As we've discussed before, programming the Unication for a road trip is far from easy.... it can be done but it will be time consuming and difficult.
You must remember that:
- if you program many sites (or wildcards site data and/or FSS) along the route, the radio will always choose a site for you - and it may not be the one you want for where you are - it could (will likely) be the one behind you as you go and it could even be a site no where near you.
- consider that along the route, the talkgroups are likely to change as you travel through counties or regions/districts and there is a limit on how many talkgroups can be placed into a single knob.
Putting the radio into FSS and TS-Monitor mode - using system parms (WACN, SysID and/or even RFSS with wildcard Site FF) - could work but still with two problems - (a) no TG alpha tags and (b) no encryption muting - it can get ugly depending upon where you are and how busy the system is and how much encryption is present. Even doing this, you'll want a different zone/knob for each system along the route.
I've done some "road trip" programming - both trying monitor mode and wildcards as well as route specific zone/knob. Each knob contained a specific system site and talkgroups configured based on the county I was passing through. As I crossed the county lines along the drive, I'd switch zones. This works if you know the area well and what you might hear on which sites along the route but not so well if you don't. And, again, extremely tedious and time consuming to do this level of detailed programming for a trip where you are only in an area for < 1 hour maybe twice over a week for the trip.
These days, I do less programming like this for the drive and focus more on where I'll be spending at least a day - it's much more useful and worthwhile....
