With software it is very easy to program your radios, Baofeng’s that have 128 memories to other radios with 1,000 memories, so why would you need to program them manually? Well, you might travel somewhere and not program your radio before you get there, you might find you didn’t program something correctly or you might need to go to a simplex or a repeater frequency that you don’t have in there, you might have forgotten or lost your programming cable or your laptop might have died. There are many reasons. Being a good communications/radio operator you should always have the ability to change frequency and program it on the fly.
Before you program you will need to gather the information. I will be posting another video on how to do that very shortly.
You should also make yourself a “cheat card” with the basic steps on. I have one for the Baofeng, but by making your own, by stepping through as you make it, it will help you remember. There is an exercise I’ve done in some classes on writing plans – give a group the task of writing instructions to make a peanut butter sandwich – go on, try it 🙂