Specifications

The entire keyboard is well backlit and the same light illuminates the display. Press and hold the light key and the dial light
will stay on until you turn it off. While this would run down the batteries faster, when the radio is connected to outside power
this might be desirable. You can set the backlight to illuminate the keyboard, the display or both when it is on.
Display
The PSR310’s all-new LCD Dot-Matrix display is roughly 1 inch tall by 1 7/8’s inches wide. This is a bit larger than the
Uniden BC346XT and GRE’s PSR500/600. This allows for more dots, thus a clearer and easier to read display. The dots
seem slightly smaller than older GRE’s, which allows for thinner characters, but this helps increase the readability. Each
character is up to 10 dots high and 7 wide, and there are up to 16 characters per line.
The display light can be set on the 310 to light both the keyboard and display or just one or the other. The display light is a
plain white, which is easy to read, more so that the prior orange. The new GRE display may well be one of the best on any
scanner. The new display makes it much easier to read at a glance, and while the amount and layout of display info is the
same as prior GRE scanners, it is less crowded on the display.
On the GRE radios the portable’s display is identical to that of the corresponding mobiles, the Uniden mobile scanner
displays are wider than their portables. The GRE display has 4 text lines plus the top line, which is reserved for specific
symbols like signal strength, battery level and other items. Also, the OOUI scanners like the 310/410 use an additional
bottom line for the programmable function key menu items.
During scanning operations the text lines display the pertinent information about the operation, such as the frequency,
talkgroup ID, Tone Code, Scan List, Mode and other information. What information is listed where depends on the
operational mode currently in place on the radio. The bottom line is often given over to display the current selections
available on the Soft Keys (F1 thru F3).
Along the top edge of the radio is a multi-colored LED light. Remarkably bright, this may be used to indicate many things,
like the use of a specific channel or group of channels, a search hit or almost anything else. Set it to white and you can just
about use it to replace a broken headlight. Used in conjunction with audible alerts and you can pretty much have any type of
activity set to a different alert and tell at a quick glance what the radio is doing.
A few examples of how this can be used includes setting different services with different colors. Make police channels or
talkgroups blue, fire channels red and local government green. Then set special use channels like tac or mutual aid channels
flash. This is all programmable in the radio or by computer. (It is a whole lot easier to edit this stuff on the computer!) You
may want to experiment with the color combinations for the LED light, it may be too bright in certain colors and cause a
distraction, especially when used in a vehicle.
Frequency Ranges
The PSR310 receives all of the contemporary scanner bands, from 25 to 54, 108 thru 174, 216 thru 512, 764 thru 960 and
1240 thru 1300 MHz., the same ranges as most other current GRE scanners. The cellular frequencies are of course blocked.
What the PSR310 does not pick up are some non-traditional scanner bands, such as the FM Broadcast band and the
occasionally interesting 72-76 MHz band. It also does not pick up most of the frequencies assigned to domestic television
broadcast. Even though the new Digital TV mode cannot be decoded on any scanners, there are many wireless mics and
occasionally other unusual operations found here.
The PSR310 can hear communications in the AM, FM and NFM modes as well as decode PL (CTCSS) and DPL (DCS)
codes. The ability to swap between FM and NFM will become more important over the next few years, as the FCC has
mandated that most communications in the various UHF and UHF scanner bands switch over to narrowband by the end of
2012. Both the GRE PSR-310 and PSR-410 handle narrowbanding out of the box very well.
Trunking
Like most scanners these days, the PSR310 can monitor several types of trunking. The most common are Motorola (3600
baud data channels), EDACS Wide and EDACS Narrow and LTR. Since this is an analog only scanner it cannot decode the
P25 protocol or any other digital mode.