I don't have a BC-296D, and don't have a VHF trunked system within
range, but I walked through the procedure on my BC796D. Your scanner
may be similar.

First off, before bothering with the trunking setup, verify that you
have the right freqs and there's a repeater near enough to hear.
Program the freqs as if they were conventional channels, and scan
them. One of them should carry a continuous data transmission. Lock
that one out, and continue scanning the others. If you hear voice
traffic, good. Erase the channels you have just entered.

Decide which bank to put the trunked system into. The scanner will
work perfectly well if you have conventional channels in the same
bank, but it's best to avoid that. Otherwise, you will have to
individually lock out the conventional channels when you want to hear
the trunked system only.

Press MENU, select SCAN OPTION, TRUNK, BANK 1 (or whatever bank you
decided on), ENTER.

Select TRUNK TYPE, ON, TYPE2/P25 VHF. (not TYPE2/P25 UHF !)

The scanner will ask you to SELECT BASE CONF, and the default choice
will be BASE CONFIG 1. That's ok, so hit ENTER.

BASE CONFIG sets up some values that the scanner needs to know in
order to decode the control channel and jump to the correct voice
frequency. It will ask you for base frequency, spacing (my scanner
calls it SPACE FREQ), and channel offset. Some of the defaults will
probably be correct as-is. When you're done, the scanner will ask for
BASE CONFIG 2. If desired, you could enter a second set of base freq,
spacing, and channel offset here. But that's not applicable to the
system you asked about, so you're done with base config. Press MENU to
get back to the previous menu.

Actually, you'll have to press MENU several times to get past the
stuff you've already entered. When you see the menu with TRUNK CHANNEL
as one of its choices, select that.

The scanner asks for the CHANNEL NO, but the "channel" it wants is the
storage location in the scanner, not the frequency itself. The default
will be the first channel in the bank. If that's ok, press ENTER. Then
you come to the menu for entering the freq. Input the first frequency
on your list. The STEPS selection on the menu can be left alone unless
you notice the scanner changes the freq after you enter it. In that
case, STEPS has to be changed to some smaller value.

Input all the frequencies in this manner. The order isn't important,
and it's not necessary to make any distinction between voice channels,
primary control channels, and alternate control channels. The scanner
will figure out what's what.

That should do it. There are other selections on the trunking menu,
but they aren't necessary to get started monitoring the system.

Recheck your settings if there's a problem. It's *very* easy to make a
mistake when setting up a trunked system. My first attempt was with a
Radio Shack PRO-95. The display flickered like mad and I got no audio.
I thought, oh no, the system's encrypted. It took awhile to discover
that just one number was wrong in my base config. Later, after I got a
Bearcat scanner, I programmed it with that same trunked system and
again botched the job! But this time I was a lot smarter and
immediately checked the setup and caught the mistake.

--
Paul Hirose
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