"Ian White G/GM3SEK" wrote in message
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For something like a receiver tuning control, even 256 steps/rev would
sound 'jumpy'. However, you could gear it up mechanically so that even a

Actually, 256 is getting too high in most cases. The "jumpiness" comes from
the size of the step, i.e., the number of Hz per step. Encoders between 50
and 100 are probably the easiest to deal with. You generally want to make
the step size small, like 1 or 10 Hz, but you don't want hundreds of turns
to cover the band. At very high resolutions, the pulses can come very fast,
so it gets tricky to distinguish the closure from noise. Of course,
higher counts can be made to work, and in principle, can be made to work
better. But generally, one is dealing with low level software and finite
compute resources to read the encoder, so the very high resolutions can
actually become somewhat problematic.

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