Welcome to the wonderful world of dynamic memory allocation...
What's been said already pretty much covers the bases. The biggest issue with most people new to either scanners or new specifically to dynamic memory is getting past that decades old "banks, channels" concept. It's tough, believe me I know. The first 3 days or so I had a Uniden BC-246T, the first dynamic memory allocation scanner, I nearly threw it across the room a few times - luckily I was just throwing the manual.
But anyway, I
did have a lightbulb moment where it all just made sense, and in that one moment I realized just how superior using DMA (Dynamic Memory Allocation, basically) is and how much it changes the face of our hobby.
To put it bluntly, everything in your scanner needs to be part of a
system. You can have conventional systems, aka the old style single frequency multipurpose communications style. You can also have trunked systems, aka the newer style multifrequency hopping multipurpose communications style.
When you create a system, of either kind, you then populate it with groups, which would be akin to how banks functioned in the old scanning memory/storage methodology. Say you had a 100 channel scanner that had 10 banks of 10 channels each. Say your local police used 4 frequencies for all their traffic, so you might have programmed in the first 4 channels of bank 1 as Police stuff. Then let's say your city had 4 frequencies of fire traffic, so you then programmed bank 2 with those 4 frequencies/channels. That way you could turn off bank 2 if you wanted to just hear police, or turn off bank 1 and just use bank 2 to monitor fire.
This was more efficient than constantly locking/unlocking the individual channels as required; you simply disabled an entire bank at once because
each bank was assigned to a purpose - and that's exactly what the function of a group is in today's DMA scanners.
A group is the same thing as a bank, more or less: a grouping of particular conventional frequencies (since each of those is typically a "channel") or a selection of particular talkgroup IDs (TGIDs) that identify specific purposes (like "South Patrol" or "Car-to-Car 1" etc). Inside the groups you'd then have the frequencies (aka channels) or you'd have the selected TGIDs bunched together and then give the group a name, like "Police" or "Fire" etc.
The mixup comes from the similar terminology: banks aren't really used anymore so that's out in common discussions nowadays (some stuff still has banks, like the Radio Shack mid to low end stuff, Pro-97, etc, 10 banks of 100 channels for 1000 total, etc). It's when you talk about channels and groups and systems where things get really confusing for those new to DMA style frequency and memory management.
The post above this one is pretty well laid out, I was going to do a similar diagram but that one works fine. Systems break down into conventional or trunked; then those systems break down into groups; inside the groups is where the real stuff is, either the conventional system frequencies or the trunked system talkgroups.
That's about it.
You define a system first, then you create groups, then you populate the groups with frequencies (aka channels for conventional systems) or talkgroup ID codes for trunked comms.
QuickKeys make it easy to enable or disable a System that you've created, and then you can enable or disable individual groups inside that system using GroupQuickKeys. So, if you're coming from using "bank" scanners, you probably know you could disable an entire bank when the scanner was in Scan mode just by pressing the keypad digit that corresponded to the bank you wanted to enable or disable.
In my example above with bank 1 for Police and bank 2 for Fire, on a Radio Shack "bank" scanner you'd press 0 to turn off the first bank if it was already enabled, and the 0 digit on the display would disappear - if the 0 was visible, it means that bank is enabled. Radio Shack did have that weird way of starting with 0 as the first of anything instead of starting with 1, but it made sense because most of their equipment designed by GRE was based on the 10 bank style = 0 through 9 is 10 digits, although I would have preferred 1 through 0 myself.
As I said, the biggest hurdle with someone new to DMA is getting past that old bank style thing. The downside to banks obviously was huge amounts of wasted channels that simply went unused. If you wanted to monitor one small number of frequencies and nothing else, say 4 or 5 frequencies, then you could theoretically lose upwards of 96 channels from being wasted and unusable in the same bank.
With DMA, that wasted memory is no longer an issue because the scanner only uses precisely the necessary amount of space to store the system/group/channels info you're creating.
To put it in the easiest possible terms,
everything is now considered to be a channel, and you can group together channels, and the groups of channels make a system, more or less. No more banks...
It's not as bad as it seems, really, it just takes time to get to that "AHA!!!" moment most if not all of us got to when DMA finally made sense. After that, this stuff is a breeze.
Good luck...
