Hi,

My day job is as software engineer and I'm newb user of WSJT-X, so I was
thinking a first impressions feature request list might be of some value.
I've been using WSJT-X significantly for a month or so now to good effect
(just need Alaska for WAS), along with the tangentially related JTAlert for
a couple of weeks, and I have a few suggestions that might make WSJT-X a
little better for new users. Since your support message said you would
welcome suggestions, here they are. (I definitely don't expect anything to
be acted, it's as much informing future direction)

version 2.5.0rc5

0) Maybe I don't understand it, but I think there's a bug: In rig split
operation, I have to select the band I'm interested in two times before it
switches both A and B over. Also, I didn't find mode Data/Pkt worked right
with my 7300 in split operation: it kept turning off Digital mode seemingly
randomly - my gut reaction is .these two issues might be related.

1) It would be nice if, instead of 'hold tx freq' checkbox, there was a
text box with a arrow button so I can keep a tx frequency I want a
long-term hold on to while I go chasing down someone who (because of gear,
I assume) are only responding to people on their CQ channel, then I can go
easily back.
1.b) I see something similar to this in another recent thread, but if you
can default it to a freq that doesn't look like it's been used in the first
few monitoring cycles, that would be helpful for first-time users, some
of whom (me) had taken over someone else's band unknowingly.
1.c) It felt odd to me that the right receive window doesn't (have an
option to) decodoe both my receive and current transmit frequency, as this
would allow one to detect that someone has taken over where you were
transmitting from.

2) if I turn off enable tx, I would really like the auto sequencer state
machine to continue to process an in-progress call and have switched to Tx3
so when I turned enable back on, it would be sending the right message -
right now, ifI just enable it, it just repeats the last message. What I
have to do now is alt-3 to get it to send the right message, and alt-n for
enable, turning it into more of a fast-twitch video game than was probably
intended. :)

2.b) Speaking of that, I am having trouble getting used to alt-e being
Erase. Do people do it that often? Alt-E is right next to alt-1-6, so for
my purposes, it would be better for it to be Enable. Did that change at
some point - it feels like it changed between 2.2.2 and 2.2.5, but maybe
that's just an illlusion. That said, if it weren't for #2 I probably
wouldn't have noticed it.

3) I would like to do something like shift-click and do the same as
double-click except without enabling TX (so, double-click enables TX and
starts the state machine, doing a shift-click or something over a callsign
just populates the DX Call and DX Grid fields. Just to satisfy a
curiousity about who or where some call is from or to, &c.

4) I'm generall pro built-in scripting, so someone (like me) could write up
simple functionality - specifically that would allows keeping track of
multiple calls so I can get back to the right one, and maybe to tie
multiple instances of WSJT-X listening to different receivers. Doing this
would probably make jtalert integration even better (although it's
surprising what they can do). I'm not up to signing up for major projects,
but this bit I think I could help with if it's considered within scope
(well, except for #7, which stops me from participating).

5) I have two (or four, really) HF antennas, I'd like to keep more than one
transmitter going, say by listening to all messages (even and odd) on one
band, and one transmitting all messages in both exe and odd on the other.
There really isn't a way to do this particularly thing even with two
instances of wsjtx.

6) Indeed, control of multiple rigs would also seem to have another benefit
at a gut level: it seems like we could have something that's FT8-like, but
sends the same data on multiple bands at the same time, and (this is far
beyond me, but it sounds feasible) the deep decoder could take in both
samples and doing so, could maybe find matches more deeply in the noise?

7) Would you consider releasing it additionally under some other license?
According to the license doc I looked at, it's released under GPLv3, which
I found repugnant even antithetical, to the notion of cooperation and open
source at its inception and the experience of how it's been wielded as a
weapon in a biased fashion has born that out. It has definitely bifurcated
the open source community to its detriment. (I'd be happy to continue to
make the arguments and deal with objections privately or in a different
forum, I just wanted to put it out there as a stumbling block to
participation.)

Thanks for the work,

JRP
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