Sheeeesh ....... now I see why this group is called "soft" radio. Leif ..... your efforts are unbelievable. I only wish I were 1/100th as knowledgeable as you so that I could attempt the same thing. From what I understand from the guys (and there are a lot of them Lief) that have mastered winrad, it is as good as any other out there. That it is complete and very useful. Thank you again for your many many hours of work and for your gift to SDR. There are several groups that I'm sure have more appreciative members that will be happy to have you included.
I for one have been using F1 and the info within to master software now for a long time. 73 Dohn Smythe N8EWY [email protected] Be patient - I'm pretty new to this stuff But I absorb fast! Looking for an Elmer near Tecumseh, MI - hint hint ----- Original Message ----- From: Leif Asbrink <[email protected]> To: soft radio <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:34:17 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [soft_radio] Re: Wish List for SDR software Hi Chuck and Jim, Chuck: > Linrad does not have a single piece of text on the screen > to explain what the various numbers mean. Can you name another > program that has absolutely no text to explain what all the numbers are? So you do not accept having to press F1. That is kind of interesting and it tells me I should stop trying to create an interest among DX-ers and HF operators. > You should not need user feedback to tell you that labels are needed, Oooh! I am so stupid that I actually needed your feedback to understand this. I am not capable of putting labels on everything and still make Linrad useful on a single screen computer and I actually thought that the F1 help system would be acceptable. > nor to tell you that the user community has found Linrad extremely > difficult to use. Hmmm, difficult to learn to master in full. Yes. But nobody has ever given a hint about something that is difficult to use. > I can't say that your newcomer page in any way resembles a manual. > Where does this page tell me what the numbers mean on the screen? It pedantically informs you about the F1 help and tells you to use it. That is the way numbers on the screen are explained in Linrad. I now know that it is unacceptable to most people so I will stop sending mails to this and other lists to try to attract interest from users from other communities than my own (VHF, EME and weak signal.) > Where does it explain how to make all the correct choices for setup? What is "correct"? Anything for which there is something that is correct (and everything else wrong) is not a user option. Every choice is correct if the user wants to do the particular processing that would become the result. Another thing is sliders. They may be incorrectly set like zero or maximum volume or a too low threshold for one of the noise blanker parameters. I have written many pages about how to set parameters to do particular things, and then of course a particular setting is correct and the other ones wrong. > I view Linrad as a wonderful engineering effort, but almost a zero > as a useful program. From what I hear from others in the HF / MF / LF > world (hams and DXers), that is unfortunately a unanimous opinion. OK. Thanks for telling me clearly. I will not spend my time on it any more. > It's a conclusion I did not want to make, because I would love to be > able to take advantage of some wonderful Linrad functions. You will have to wait until someone else brings them into some other software.... Jim: > Note: You can't make a program TOO easy to use ... you can't provide > TOO much OBVIOUS help. > Leif, if you have 100000 users of Linrad and they all have to spend MANY > HOURS or MONTHS to learn how to use it, just think of what additional > things could have achieved if those hours were NOT spent learning an > difficult program/operating system ... If YOU spend one man year and > improve the user interface to be as easy to learn as say WinRad ... it > would an HUGE savings of VALUABLE time ... Well, I always thought that the problem was the need to understand some of the physics of radio receiving, not actually controlling the Linrad or understanding what the graphs are (with dots not joined by lines etc.) It means that in my mind the time spent in learning how to master Linrad is very well spent and gives knowledge and skill that can be applied in many other contexts. Both of you send me the same message loud and clear. I actually did not understand before. Thanks:-) 73 Leif
