The Wouxun KG-1000G is perhaps the most powerful and versatile GMRS mobile radio around. Among its powerful features is the ability to create scan groups. It's easy to set up and use, but can be a little confusing to those who are not familiar with this function. What are scan groups? How do you set a particular channel to a specific scan group? Once configured, how do you activate this feature on the KG-1000G?
What are Scan Groups?
The KG-1000G is pre-programmed with 22 GMRS simplex and 8 GMRS repeater channels out of the box, for a total of 30 channels. However, it also allows you to program additional customized channels into the radio, for a combined total of 999 channels. That's a lot of channels to scan. Now, you could just press the scan button and let the KG-1000G just scan everything, but if you are using a lot of the custom memory channel slots, or all of them, a general scan for any active channels could take awhile.
This is where Scan Groups come in. You can assign a specific number of channels to a scan group and configure the radio to scan only those channels, greatly decreasing the time it takes to find an active channel and increasing the efficiency of the scan.
Let's say you only want to scan channels 1-7 during the day and channels 15-22 in the evening. You could remove the channels you don't want to scan from the general scan list momentarily, but that would be quite time consuming and impractical, especially if you want to go back and scan those other channels later. Instead, you could create one scan group for channels 1-7, another scan group for channels 15-22, and leave the rest alone, in case you do want to scan all the channels as normal at some point. Then simply choose the group you want to scan for the moment, and press the scan button.
How to create a Scan Group
The KG-1000G supports up to 10 scan groups. Channels are added to a group by assigning a range of channel numbers to it using the KG-1000G programming software. Channels can be assigned to multiple groups. For instance, Channels 1-7 can be assigned to Group 1, channels 5-12 assigned to Group 2, etc. You can assign one channel to a group, however you cannot assign multiple channels individually within a group. In other words, Channel 1 can be its own scan group, but Channels 1,3, and 5 cannot. They can only be entered in a range of channels, e.g. Channels 1-7.
To create a scan group, open the Wouxun KG-1000G programming software, click on the Scan Group tab and choose the group number to which you want to add channels. Then enter the first channel in the range of channels to be scanned by choosing it in the drop down list in the CH-From column, and enter the last channel in the range by doing the same in the CH-To column. You can also enter a name for the scan group up to 6 characters long in the Scan-Name column.
How to activate a Scan Group
There are two ways to choose and activate a scan group. If you are already creating your scan group(s) in the programming software, simply click on a radio button to the left of the CH-From column of the scan group you want to activate and choose the side of the radio to which the scan group will be assigned (Side A, Side B or Both). Save your configuration to the radio and it's all set.
Alternately, you can leave the scan group default to ALL while in the programming software and activate your scan group directly from the radio itself. Press the [MENU] button, choose SC-GROUP from the menu (option 43) and choose the number or name of the scan group you created in the programming software that you want to activate. Press [MENU] to save your option, and press [EXIT] to exit the menu. Now, whenever you press the Scan key, it will scan only the channels in the scan group you chose.
You can change the scan group on the KG-1000G at any time by going back to the SC-GROUP option in the menu and choosing another group, or choosing ALL if you want to scan all channels sequentially as normal.
It is important to note that the Scan Group function is not available in Frequency Mode, simply because it is used for scanning channels, not frequencies. Also, this feature is not available when the KG-1000G is in Repeater Mode.
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