Follow these steps in order and you will specify a text board that works. Fix the reading distance, then the character height, then the colour, then the housing, then the way content is delivered and who will do it, and finally the arrangements that keep the board running when the nearest technician is 477 kilometres up the motorway.
LED scrolling sign in Nova Gradiška — manufacturing, installation, quote
A running-text board earns its keep in Nova Gradiska wherever a short fact changes often. The gatehouse of a plant in the Industrijski park telling drivers which loading bay is theirs; a pharmacy near the square posting the duty rota; the Gradski muzej on Trg kralja Tomislava listing the current exhibition and its closing date; a fuel station on the A3 approach showing today's prices; the Gradski stadion, where NK Sloga plays in front of three thousand places, putting up a score. All of them want a line of text that can be altered in a minute and understood at a glance. None of them wants video, and buying video would mean paying for something nobody there would look at.
Measure the reading distance first
Character height follows from it, and nothing else does
Walk to the place where the reader will be and measure back to the board position. That single number sets the specification. As a working guide, allow about one centimetre of character height for every four metres of distance, then add margin for readers who are moving, for poor light and for anyone reading at an angle. A gatehouse board read by a driver stopping at a barrier at eight metres wants characters of two to three centimetres; the same board read while the vehicle is still rolling wants considerably more and fewer words. A board on a shopfront read from across the street at twenty metres wants five or six centimetres. Work in that direction and the physical board size is a consequence. Work the other way - fitting a board to a gap and accepting whatever characters result - and you will get a board nobody reads.
Choose single colour unless there is a reason not to
Where amber or white beats full colour outright
For text, a monochrome board is the better product as well as the cheaper one. It is brighter for the power it draws, higher in contrast, and quicker to read at a glance, which is exactly what a price, a rota, a bay number or a score needs to be. Full colour is worth its cost when the board carries a logo, when colour itself is the message - a red or green indication at a barrier, for example - or when images run alongside the words. A split board is often the best compromise: a fixed colour panel carrying the company mark at one end, and a monochrome text field across the remaining width. For a plant gatehouse or a fuel station forecourt that combination usually gives the most useful board for the budget.
Specify the housing for the position
Sheltered, exposed, and the Slavonian temperature range
Nova Gradiska sees hard frosts in winter and high summer temperatures, and an outdoor board has to work at both ends without complaint. Exposed positions need an IP65 sealed housing and output set for daylight, with automatic reduction in the evening so the board does not glare down a quiet street after midnight. A board under a canopy, inside a portal or behind glass in a sheltered position can often use a lighter specification and cost less. Mounting height is worth thinking about at the same time. Between two and a half and three and a half metres is the practical band for a street position: high enough to be out of reach and clear of parked vehicles, low enough that the reading angle does not cost legibility. Above four metres the text has to grow to compensate, and the board grows with it.
Decide how content reaches the board
Cable, wireless, and who will be doing the typing
Content goes to the board over the network or wirelessly. The wireless route is what makes a gatehouse board or a board over a yard entrance practical, because no cable trench is required to reach it. Where a building already has structured cabling, a wired connection is the more robust option and worth using. The more important question is who edits it. Identify that person before the board is ordered, and make sure it is somebody who is on site most days - a receptionist, a shift supervisor, a shop manager. The editing tool is a text field with a schedule, and a demonstration takes minutes. Boards fail to be useful not because the software is difficult but because the only person shown how to use it left, so we set up the scheduled content at handover and provide the instructions in writing for whoever comes next.
Confirm the power supply before ordering
The check that prevents a wasted delivery
The board draws very little, so the question is not capacity but reliability. Confirm that the intended socket is not on a circuit that switches off with the lights, is not shared with equipment that trips it, and is not controlled by a timer somebody set years ago and has forgotten. A board that goes dark every evening because of a contactor in a cupboard looks exactly like a faulty board and is the most frequent false fault report we receive. Send photographs of the mounting position, the power point and the route between them with your enquiry. That single step is worth more than any amount of discussion, because it lets us specify the bracket, the cable length and the sealing correctly the first time and avoid a second delivery across 477 kilometres.
Arrange the after-sales side up front
Spares on your shelf, and remote help
Every board leaves us with spare modules and a spare power supply matching what is fitted, along with an illustrated procedure for exchanging either. Those two items account for nearly all faults, and either is changed by a maintenance electrician in well under an hour without specialist tools. That is what makes distance manageable. A board at a plant on the industrial estate that stops working on a Friday is repaired from your own store the same day, instead of waiting for a crew to drive 477 kilometres and charge for the journey. We can also connect to the controller remotely to check settings and reload content. Depending on the model, the guarantee runs for one or two years, and carrying out a module change yourself does not affect it - we would rather the board was working.
