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gqrx-sdr
Side-to-side scrolling using mouse wheel tilt moves modem in unexpected direction
I have noticed that I can use the scroll-wheel tilt feature of my mouse to change the modem frequency, which for me is preferable to actually rotating the scroll wheel, as continuous scrolling is possible with the wheel tilted left or right.
However, it seems that the direction of the wheel tilt is in opposition to the effect on the modem frequency. For example, i tilt the scroll wheel to the right, expecting the modem frequency to increase and therefore for the visible modem passband to also move to the right, but the modem passband moves to the left and the frequency goes down.
Having said that, there is perhaps a more desirable use-case for the wheel-tilt facility. Instead of changing the modem frequency (as with scrolling up/down using the mouse wheel), it could change the hardware frequency instead. If gqrx were to adopt this approach, I might expect the modem passband to move in the opposite direction to the wheel tilt, as the modem should remain on the same frequency, whilst the entire spectrum/waterfall moves with it, at least until the modem passband hits the edge of the spectrum at which point something else must happen.
I don't know which of these two outcomes is more desirable. The first is probably what a user would expect, but the second would offer a way to QSY the hardware directly and as of this time, there doesn't seem to be any other way of doing that, other than by scrolling the modem to the edge of the spectrum and continuing to scroll in the same direction. The disadvantage of doing that is that the hardware frequency slewing step size seems to be governed by the selected modem (i.e. 10Hz for SSB/CW, 100Hz for AM/NFM and 1kHz for WFM) and can therefore be quite slow. I would recommend perhaps 1% of the sample rate in order to QSY faster.
I think what you experience is a side effect of what is called "natural scrolling" - I believe it was invented by Apple, and basically reverses the scroll direction compared to what you might be used to. It makes sense when using a touchpad or a touchscreen but is just wrong when using a traditional mouse.
So, since the actual behavior depends on the hardware device, the OS default and the user settings, the only safe way to handle this is to make it a configure option.
PS: I don't understand what you mean by there is no way of changing the hardware frequency directly - When you change the frequency on the big digits, the delta is applied directly to the hardware.
On 12/08/13 21:57, Alexandru Csete wrote:
I think what you experience is a side effect of what is called "natural scrolling" - I believe it was invented by Apple, and basically reverses the scroll direction compared to what you might be used to. It makes sense when using a touchpad or a touchscreen but is just wrong when using a traditional mouse.
I tried to live with a Mac mouse using the new paradigm, but found that my brain/hand became confused when using Linux and Windows machines and in the end I configured OS X to be consistent with them.
makes sense if the sideways scrolling is intended to scroll the spectrum, not the HW or modem frequency. I thought there was an inconsistency in that when side-scrolling the modem to the right, nothing moved to the right, but I now see that when the modem hits its endstop, the whole spectrum slews to the right, as it does when side-scrolling the actual HW frequency to the right, so gqrx is consistent as is.
So, since the actual behavior depends on the hardware device, the OS default and the user settings, the only safe way to handle this is to make it a configure option.
Possibly. I'd certainly prefer gqrx to be able to operate in the opposite sense for left/right scrolling (up/down is fine as is) and would have thought that those who favoured natural scrolling would have that enabled at the OS level. To recap, I think that up and right should do the same thing, likewise for down and left. I wonder how gqrx currently behaves on a Mac with natural scrolling enabled?
PS: I don't understand what you mean by there is no way of changing the hardware frequency directly - When you change the frequency on the big digits, the delta is applied directly to the hardware.
Yes, you are correct. I don't know what I was thinking at that point. Perhaps I was having flashbacks to earlier versions. Sorry.
Congrats on the new release, BTW.
On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 12:11 AM, Darren Long [email protected] wrote:
On 12/08/13 21:57, Alexandru Csete wrote:
I think what you experience is a side effect of what is called "natural scrolling" - I believe it was invented by Apple, and basically reverses the scroll direction compared to what you might be used to. It makes sense when using a touchpad or a touchscreen but is just wrong when using a traditional mouse.
I tried to live with a Mac mouse using the new paradigm, but found that my brain/hand became confused when using Linux and Windows machines and in the end I configured OS X to be consistent with them.
makes sense if the sideways scrolling is intended to scroll the spectrum, not the HW or modem frequency. I thought there was an inconsistency in that when side-scrolling the modem to the right, nothing moved to the right, but I now see that when the modem hits its endstop, the whole spectrum slews to the right, as it does when side-scrolling the actual HW frequency to the right, so gqrx is consistent as is.
Actually, there is no explicit handling of side scrolling in gqrx, so what you are experiencing is a default mapping either in the OS or Qt and the direction is quite random.
Alex
On 12/08/13 23:16, Alexandru Csete wrote:
Actually, there is no explicit handling of side scrolling in gqrx, so what you are experiencing is a default mapping either in the OS or Qt and the direction is quite random. Bugger. I suppose there's no obvious way to change something that is undefined. Not to worry.
Cheers,
Darren
No, I meant that if we will handle these events ourselves we can do whatever we want. Until then we just have some default behaviour.
I am running into the same issue. It seems like subtle side-by-side scrolling in any direction on my touchpad makes gqrx zoom in super fast. This "completes" with the up/down scrolling on my touchpad and makes the software appear to "glitch" when scrolling. This unfortunately affects all aspects of scrolling in gqrx, and makes using it with a touchpad pretty problematic.
@synthead Hi, it looks like the issue was about scrolling direction whereas issue you are describing seems to be about scrolling speed, is it? If yes, please can you create new issue? If not, can you please add step by step how to reproduce the issue (just few more details to what you already described).
The issue is about a mouse with secondary horizontal scrolling wheel or tilting wheel. In my case horizontal wheel does nothing over the waterfall/panadapter, but zooms in over any panadapter axis independent of rotation direction. Horizontal wheel works as expected in a bookmarks list (if I enable enough columns to have horizontal scrolling).
