Understanding Your Scanner; Channel Storage Banks; Service Banks - Radio Shack 20-405 User Manual

Understanding Your Scanner

Once you understand a few simple terms used in this manual and familiarize
yourself with your scanner's features, you can put the scanner to work for you.
Simply determine the type of communications you want to receive, then set the
scanner to scan them.
A frequency is the receiving signal location (expressed in kHz or MHz). To find
active frequencies, use the search function or consult an online resource such
as www.radioreference.com.
When you find a frequency, you can store it into a programmable memory
location called a channel, which is grouped with other channels in a channel-
storage bank. You can then scan the channel-storage banks to see if there is
activity on the frequencies stored there. Each time the scanner finds an active
frequency, it stays on that channel until the transmission ends.

Channel Storage Banks

To make it easier to identify and select the channels you want to listen to, your
scanner divides the channels into 10 banks (1 to 10) with 20 channels each,
for a total of 200 channels. You can use each channel-storage bank to group
frequencies, such as those used by the police department, fire department,
ambulance services, or aircraft.
For example, you could program the frequencies used by your local police
department starting with Channel 1 (the first channel in bank 1) and program
the fire department frequencies starting with Channel 21 (the first channel in
bank 2).

Service Banks

The scanner is preprogrammed with the frequencies allocated to marine, fire/
police, aircraft, ham radio, FM broadcast and weather services. This is handy for
quickly finding active frequencies instead of searching through an entire bank
(see "Service Bank Search" on page 17).