How to quickly program in the 2m Ham band

Note - You can use an optional cable and your PC to program and load the radio. Or you can use the following method to make the process more efficient if you need to program your radio with the 2m Ham band manually using only the radio itself.

My approach: With 200 memories, there's plenty of room to simply program-in the entire 2m band plan (all the commonly-used and traditional simplex frequencies and repeater frequency pairs, 40 channels). And there's plenty of room left for your local exceptions, and any of the 15 kHz splits that may be used in your local area.

I'll type in the (basic) 2m band plan in the next post (above).

PRELIMINARY STEPS:

Using the VFO and BAND buttons, set the radio into F1 mode.

Dial-in (for example) 146.400 MHz (the bottom of the traditional 2m Band Plan).

Using F+0+1, set the Channel Step to 30 kHz (matching the 2m channel spacing)

Using F+0+2, set the transmitter offset (they call it "Frequency deviation" in the manual, which is just plain wrong) to 0.600 MHz (you'll need to enter 00600 since it accepts 10's of MHz). Each channel can have none, "+", or "-" offset. And you can subsequently adjust each memory channel's offset individually too...

Make sure the other 'per memory' variables, such as power level (L, M, H), are set the way you want.

With "F1 146.400 00" MHz (and no offset) on the display, use F+MR, adjust the memory pointer to your base memory channel (I started with 001), use MR to store and MR to confirm.

Now you can start cranking through the frequencies and channels.

REPEAT THESE STEPS:

Adjust the F1 frequency up one 30 kHz step.

Using F+4, make sure the transmit frequency offset (600 kHz = N, +, -) matches the band plan. This only needs to be adjusted a few times for the whole list.

Use F+MR, and then UP to adjust memory pointer to the next memory, and MR to store and confirm.

Repeat.


Using this method, you can program-in the 40 channels of the band plan in just a few minutes.