As Carl noted, the Logitech mice that utilize what Logitech refers to as
"microgear" wheel action, work extremely well. (For those who are not
familiar with this technology, the mouse wheel is weighted, and it just
'free-wheels' without any mechanical click detents. It will spin five or
six revolutions with a single flick of the finger.) I'm uisng the "MX
Revolution", and I keep the PowerSDR tuning steps set to 50 Hz, for both
ssb and cw operation, and then use the keyboard's <shift> key to drop
the tuning steps by a factor of 10, down to 5 Hz for really fine tuning.
So, I click the signal of interest, and then scroll at a 50 Hz/step rate
until I get close and then just depress the shift key for instant
fine-tuning.
With the old analog radios, the characteristics of the main tuning knob
were always a major consideration, but we tuned those radios with a knob
until we heard something of interest. With PowerSDR, we can see
everything before we hear it, and the quickest way to get there is by
clicking on it with the mouse. I can't envision any scenario where
tuning with a conventional tuning knob would offer an advantage over
click-tuning with the panadapter. Even better would be a touch screen
with a fine-point stylus!
73, Dale
WA8SRA
Duane - N9DG wrote:
Would be curious what the typical tune step size folks are running in PowerSDR?
I typically run at either 1 or . 5 kHz step size. It is coarse enough that when
I click on the appropriate edge of a SSB signal that I see I will hit it dead
on 95% of the time. And for CW right on top of it. Occasionally I need to mouse
wheel a step or two.
So do many use the finer step sizes normally? Or the coarser ones like I do? The reason I
ask it makes me wonder if those who find point and click tuning "unfriendly"
are also the same ones who run fine sized tuning steps. Mostly just a curiosity..
On knob radios I find the extremely slow tunning rates choices/settings very
annoying, takes forever to tune a signal in. In that regard I always like the
older analog VFO's that were in the ~20 kHz per revolution rage.
Duane
N9DG
--- On Thu, 7/2/09, N4PY2 <n4...@earthlink.net> wrote:
I have solved this problem with a mouse wheel that is the
type that is weighted and spins. I have a logitech
MX620 mouse that works very well in this application.
<snip>
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Lloyd" <brian-wb6...@lloyd.com>
This is an interesting example of how a tiny change in
user-interface
can make a huge difference in usability. I too like a VFO
knob. It is
actually a very natural way to change frequency and
everyone is very
comfortable using it. On other radios it works very well.
Older radios
with analog VFOs have a much faster tuning rate so that one
can use
the finger dimple and quickly QSY from one end of the band
to the
other. Once you get near the desired frequency, the fact
that the VFO
is analog means that you can tune spot-on just by turning
the knob
very slowly.
<snip>
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