Running-text boards are modest products with an unusually clear payback, because they replace a manual task rather than adding a new one. Here we ask the questions that decide the specification: what will it say, how large do the characters need to be, how many colours are genuinely required, how does the text get changed, where does the unit go, and what does buying one 400 kilometres from the factory involve?
LED scrolling sign in Vukovar — manufacturing, installation, quote
A programmable text panel suits Vukovar because so much of the information here changes daily and is currently written by hand. Sailing and cargo movements at the river harbour, department and visiting hours at the Dr Juraj Njavro National Memorial Hospital, shift notices at a gate in Borovo Naselje, and opening times in the shops off Trg Republike Hrvatske are all short, changeable and read at close range. None of them justifies a video wall. All of them justify a board that one member of staff can update from a desk in under a minute.
What will it say next week?
The test that separates a text board from a printed sign
Write down the three things the board will display seven days from now. If that list comes easily, a text panel is the right product. If it takes effort, what you want is a printed sign, which will look better and cost far less. The boards that pay for themselves carry duty hours, a counter or queue number, a delivery time, a price that moves with the market, a safety notice at a gate. The boards that gather dust carry a slogan that nobody has changed since the day it was installed.
How tall do the characters need to be?
Work from a distance table rather than from a formula
Character height is the whole specification, and it is easier to reason about as a table than as a formula. Characters 20 millimetres high are comfortable to roughly eight metres, which covers a counter and a small waiting area. Forty millimetres reaches something like sixteen metres, enough for a hospital corridor or a shop across the street. Eighty millimetres carries to thirty metres and beyond, which is the range a gate or a quayside needs. Two things shorten every figure in that table: a reader who is moving, because the time available collapses, and harsh side light, because contrast rather than size becomes the limit.
How many colours are actually needed?
What each option costs to buy, to run and to repair
Start from the running cost rather than from the appearance. A monochrome panel lights one emitter per pixel, so it draws the least current, carries furthest for its size and has the fewest parts to fail, which is why harbours, weighbridges and depots have relied on them for decades. Add red and green and the board can indicate a state: berth free, vehicle waiting, gate closed. Full colour triples the emitters, the consumption and the price of a replacement module, and it earns that only if photographs, a badge or moving footage will genuinely appear. Where the honest answer is white lettering on a black field, buy the monochrome and put the difference into size.
How is the message changed?
Three delivery routes, and a rehearsal before we leave
Whether the board gets used at all comes down to the friction in changing it. Content travels to the panel by one of three routes: across the site network from a machine at the counter, wirelessly where taking a cable to the board would mean opening a ceiling, or physically on a stick for a gate position with no network at all. Each message carries a start and a finish time, so a holiday rota can be written a month early and will put itself up and take itself down again. Before we leave a handover, whoever will own this task makes a change with us standing there, which is worth more than a manual that gets read once.
Where does the panel go?
A waiting area, a works gate and a quayside are three different products
In a waiting area the board is indoors, close to seated readers, and its job is to be calm: moderate output, generous spacing, no movement. At a works gate it faces a driver with thirty seconds and a windscreen in the way, so it needs contrast, brightness and very few words, and it belongs in a sealed housing on a post rather than on the building. On a quayside it takes weather from every direction and is read from a moving vessel or a vehicle, which pushes it to the largest characters and the most robust enclosure of the three. Settling the position before the model avoids the usual mistake, which is buying an indoor board and then hunting for somewhere outside to put it.
What does the distance change?
Shipped ready to use, hung locally, exchanged rather than visited
Panels leave here tested, with your first set of messages already loaded, and a local electrician puts one up in about an hour. Over 400 kilometres that is simply the sensible arrangement for a product of this size, and the money not spent on a crew stays with you. Should a site genuinely need us present, the mileage, the allowance and any night away appear as separate rows instead of as a single installation figure. The guarantee is one year or two by model. A spares pack of modules and a power unit is in the carton, and exchanging a failed board by carrier is faster than getting a van across the country.
