Exactly, I pretty much have in my scanner, fire and police for the town I 
live in, the one I grew up in, another one or 2 neighboring towns which are 
interesting to listen to, Massachusetts emergency management stuff since I 
volunteer with them, and that's about it. I have 1000 channels in my current 
scanner and might use 30, 35 if I have the ham radio bank on for the local 
repeater and RACES ones and what not, much more than that it gets very 
confusing, you can't even follow a conversation because there's too much 
going on. The only thing all those channels is good for in my mind is 
trunked systems but since my scanner wont' do trunked for state polite and 
conventional for the local police at the same time, it's only on 
conventional and any more than what I use not gets confusing and sometimes 
it's confusing now since the town I grew up in the cops are nonstop because 
that place is so crime infested which is 1 of the main reasons why I left 
and will never move back. Lack of software has never bothered me.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "colin McDonald" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, September 06, 2010 12:32 PM
Subject: Re: A Question About Hand Held Scanners?


> perhaps i'm just stubborn, but i've never liked using programming software
> for anything.
> figuring out the programming process, and manually entering everything 
> seems
> like one is in far more control than fighting with some useless piece of
> unaccessible software?
> I guess if you want to program 500 frequencies, it might get tedious, but
> for myself, and I think it's probably true for most scanner listeners, you
> really only listen to perhaps 40 or 50 frequencies anyway, usually less 
> than
> that if you listen to 3 or 4 trunk systems.
> at one point, I programmed all 300 channels  into my bc245XLT...the 
> problem
> then became what I actually wanted to listen to.
> there was so much stuff in there that I started forgetting what was
> where...and ended up resetting and just programming a couple trunk systems
> and some very common police, fire and EMS along with air and transit
> frequencies...a total of 40 memory channels I think.  I just stick 
> different
> services and frequency groups into different banks on the scanner so I can
> shut off air freqs, or transit freqs, or police conventional freqs if I 
> want
> to listen to specific things without the other garbage getting in the way.
>
> it's nice to use radio reference and all that stuff with an accessible 
> piece
> of software, but sometimes, when you can't afford either a top end scanner
> or don't feel like paying $30/$70 for a subscription for 30 seconds worth 
> of
> download, then it's time to just figure it out yourself and go from there.
> we're all hams after all.  we're supposed to be able to figure these 
> things
> out given time and patients.
> I suspect the programming protacalls haven't changed all that much since 
> the
> bc245xlt...just choose your system type, enter frequencies, then talk 
> group
> info if you need to, and off you go.
> conventional is even easier than that.
> 73
> Colin, V A6BKX
> ----- Original Me