ARES: Suggested Radio Programming

Notes in this font. Be advised the statewide list has changed slightly, but not much. K0ECW is able to program nearly any radio, and his lists are more up to date than these. The big take-away is to have things programmed PRIOR TO THE EVENT. If not...please know how to program your radio.

Being prepared means not having to fumble around with things during an event,. Modern radios have many features — too many to allow easy programming in the field. Furthermore, every radio manufacturer takes a different approach to programming by keypad, meaning that knowing how to program one radio doesn’t help much with any other.

Thus, it is vital that you have your radios programmed before deploying to an event or drill. At minimum, your radio should be programmed for our designated repeaters and simplex frequencies. But these are just “go here first” frequencies…others may be used depending on the nature of the event. (We have handled large events in the past that involved five repeaters and three simplex frequencies.)

Linn County ARES recommends the following programming. The channel numbers come from the Kenwood D700/D710 units we have installed at various locations. Your radio may have fewer memories, or a different bank labeling scheme (such as the alphabet labels on some Icom units). Feel free to make adjustments as required for your radio.

Note: we can provide a CSV file with this information for you to import into your programming software. You are not expected to program from these tables!

All mobile rigs and handhelds should have this bank of frequencies:

If your radio does not support APRS, you may disregard those frequencies.

Note that 146.745 appears twice. Memory 6 has the 250.3 Hz tone to break squelch during emergencies. Memory 1 has a 192.8 Hz tone, for normal repeater use. Please do not use Memory 6 for anything other than emergencies.

You are free to add any other frequencies you like to this list. For Kenwood radios and other units with “bank scan,” we recommend adding designated ARES repeaters and simplex frequencies for other counties. Our D710 programming does this by memory bank to make finding them easier. For example, District 2 frequencies are stored in memory channels 200-299 (the first digit indicating the district).

Counties are in CAPS, cities in in normal type.