The GRE digital radios (as well as some Radio Shack digital scanners made by GRE) have a feature called
V-Scanners. These are basically 21 sets of scanner memories available to be loaded into your scanner.
Imagine it like having 21 different scanners in one, but you can only listen to one at a time. This is useful
for people that travel often between several locales or have multiple scanning targets. You can also use this
to back up variations in your programming so that if you really mess something up you can restore the
radio to a prior configuration. Think of this idea as sort of a manually saved Restore Point.
While it takes a couple minutes for the V-Scanners to load it is not difficult to do. When you Save to a V-
Scanner the entire radio contents are saved, including frequencies, talkgroups and searches, any startup
configurations and settings as well as anything else you have in the radio.
To use the V-Scanner feature press the FUNC then PGM buttons. From there you can load, store or erase
V-Scanners.
Banks & Channels, Nuh uh!
On older scanners with defined banks the user entered channels into the banks. If your radio has 10 banks
of 100 channels each (for a total of 1000 channels) and you only used 10 channels in a specific bank the
extra 90 channels would be wasted. You could lose use of a great deal of the available memories this way.
In addition, most older radios were limited to 10 banks. This normally limited you to up to 10 trunked
systems or sites, with further limitations on programming methods since you could usually only have a
single trunked system per bank. If a trunked system only had 5 or 6 frequencies the other channels in the
bank were probably wasted. While most recent scanners allow you to program in conventional channels to
use up some of the wasted channel space in banks with trunked systems, in practice this was not often done.
Once you set up the trunked frequencies you would then program in trunked talkgroups. While these would
not take away from regular channel memory, there was usually a strict limit to the amount of talkgroups
allowed in scan lists.
GRE’s OOUI allows you to program many more trunked systems into the radio, and, with proper use of the
Scan Lists you can pick and choose the channels or talkgroups you want, in many different combinations.
With the 10 bank limit of older scanners you had few choices of how to scan, with the GRE method the
choice is almost limitless.
GRE’s method is different than Uniden’s in that GRE’s Scan Lists point to various channels, talkgroups or
searches programmed into a single pool of memories. Uniden has the user program separate Systems that
contain either conventional or trunked systems and you switch Systems on or off (enable/disable). While
Uniden scanners have more available channel memory, the GRE method allows you to share a single
frequency or talkgroup among multiple Scan Lists.
Sadly, however the GRE limits one to 20 Scan Lists. While this is sufficient for most users, power users
may want the ability to program in more Scan Lists than this. In this way the Uniden is far more flexible.
Search & Scan
With older radios, searches were almost always exclusive to scanning. You could scan or you could search,
but not both at the same time. The PSR-600 allows you to add not only conventional channels and trunked
talkgroups but also several types of searches to your scan lists so you can monitor all of these at the same
time.
Some of the Search Options include limit searches (checking each frequency between an upper and lower
limit), Service Searches or Spectrum Sweeper. You can add any of these search types to a Scan List and run
the searches while scanning other channels or talkgroups. As far as the radio is concerned it is just another
Scannable Object, it really doesn’t care what type of Object it is.
Keyboard
The Keyboard of the radio is how you program the radio manually and control most of its actions. While
most users will eventually use a computer to do most of the programming (almost a requirement these days
