Specifications

The PSR410 also displays any received CTCSS or DCS code received during a Search Event.
What’s the deal with the LED?
The PSR410 has an LED on the front panel that is visible from almost any angle. In fact it is nearly visible from the next
county. This is actually three LED’s (red, green and blue) that sit behind a single prism, These LED’s combined can make
almost any color light, depending on your settings. At its maximum brightness you can just about use it to read by.
Combined with an audible alert tone you can create innumerable combinations to advise you of different activities. For
example, you can set the LED to flash red when a CloseCall hit is found and green if your favorite channel comes up. You
can even set it to stay on indefinitely after activation, so if a rarely used channel pops up you will know that it was active,
even if you weren’t around to hear it.
There are so many settings for the Alert System (LED and audible) that as you use the radio you can add different
combinations as you learn the radio. While it seems daunting at first, it can come in handy eventually. Like so many other
advanced features this might never be useful for some but indispensable for others.
You may want to experiment with the various color choices (much easier in software!) as some color choices may be too
bright and cause distractions when driving.
Power issues
The PSR410 runs off 13.8 volts DC (often shown as 12VDC). It includes both an AC adaptor to use at home and a DC power
cable to use in the car. You can also buy or make a cigar lighter cable for temporary installations in a vehicle.
Is it an antenna or an aerial?
Let’s call it an antenna, the most important part of a scanner. This determines how well the scanner will perform. While in
many instances the included telescoping antenna will work just fine, if you are doing any type of serious monitoring from a
building or vehicle an external antenna is required. While there are dozens of available scanner or two-way antennas that will
work fine, the antenna that works best for you depends on many factors. This includes the frequencies you want to monitor,
the distances and power levels involved, you location and elevation and more. Entire books have been written to help you
decide what works best. See Scanner’s Master’s antenna section for a variety of excellent options.
The PSR410 comes with a standard telescoping antenna. It connects onto the BNC connector on the rear of the radio. You
can also use this connector with another antenna, either directly or with coaxial cable. You can use an antenna geared toward
a specific band or one more generalized over the range of frequencies.
Performance
With like antennas the PSR410 and it’s competition, the Uniden BCT15X, perform similarly as far as sensitivity is
concerned. I found the 410 slightly more sensitive than the 15 in use in my area. If you read the Yahoo, RadioReference and
other user groups and web sites online you’ll find a spirited debate over which radio is the better receiver. It seems as though
it depends on the environment you’re in (urban, suburban, rural), how close you are to nearby unwanted transmitters
(cellular, paging, broadcast and the like), among other factors. There is no definitive answer on this. I personally did get a bit
more intermod type interference from the PSR500 than I did with the PSR410 or the BCT15X when comparing them in a
high RF environment (in a city or when you’re close by the aforementioned types of transmitter sites). I have also heard of
cases where in a high RF environment, when you connect an outdoor/base station antenna, the GRE will tend to become
overloaded but you can remedy this by enabling attenuation. The problem with this is that it lessens the impact of the time,
money and effort you put into putting up an outdoor antenna in an effort to receive distant signals. Now suddenly you’re
attenuating them. All radios are subject to this problem to some degree but the PSR410 seems to be slightly better than many
other radios.
Your results may vary, and results can vary from radio to radio.
Speak to me
The PSR410 provides 1.8 watts of audio into a built-in bottom firing speaker. This provides pretty good audio punch for
mobile or desktop use scanner and the audio sounds good across the board. The audio quality is very good, following GRE’s
reputation for good audio.