I really don't know, but every radio I ever had, seemed to break. I must have owned a dozen scanners over the years, but I never really knew how I wanted to program. Being Police Explorer and Town member, I need a radio to monitor all of districts in the PPD. I also wanted to listen to neighboring Town Watches and Railroads. However, most earlier scanners, didn't have Banks. Once, the manufactures added Banks or Folders, I still couldn't figure out which frequency to assign to what channel. The majority of those scanners, you could assign channel equally, in my opinion,..
Example
Bank 1 20 channels
01 - 20
01 Tacony Tw
02 NE Band
03 J-Band
04 M- Band
05 T-Band
Bank 2 20
21 - 30
21 AAR 46
22 AAR 54
23 AAR 16
24 AAR 64
25 AAR 75
I guess the Big Guy upstairs don't want me to have a simple to use scanner..
Radio systems these days, especially digital trunked systems, are far more complicated than those of 10 to 20 years ago. The farther back you go, the more obvious the differences become. Some of the more recent scanners, such as Uniden's 160DN & 260DN, do still utilize banks, but these scanners, and other simplified scanners, are not capable of handling trunked systems, and, in many cases, are incapable of dealing with digital transmissions. The 160DN & 260DN have limited digital capability, for DMR & NXDN, but not P25, and not digital trunked systems that are commonly used for public safety agencies.
While the newer digital scanners, such as Uniden's x36HP & SDS series, as well as Whistler's TRX scanners, do not have the old style 'banks', their memory is configured such that you can, in effect, duplicate the banks used in older units, with one large advantage. The Uniden's use Quick Keys, which can be used to categorize systems for a specific area or agency. The TRX scanners use Scanlists, which can also be used to categorize programmed agencies & channels. These have a significant advantage over the old style banks, in that you have the flexibility to make these pretty much any size you want. In an older, "banked", scanner, you might have your city or county in a single bank, so that you can access it easily, or temporarily 'turn it off' when something else caught your interest. But if you made an effort to restrict each bank to a specific area or usage type, then you'd end up with a number of "blank" channels, with nothing programmed in them. That would be especially the case if each "bank" was 50, or 100, channels.
For the Uniden scanners, you can assign a specific Quick Key to a given category, whether it's a department in your hometown city, or county, or a state agency, or anything else. Then use that key for all channels related to that category, whether it's 5, 10, 20, or more. No 'blank', wasted, channels in an otherwise large bank. Use the quick key to toggle those channels on or off easily. If things change, and that category of channels grows larger, you can program additional channels, and assign those to the same key whenever you have the need or desire, without being restricted to an unchangeable "bank" size.
The TRX scanners don't use banks either, nor Quick Keys, but do use Scanlists. Assign a list number to a specific purpose or category, then add however many channels (frequencies, or talkgroups for a trunked system) that fall in that same category. Here again, you are not restricted to a specific number of channels for a given Scanlist. Split them up however it makes the most sense to you. And, like the Uniden scanners with their Quick Keys, you have the ability to later add additional channels categorized with the same Scanlist number. No wasted blank channels here either.
Is there a learning course, compared to the older scanners? Sure, but once you begin to understand the differences, and use them to your advantage, you have much more flexibility
