You state you are a newbie, if that's the case, programming by hand may be your problem until you fully understand how it all fits together. Use software.
I programmed my radio from radioreference with the culver city system a couple of years ago. Worked fine for a while but when i went to use it recently it no longer worked. Turns out at some point they changed the system. Previously my scanner was set to Motorola P25. That is what it was set to before and worked fine. When I changed it to P25 Auto it started working again but there are also a couple of new frequencies to add to the system and all of the talk group IDs have changed.
Yeah the software may be the way to go but I do t have a pc at the moment and like anything else doing by hand forces me to learn it a bit faster. Thanks for your input.