I think it could take a long time after power-on for the empeg to scan the entire FM band looking for a matching PTY if it can't find the previous station.I suppose that dual-channel tuners could do something more creative here but that's a moot point.

The behaviour I would expect is that the last freq. (possibly one that's aquired by the AF mechanism) is the one the tuner returns to at power-on. If the user presses L/R to change preset then the 'soft' value is lost forever. Maybe it already does something like this?