Anyone here know when the Gentex Commander 2 was released?
I know it was sometime before 2001 as that’s when many buildings at the Walt Disney World theme parks were upgraded, and Commander 2’s were installed in many buildings (on Siemens systems, oddly enough!).
I’m not sure either, but the Commander 2 I have is dated July 19th, 2000. (& uses jumpers, even though most Commander 2s I’ve seen have DIP switches instead) By comparison my Commander 3 is dated August 2nd, 2006, 2 of my Commander 1s are dated 2000, & the remaining Commander 1 is dated 2003. Back where me & my family used to live we’d often go to a Staples that had Commander 2s on a Silent Knight system. (not sure when it was built but just thought I’d mention that)
Just now I also noticed that 2 of my year 2000 Commanders (my Commander 2 horn/strobe & my Commander 1 remote strobe) are painted a brighter shade of red than the others, leading me to believe that Gentex changed the shade of red they painted their Commanders with around 2000, as all of my others are a darker red & made after 2000.
My school was built in 2001 with older commander 2s, so i could assume sometime around 2000-2001.
According to the Wayback Machine Gentex supposedly introduced the Commander 2 in 2000 (though there’s a big gap in the timeline of Gentex’s website between 1999 & 2000, so I can’t say for sure. 2000 seems likely though).
I just realised I own a Gentex Commander 2 Horn Strobe from 2007 with pure 15 candela (not 15/75), is that rare, because I searched for 15 candela model on Google and it came up with 15/75 model.
From the looks of it, yes, it is rather rare: is the model number by any chance “GEC24-15WR”? (since according to a document that’s one of the few 15 candela models of Commander 2 Gentex has ever made)
Yes. It’s a newer 2007 GEC24-15WR with the window. If it’s rare, then in that case I am keeping two.
@Randomnicious That could be a really rare prototype of that model or something judging from what I found here. But here they also list 15/75 instead of pure 15 candela so that might be a prototype. I could be wrong though.
My guess is that once they released the Commander 3-series, which had most of the candela settings of the Commander 2-series, Gentex dropped all the models from the latter except for those the Commander 3 couldn’t replace, which are the 15/75 & 177 candela models, since there would be no real reason to have two nearly-identical product lines (candela-wise at least).
You are correct that Gentex eventually dropped all Commander2 models except the remote horn, 15/75 strobes, and 177 strobes, as those are the only models on this datasheet. However, that didn’t happen immediately when the Commander3 was released (in 2002 - before and after), since the Commander1 remained in production until around 2008 according to this snapshot, and this 2007 snapshot of a datasheet shows all of the Commander2 models (which is consistent with @Randomnicious’s 2007 date code). In fact, the original Commander2 didn’t have the chime and whoop tones, but those were added after the Commander3 was released (before and after), which also appears to be when the candela window was added to the Commander2.
Oh? Alright. That one part would also explain why the Commander 2 horn/strobe I have doesn’t have chime & whoop tones as well, heh (as much as I expected & frankly want it to have such).
