In addition to my Drake being somewhat crippled with respect to limited designators, some of those designators aren't even unique. For example, the Drake came out about in the time frame when the Anik sats were changing designators of "A" for Anik-D, to "E" for the Anik-E series, so it has 2 designators for Anik sats, ie both A and E. However they both vector to the same memory locations, so that if for example, you define A1, and then later define E1, you have then wiped out A1. Same is true for C and F, since the Satcom-C sats replaced the Satcom-F sats. This makes it doubly confusing when trying to pick an unused sat designator.
This whole discussion is making me thing that I should retire the old Drake, and switch to my Monty 50/55. Only thing is that I've been using the Drake for about 13+ years now, and am familiar with the functions, and would have to re-learn how to use the Monty, as well as re-program my JP1 remote, etc. But the Monty also has the advantage of having direct entry of frequency, whereas with my Drake, I have to use a chart that interprets an incomprehensible relationship between a wierd 2 byte word and frequency, and it generally isn't very accurate. Also, the power supply on my Drake seems to be slowly dying, as the Ku LNB voltage seems to be slowly dropping. Yeah, I think this discussion has convinced me that I need to retire the Drake.