Joy,
I use the banks to divide the frequencies into groups for different parts of the state (and neighboring states) so that I can enable and disable scanning those channels as I travel around the state...which I do about once or twice a month. That way when I am around my house, I only scan the repeaters near my house, but when I travel to Denver, I can turn off the bank containing my home repeaters and enable the bank with the Denver repeaters.
Bank 1 = Colorado Simplex frequencies
Bank 2 = Repeaters reachable near my home
Bank 3 = Denver
Bank 4 = Pueblo & Canon City
Bank 5 = New Mexico
etc.
Bank 10 = Public Service (monitor only) - we still use VHF in my rural county.
How to use it? Well, I got this all from the manual, but it is complicated - this is one of the most powerful features of the FT60 in my opinion, but is is complicated to program and somewhat complicated to use.
What you do is to load the frequencies using CHIRP or RT Systems or G4HFQ software. Put them in whatever order makes sense to you. I have mine in ascending by frequency, but blocked a little bit. 0-100 is simplex
100-300 is Colorado, 300's is NM, above 900 is Public Service. But I am thinking of doing it just by frequency as that seems to make more sense when I am hunting for a channel. But the jury is still out for me on that point :)
Anyway. What can you use banks for? Once you understand that, you can understand how to assign banks to channels. I said it that way on purpose. That seems to be the way the SW I use is organized ...but after you do it, you have the effect of having channels assigned to banks. The FT60 has 10 banks, each channel can be in zero banks or up to all ten. The banks control the channels you can select by using the channel select knob AND the channels that are scanned. The Specifics of enabling banks on and off will take too long (I gotta go to work) for this post. When banks are enabled, the channels you can select are ONLY those from that bank. You can select multiple banks for multi-bank scanning. Or you can scan just the selected bank.
You can use CHIRP to assign banks to channels - there is a separate tab for that. But I find G4HFQ to be MUCH easier for this particular task. SO I use G4HFQ - see their docs and you'll see what I mean. I can set up the channels and banks in Excel and use all my favorite fill and sort and filter tools in Excel to handle the hundreds of frequencies (we have 300+ repeaters in Colorado alone and I want this radio to be ready to handle any of them when I travel).
If this doesn't get you over the hump, let me know.
Greg Liverman