Is there yet another way of using time-based navigation which I have missed?
You are right: we don’t need Navigate anymore, because there are multiple methods to position the zoom window – some of them you’ve already discovered. Yet it cannot hurt to recall the methods without touch:
Back when we didn't have touch screens - and encoder acceleration generally didn't work so well on top of that, twiddling the time base knob absolutely wasn't an option when positioning a zoom window at high zoom factors. It would have taken forever - and it still does today. So, navigation was one of only two feasible ways to position the zoom window:
1.) start with a low zoom factor, do a coarse positioning and then increase the zoom factor, do a fine(r) positioning, repeat the last two steps if required.
2.) Use time navigate. The direction buttons act as automatic knob twiddlers with three different speeds, where the highest speed is very suitable for coarse positioning, because even with a very high zoom factor like one million, it takes only some 12 seconds to go from one end of the record to the other.
That was our best bet without touch interface.
Nowadays we can quickly enter the required delay in the time field of the Navigate function, which was a tedious task with the old instruments, where the numeric input field had to be operated by the universal control.
Yet as mentioned right at the start, with the touch-UI we don’t need Time Navigate anymore because now we have the zoom tab which we can touch and set the delay directly.
Yes, there are several occasions where we want to enter numerical values directly, namely:
1. When we need high precision and the desired value cannot be reached via the encoder. This usually isn’t an issue with vertical gain and horizontal time base settings, but might happen for FFT or Bode Plot applications.
2. When we need a big jump to set a completely different value – for parameters that cover an exceptional wide range with very high resolution. Setting the time base delay is an example, even more so for the zoom time base, where we can have 10 million zoom factor (20 ms and 2 ns per division), and the delay can be anything from 20 ps up to 200 ms with 20 ps resolution. Twiddling a knob certainly isn’t the method of choice in such situations.