I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "cut out for this type of work?" Certainly, the radio will stand up to the "abuse" if that's what you are referring to. Most likely you want to know if the radio will do a good job of monitoring all those systems at once. No, probably not, though it depends on how busy each system is. Here's how the radio tracks multiple trunked systems: Assume it is currently tracking a trunked system in bank one with banks two, three, and four also enabled for trunk tracking. As a conversation in bank one ebbs and flows the radio waits a predetermined amount of time (depending on the delay setting) for a response to the last transmission. If no response is forthcoming within the delay period the radio assumes that the conversation for that particular ID is complete. The '780 will then start to look for another conversation, WITHIN BANK ONE. If you are in Scan MOde it will look for an ID in the scan list(s), if in Search Mode it'll look for ANY ID. Notice that it first looks for an active conversation within the SAME bank. IF it finds no conversations there, only then it will move on to bank two and repeat the whole process followed eventually by bank three, four, and finally back to bank one.
Therein lies the problem. If a system is busy it is possible that radio will never get out of that system unless you MANUALLY command it to start tracking the next system, (press the limit/down arrow button).
The problem may be ameliorated somewhat if you are using the scan lists instead of search mode. When you use tha scan lists it obviously only matters how busy those IDs in the acive scan lists are. If you are only looking at a few IDs per system you might be satisfied with the performance. In general, I don't think that a newsroom operation is going to be real happy with the performance unless all they are doing with it is monitoring a few of the dispatch talk groups. I would think you'd be better of with a radio for each system or at most, two systems per radio.
Greg Knox