In the radio I programmed for myself, I used the switch for banks. I had one for the base freqs, one for county FD freqs and one with the local 2m repeaters. Most of the radios used the switch for scanning and scan list selection.
The HT1000 does not support banks, and it does not support more than 16 channels.
http://www.repeater-builder.com/motorola/jedi/pdfs/ht1000-specs.pdf
The HT1000/JT1000/Visar Page
It is possible to assign TALKAROUND to one of the A-B-C positions but not multiple zones.
I have programmed about 300 or so of these over the last 20 years and back in 1997 took an actual Motorola class on the Jedi series. To get more than 1 zone or bank operation, a customer would have to buy an MT2000.
The HT1000, JT1000 and Visar all share similar controller hardware, with the exception being the JT1000 which has modified firmware an CPU to accommodate a display and FPP of the 16 channels. The EEPROM available for codeplug storage is not enough to support anything other than 16 channels. End of story.
The codeplug structure is the same: 1 zone of 16 channels. If you look at the S-records from any of these radios, you will see there is NO WAY to enable zone operation. 640 bytes of codeplug space is all that is available.
If you have set yours up for zone operation, what version of HT1000/JT100/Visar RSS are you using, and how does one select the option for zone operation? Don't see that as one of the choices. How were you able to add more than 1 zone in the S-record? How did you get more than 1 zone to fit in the 640 byte codeplug and get the radio firmware to recognize it?