Owner`s manual

use Text labels, and other parameters. With the 21 available V-Scanners this works out to over 37,000
available memories. Will you be able to program 37,000 channels? Probably not, but you might if you try
hard enough!
If you want to see how much memory you have used or have left you can press “0” twice during the start-
up screen.
V-Scanners
The RadioShack (as well as GRE) digital radios have a feature called V-Scanners. These are basically 21
sets of scanner memories available to be loaded into your scanner.
Imagine it like having 21 different scanners in one, but you can only listen to one at a time. This is useful
for people that travel often between several locales or have multiple scanning targets. You can also use this
to back up variations in your programming so that if you really mess something up you can restore the
radio to a prior configuration. Think of this idea as sort of a manually saved Restore Point.
While it takes a couple minutes for the V-Scanners to load it is not difficult to do. When you Save to a V-
Scanner the entire radio contents are saved, including frequencies, talkgroups and searches, any startup
configurations and settings as well as anything else you have in the radio.
To use the V-Scanner feature press the FUNC then PGM buttons. From there you can load, store or erase
V-Scanners.
Banks & Channels, Nuh uh!
On older scanners with defined banks the user entered channels into the banks. If your radio has 10 banks
of 100 channels each (for a total of 1000 channels) and you only used 10 channels in a specific bank the
extra 90 channels would be wasted. You could lose use of a great deal of the available memories this way.
In addition, most older radios were limited to 10 banks. This normally limited you to up to 10 trunked
systems or sites, with further limitations on programming methods since you could usually only have a
single trunked system per bank. If a trunked system only had 5 or 6 frequencies the other channels in the
bank were probably wasted. While most recent scanners allow you to program in conventional channels to
use up some of the wasted channel space in banks with trunked systems, in practice this was not often done.
Once you set up the trunked frequencies you would then program in trunked talkgroups. While these would
not take away from regular channel memory, there was usually a strict limit to the amount of talkgroups
allowed in scan lists.
The PRO106’s OOUI allows you to program many more trunked systems into the radio, and, with proper
use of the Scan Lists you can pick and choose the channels or talkgroups you want, in many different
combinations. With the 10 bank limit of older scanners you had few choices of how to scan, with the
PRO106 method the choice is almost limitless.
The PRO106’s method is different than Uniden’s in that the PRO106 Scan Lists point to various channels,
talkgroups or searches programmed into a single pool of memories. Uniden has the user program separate
Systems that contain either conventional or trunked systems and you switch Systems on or off
(enable/disable). While Uniden scanners have more available channel memory, the PRO106 method allows
you to share a single frequency or talkgroup among multiple Scan Lists.
Sadly, however the PRO106 limits one to 20 Scan Lists. While this is sufficient for most users, power users
may want the ability to program in more Scan Lists than this. In this way the Uniden is far more flexible.
Search & Scan
With older radios, searches were almost always exclusive to scanning. You could scan or you could search,
but not both at the same time. The PSR-500 allows you to add not only conventional channels and trunked
talkgroups but also several types of searches to your scan lists so you can monitor all of these at the same
time.