I used to have a BC72XLT scanning SJ/Bay Area stuff. I found that the 100 channels were a limitation once I started trying to add in lots of Dot/Star freqs, FRS/GMRS, etc. I does fine, though for basic monitoring of Police, Fire, EMS, and aviation.
San Jose PD 20 channels will fill up two entire banks. It makes most sense to enter them in the same order as in the RadioReference database, so when the dispatcher says "211 is working on Chan 7"
you will be able to easily select that channel on your scanner.
I'd put other law enforcement (CHP San Jose, Santa Clara County Sheriff, any adjacent cities you are interested in) in another bank. If there's room, also put in all of the BayMacs freqs (Bay Area Mutual Aid).
I put various Fire and EMS in another bank. The 72 cannot receive the 800MHz Med91 dispatch freq, but there is a simulcast of it at 453.1. I predict that you will lock it out after a short while, since it is very busy.
You also need to think a bit about how you will use the Priority Channel feature. The 72 can assign 1 channel out of each bank of 10 as a priority channel. I found that I really only wanted 1 or two priority channels and ended up keeping blank or unassigned freqs in each bank so these could be assigned as priority .... effectively disabling the priority scan for that bank.
Another bank might be for aviation related stuff. SJC and Reid Hillview towers and ground control and the various airline operations freqs at SJC.
PG&E has only 2 freqs for the line repair crews in Santa Clara county. The DeAnza (Cupertino) yard handles some areas of San Jose, such as the area adjacent to Cupertino/Saratoga/Los Gatos. Most of San Jose is on the Edendale freq.
There are lots of other things to monitor, such as shopping centers and fast food. You will probably eventually end up with a few things that you routinely monitor. It is useful to reserve one bank for just those freqs that you frequently monitor. For example, you might have in that bank the SJPD for the area in which you live, even though it duplicates the entry in the banks that have the full set of SJPD in numerical channel sequence.
Play around a bit. You can alway reprogram it.
Range is difficult to predict. It depends mostly on the height of the transmitter. So you will find that you can receive the SJPD repeater outputs easily, but it is much harder to pickup the signal from the cars directly.
