Radio Shack 20-521 owner manual About Your Scanner

ABOUT YOUR SCANNER

Once you understand a few simple terms we use in this manual and familiarize yourself with your scanner’s features, you can put the scanner to work for you. You simply determine the type of communications you want to receive, then set the scanner to scan those commu- nications.

A frequency is the tuning location of a station (ex- pressed in kHz or MHz). To find active frequencies, you use the search function.

Besides searching within a frequency range you deter- mine, you can also search your scanner’s service banks. Service banks are preset groups of frequencies categorized by type of service. For example, many am- ateur radio frequencies are located in the HAM2 service bank.

When you find a frequency, you can store it into a pro- grammable memory location called a channel. Chan- nels are grouped into channel-storage banks. (This scanner has 5 channel-storage banks of 30 channels each). You can then scan the channel-storage banks to see if there is activity on the frequencies stored there.

Or, when you find a frequency, you can store it into a temporary memory location called a monitor memory until you decide whether or not to move it to a channel.

Just keep in mind — you search frequencies and scan channels.

You can also use your scanner to track trunked trans- missions (see “Trunk Tracking” on Page 39).

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