Hi Mike,
Thanks for the praise!
I did not understand about the .img file needing to be created and was lost for a while, after creating my memories, on how to upload the data to the radio. The menu item was disabled and I could not find any "startup" doc to tell me to get the image from the radio, modify it and upload it back.
Step 1 on the "Beginner's guide" is "download contents from the radio":
http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Beginners_Guide
Any piece of radio programming software will require you to do this first, unless you want to destroy all the settings currently in the radio. CHIRP doesn't provide a File->New function for an uploadable image, because unlike other software packages that are only designed for one radio and thus know what sort of image to initialize, we'd have to have a drop-down box with all 80+ models.
Thanks!