On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 13:17:13 -0700, The Other Guy wrote:

On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:45:10 -0400, R S H wrote:

This is a year and a half later, and the price of my PSR-800 from GRE was about $380, as opposed to the $500 or so for the Home Patrol,
which basically does the same things.

Is it worth it:?

You need to add $100 to the Home Patrol to get the 'extra' features.

But it REALLY isn't THAT hard to program a scanner, even a trunking
scanner.

And by doing it yourself, you get what YOU WANT, and not just some
huge mishmash of stuff JUST because it's something you CAN hear in
your area.

I programmed a Home Patrol for a handicapped person, who was VERY set
in what he wanted.

I used the zip code process, and ended up spending 5 times as long as
usual DELETING things he didn't want and would never listen to, as I
would have doing it the normal way from scratch.

If he had a 396 or 996, it would have taken my 5 minutes or less to
adjust my programming and flash his radio.

In Canada one cannot use the zip code method, which on the PSR-800 fills in scanlists starting at 150 so still leaves the first 149 empty.
[Tried the for Houson's 77030, so found out]... So it is relatively easy to go through the lists and change the scanlist number to an empty
lower one, such as 1 or 2 or whatever you have not used for those specific things you want to keep, then delete all of the rest via a CTRL-A
and then a delete, should you want to go that route. In Canada you are forced to be more selective to begin with, since you need to pick
Canada, Province, County and then go down from there, in the main.

So I agree that the ZIP code process is a bit of overkill as it seems to pull in all of Texas if you use a Houston zip code, but it is still
easy to strip it down in the PSR-800 IF you want to do that. I suspect it is simpler to just go to Houston and pick what you want from the
available choices. That is what I did for my part of Canada.

RsH