I can't make head or tail of this scanner programing, I ONLY want to listen to
about 23 - 866, 867 and 868 channels as well as two 154 and two 424 channels.
This thing is to much like windows, it "thinks" it knows better then I do what I want to listen to.
You don't really give enough info to help, where exactly is your problem? Have you actually entered the items of interest and it's scanning but you can't turn what you want on/off? Or are you not even getting it to scan? Maybe not even getting the frequencies entered?
A few pointers to start out, perhaps they'll help some:
With this scanner, for trunked systems you need to stop thinking in terms of frequencies/channels. To scan them, you first create a "TSYS" (trunked system) object. Inside that, you will configure what the system type is and enter all the frequencies for the particular site you will be listening to.
After that is created, you create "TGRP" objects for each talkgroup you want to hear. Or you can create a "wildcard" TGRP that will let you hear anything that comes across the system. Each of these TGRP objects is pointed to the appropriate TSYS so the scanner knows what system to scan to look for it.
And THEN you enable which "scanlists" you want to hear the talkgroups in. They will all default to a particular scanlist (I think the factory default is 1). So if you are hearing *everything* in just a single scanlist, then all you need to do is edit the various objects and adjust the scanlist settings. This is the one thing that kind of threw me at first - because you can have an object in several scanlists, you have to also
turn off unwanted scanlists. So if it defaults to 1, and you want it in 3, you need to edit the object and go to the scanlist line. Hit the left/right arrows to bring up "1". If it has a * beside it, it's enabled. Press SEL to disable (get rid of the *). Then arrow to 3 and hit SEL to enable it.
Conventional frequencies are the same way, you just don't have the first "TSYS" step. Just create a CONV object, enter the frequency and other info (alpha tag, set scanlists, whatever) and you're done with them.
Also, when programming an object there is a L-O-N-G list of parameters you can adjust. I have found for basic entry - especially for conventional frequencies - I only use the first 3-5 of them and ignore the rest unless I really need them. Scanlist, frequency and alpha-tag are the mandatory three. Then maybe squelch type / code for CTCSS/DCS decoding, but those aren't required.
Yes, the software makes it much easier to program (and I use it too, otherwise I'd have been here for hours entering my state's trunked system with hundreds of TGs - alpha tagging is where it gets very slow by hand) but it's also quite useful to know how to program the thing by hand. Not only are you able to enter something on the fly if desired, it helps to understand how the thing works! I certainly don't think it's impossible to program by hand, just a different paradigm - you have to look at the setup differently, and it does take some getting used to.
