Notifier and GWFCI currently have the fastest responding SLCs that I have seen in the field. Simplex takes a long time and Siemens is even slower. It looks now like Honeywell’s four brands are now the top dogs in the industry, which is rare considering how long Simplex has been known as an industry leader. I give applause to Notifier and Fire-Lite for making advanced high capacity addressable systems that are ridiculously small.
In 1996, Simplex’s smallest addressable panel, the 4020, was quite large, about 4 feet tall and VERY heavy. This was because they used through-hole components on multiple PCBs. The 4020 was a single loop analog MAPNET II FACP with a loop capacity of 127 devices which required shielded twisted pair wiring. Simplex had add-on cards, which were a DACT, a Simplex panel network card, RS-232 printer interface, and agent release functions. If you wanted to add voice to a 4020 you would need to add a 4003, which was another oversized Simplex product, and that would be placed next to the panel. However this configuration was rarely seen as they usually would install a 4100 with the voice evacuation panel built in.
Notifier had three single loop analog addressable panels at the time: the AFP-100, AFP-200, and AFP-300. The AFP-100 was an extremely basic panel (it was a rebranded Fire-Lite MS-9200). The AFP-200 was a very small networkable addressable panel with a single CLIP loop, four NACs, and several other features that did not come standard on the 4020, such as agent release, printer/terminal interface, and relays.
Lastly, the AFP-300 was a physically larger version of the AFP-200 designed to be used with Notifier’s modular cabinet system, where you could add extra NACs, power supplies, and voice evacuation inside a cabinet the same size as the 4020 cabinet.
All of Notifier’s CLIP SLCs had a capacity of 198 devices, 71 more than Simplex at the time. Furthermore, this SLC did not require shielded twisted wiring and could be used as a drop-in replacement for old zoned systems. The SLC capacity on the ONYX series and the AFC-600 panel was 318.
The Simplex 4020 was expanded to support three SLCs at one point before it was discontinued. Notifier’s AFP-400 was a two CLIP loop panel that used the same cabinet and power supply as the AFP-300. This made it possible to expand to an AFP-400 easily since very few re-wiring would be necessary as the terminal blocks are able to unplug from the PCB making board swaps a piece of cake. Now if you needed more than two SLCs, your options at the time were either the AFP-1010, with a total capacity of five loops at 198 devices each, or the AM-2020, with a capacity of ten loops at 198 devices each. All of these panels (AFP-300, AFP-400, AFP-1010, and AM-2020 all use the same standard Notifier cabinets. The large scale conventional System 5000 series also used the same cabinet.
The Simplex 4010 was created to replace the 4020, after Notifier began to get lots of sales from their small addressable systems. It was built quickly and based off the Simplex 4005 to the point where the firmware and operating panel is nearly identical on both. It has all the advanced control features as the Simplex 4005 (this includes agent release, logic control scripts, and more) plus networking capability. The SLC on this panel was now IDNET with a loop capacity of 250. I think IDNET is still an analog protocol.