To the original poster (Wayne?) Motorola trunked systems typically
use 4 control channels and rotate through them each 24 hour period.
No matter what, you must know the frequencies of each of the
control channels in order to do anything else, since when they
are not playing the role of control channel they are being granteed
to users as voice channels. In a 5 channel system this makes
a huge difference!
Anyway, I guess I should stand up and take some of the blame since I was
one of those demanding control channel-only capability. I guess
I'm living in the past, since I was not aware that there were different
band plans. I suppose there had to be since I now see frequencies
like 861.600 rather than the 861.6125 that were common earlier.
Even so, if I am driving cross-country and passing through an area
(one of my arguments for this feature) the control channel probably
won't change before I am long gone and don't care any more. If
they adopted the most common band plan I should be fine; if not,
I can live with it.
It still gives me more capability than I would have had without it.
Thanks for the hard work, Greg and Uniden!
Happy New Year to you and all!
John Boteler
WD4OXQ