Simplex Panel in France, a rare occurence

Bit of a back story about something you won’t probably belive… ATSE Incendie (“ATSE” stands for ATS Électronique) was known as “Simplex France” back in the early 80’s-90’s. A colleague of mine (Guillaume) has found one, in an hospital in the process of being renovated. This panel was basically a Simplex 4207 with French lettering…

Fast forward to today, I got a picture of one of these, I admit it, a jet black Simplex 4207 panel would’ve looked cool IMO. And before you ask, this panel was in a former clinic in the process of being demolished. The demolition workers were kind enough to let me and a friend take picture of this beastly panel, sadly it has already been gutted of all the cabling, cards and such.

This particular unit is branded by ATSE rather than Simplex France.

Notice how the zone cards (on the left cabinet) were daisy-chained with card edge connectors that looked similar to the cables used on old MFM hard drives.

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Interesting. Do you know what initiating devices (pulls & smokes) and notification appliances were used in that system?

The system had old Fare/ATSE ionization smoke detectors (trust me I’m more than tempted to pick one up), I belive they’re newer than the panel itself (which is an ATSE A321, it is the “descendent” of the Simplex 4207/8)…

There was other remote buildings that had Chubb C-Scan photoelectric detectors along with their heat counterparts, the remote buildings had Chubb BZ1L sounders (very rare) and ATSE KAC manual call points (both glass-break a’d membrane)

The main building had Télémécanique call points (break-glass) those were pretty big and heavy.

Also the signals in the main building are still unknown as they were gutted already but there was one SERMA siren still remaining however.