10 vertical gridlines as standard
elraval opened this issue · comments
Hi.
Would it be possible to mantain 10 vertical gridlines?. The number of lines seem to change depending on the span now, and 10 gridlines is pretty standard in spectrum analysers.
Thank you in advance. Cheers,
D
The vertical gridlines are generated automatically by the 'pyqtgraph' module according to the major divisions on the graph display: https://pyqtgraph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api_reference/graphicsItems/griditem.html
It has an option to set the tick spacing (I would have to read about how to use it) but I don't see what the advantage to fixing the vertical grid to 10 lines would be instead of it setting discrete frequencies automatically?
10 gridlines allow for easy channel identification within a given span. My main use case is wireless microphone frequency coordination and band planning. My typical Span ranges when monitoring frequencies are multiples of 8MHz (which is the bandwidth of one TV channel in Europe). For instance, 80MHz span would make 10 channels visible with a gridline separating each one of them.
This would also work for other regions (i.e.: the US, with 6MHz multiples) or other use cases with spans that require consistent spacing divisions of 10.
I made a similar request https://groups.io/g/tinysa/message/10744 to Erik while ago and he built firmware revision on tinySA to accomodate this: https://groups.io/g/tinysa/topic/97840732#11011
Hope you find this topics helpful in understanding the advantages. Cheers
It is my belief that the old 10 (or what ever number) graticule divisions has had its day. It was born out of the requirement for something to subdivide a screen and had to be etched into the perspex screen.
However now we can have the flexibility to have the marking stay on a particular integer MHz boundry. But to accommodate any speific requirement of a 'not on a whole MHz' boundry we have the 'Preset bands and Markers' function within the preference tab. Attached is a screenshot where I have marked the channels in use at a Radio transmitter station.
In the mic use case TV channel boundries could be added as markers. The advantage over simple 10 graticules is that as one spans in or out, the marker will stay true to the frequency required not some arbitary location across the screen.
