VHF/UHF FM + multi-channel standby / background scanning for chasing

Equipment Radios & Power
1

I’m looking for a 2m/70cm FM rig for my home QTH for chasing.

I have some summits around my home QTH and sometimes I have the luck of chasing some activators on them. I used to have a Qyt KT-8900D which was essentially a Baofeng in a mobile-rig format, but it had a very nice feature - quad standby. I could have 4 channels on the display. To the user they would behave as A/B/C/D VFOs. This was a cheap single-chip radio, so probably this was achieved by some clever background channel-jumping or a wide-band receiver. But it did what I wanted - when there was activity on our local 2m/70cm repeaters, I would hear the repeater. When there was someone on 145.500 or 550, which were on my C and D channels, I would hear those. Or whichever transmitted first.

I know name-brand radios like Yaesu, Icom or Kenwood have much better receivers and filters, but they only have 2-channel displays. Is there a TRX that has multi-channel standby or perhaps some kind of background scanning of pre-selected channels?

For example VFO A is the 70cm repeater, VFO B is the 2m repeater, but in the background it keeps constantly scanning 145.500, 525, 550?

I know many mobile rigs have a scan function, but usually you have to activate it explicitly every time and then it bothers you on the display. You see channels changing on VFO A or B or something is flashing somewhere. And I want to have the radio in this state pretty much every day, whole day by just switching it on, so it has to be unobtrusive. Does anyone know such a radio please?

2

I’m not familiar with FM base station rigs, but if it helps, something like what you need can be had by using the PMS feature (Programmable Memory Scan) on the FT817/818, FT857 and FT897.

1 Like
3

Memory banks may give you what you need. Some radios use this scheme, adding specific memory channels into a “bank” and then you can scan the channels in that bank, rather than all stored channels. This cuts down the chatter from channels you know have traffic but it is never related to what you are interested in. Such a thing is unknown where I live, but perhaps there are conversations on repeaters in other countries!
73 Andrew VK1DA/VK2UH