big moves, we do have a "GEN" key with the band buttons, don't we (don't have the display in front of me). I don't know what it does now, but it could "walk up the MHz" or perhaps by 500 KHz per band button depression. As I had suggested before, a right click on that key (that now does nothing) might plausibly go the other direction, even if it isn't perfect general purpos human factors, which would help make this suggestion more useful. The other alternative is to add MHz Up/Down buttons as many rigs have. But, we're running out of room.
