From your description of what you want, I think memory banks are exactly what you want. Great call!

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“liverman at att.net” just posted a good explanation so I’ll not repeat but hopefully expand.

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As he(?) alluded to, the ordering of entries in the memory locations is completely separate from how you can assign them to a memory bank.? At first we made entries into the memory locations in an order that made sense to us.? Don’t recall our thoughts at the time on the ordering…

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We finally decided to keep things simple for us and made the memory organization identical to our local EOC (Mountain View).? That way when we worked the EOC and needed to go to a specific frequency, we generally knew the memory #.? For example, MTV tactical 1 or County Message Net or Hospital Net.? The reverse was also true: after working the EOC, the FT60 locations were easier to remember.? I’m pretty sure your EC, Jerry, has a file of the typical Sunnyvale settings that he passes out.? I’m sure he’ll give you the file – if it isn’t online already!? If you need contact information for Jerry or any EC in the County, go to the County website.? If you have issues getting that, contact me off list.

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I know we all in MTV can get a file with the MTV EOC “load”.? There is no requirement that we do but most people use it.? My YL & I have the same basic memories in all our radios which really helps if we grab one of our old backup HTs or use the mobile rig in the “other” car

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We also decided to use the huge number of memories available along with the Banks.

Bank 1 is memory location 1 through 300 and all memory channels are set to display the frequency.

Bank 2 is memory location 401 through 700 and all memory channels are set to display the call sign.? Easy for repeaters, needs some tweaking for simplex.? The ordering is the same as 1-300: memory 1 has the same settings as memory 401 other than the display.

Bank 3 is memory locations 701 through 1000 and all memory channels are set to display the tactical call.? Again, the order is the same.? Memory 1 == memory 401 == memory 701

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For example, one memory, call it X, displays the repeater frequency of 145.270, the location 400 away, 40X, show W6ASH, and the one 700 away, 70X, shows RSCNOR (for resource net north).? This bank style allows us to more easily follow instructions regardless of style.

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So what about the 300-400 gap?? We placed all the police and fire departments in there with the display set to their tactical call, whatever they themselves use.

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We come nowhere close to using all the memories even with this tripling.? Wonderful radio!

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We have fun with the other banks

????????????? When we work an public service event, we use bank 10 to designate/tag all the frequency used by that event.? If the use a frequency not in our standard load, we use one of the spare locations.? This not only makes it easy to avoid getting on the wrong channel during the chaos of an event, if things get boring you can scan all the event frequencies (but be sure to use the pause and not the stop scan or you can lose track of your own messages!)? Well, this actually only is practical at events where most of the channels are low traffic – otherwise I find it too distracting.? My wife is better at not getting distracted than I am!

????????????? Remember that a specific memory channel can be assigned to more than one bank.? This merely means here that a setting channel can be assigned to the public service bank without affecting its availability to the “normal” bank.

????????????? We have a back assigned to the local police & fire.? In our case, MTV, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and yours: Sunnyvale.? That’s just for fun.? General set the FT60 to scan when this bank is active.

????????????? For events that occur every year, we use the other banks.? Los Altos Festival of Lights gets a bank.? Tour De Cure gets one.

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Let your imagination run wild.? What we did works for us but there are a lot a other great ideas out there!

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Andy