I have looked at the frequency list for Payne County in
Oklahoma on RR and they get most of it right but I have also
seen stuff that is several years out of date. I used their
information to program in an E.F. Johnson LTR trunk system and
that worked like it should but I mainly did it to see if I could
because what I got for all that was a paratransit company which
takes people to the doctor and then there is ReadyMix Concrete
which is one busy company. They pour concrete all day and half
the night in the Summer and frantically clean their mixers
between jobs since there is nothing much more ruined than a
setup batch of cement still in the mixer.

	Their was a taxi company on there for a while that was
kind of interesting in the evenings as they picked up and
dropped off drunk people at various clubs and then tried to get
them to their homes in one piece.

	If anybody interesting ever gets on there again, I can
open that bank back up but normally, there's nothing to hear but
folks working very hard.

	One thing you'll find out about the BCD996 is that it is
truly different than most scanners in the way one stores
frequencies. You'll read in the manual about something called systems
instead of so many banks. Systems are just groups of
frequencies. Some of them are trunked systems but others are
just aggrigations of channels such as FRS or CB or your local
police frequencies that are not trunked or may not even have any
repeaters. Unlike many other scanners, you can't set the
individual tone coded squelch or the time delay between channels
but you set a delay or not for the whole system. The book says
you can have up to 500 systems programmed in to your BCD996 so
it's perfectly okay to have a system containing just 1 channel
if that's what you need.

	I have a BC780 that tracks some trunked systems and it
uses ten banks so one bank is occupied with the Johnson system
and isn't really any good for anything else so 45 out of 50
possible channels are just wasted.

	The BC780 is easier to change on the fly but the BCD996
is more thrifty in the number of channels you can save. It may
just take a bit more work to get there on the BCD996.

	Keep that in mind and you will understand what your
programming software is trying to do as you fill up your scanner
with frequencies.

	I don't even use the GPS functions on my BCD996 as it is
used as a base so doesn't move around but I am sure it is
helpful for people moving about their area as it should always
be ready to work wherever you go.

	Good luck and don't spend too much time listening to
cement trucks. Unless you're waiting for them to come and pour
your tower base or your Olympic-sized in-ground pool, it's not
terribly exciting.

	Just for the record, I do have a tower base but the pool
is just a dream.

Martin WB5AGZ
Butch Bussen writes:
> I don't think this one will do it with zip code, this isn't the patrol
> model.  Oddly enough, mine did not come with a cd, don't know why, it
> has a printed manual.
> 73