Flight Progress Strip Printers
 

Hi

Looking for information about Flight Progress Strip Printers, specifically the makes and models of the printers used and the size of strip produced.

Does anyone know of a strip printer that can print off to the standard 25mm x 200mm VFR strip size?

I have found BOCA as being one manufacturer - any others? Does anyone know of a source of second hand strip printers?

Finally, does anyone have any experience of printing to such printers from anything other than specifically developed air traffic applications?

Many thanks in advance.

I've often wondered why controllers have very small handwriting.

We use an IER512

Apologies - I meant 25mm. Thanks

Matspart3 - Do you use a specific ATC application to drive the printer or something generic?

Copperchase's FDMS.

I'm pretty sure the Copperchase system has FPS printing built in unless its a very old version.

I can't remember what our printer is (I'll have a look next time I'm in). It is a thermal printer and prints onto a roll of about 450 strips, our pre-requisite for strip printing was that each printed strip is MATS Part 1 standard in terms of layout and content (with some slight local variations) although the printer prints in black on white paper and is then put into a coloured strip holders.

The strips are a standard size and fits holders 10ACA275348.

The biggest hurdle for us was sourcing the paper.

I think Resource Training use a basic 'home made' programme for strip printing with a strip printer, you could see if their setup suits you.

Thanks Andy, if you could find the printer make that would be great.

The background to this is that a colleague has put a lot of work in to creating an Excel spreadsheet that will print on to the standard strips in the correct format. This system has a user friendly front end to allow either us (we are a FISO unit), to 'quick select' the aircraft required (we are also looking at touch screen monitors to improve this aspect), or for pilots to 'book out' in the Flight Briefing room before flight.
We have the basics working well and currently use the system on a pilot basis (excuse the pun!), for our reception staff to enter PPR details. Currently the print out goes to a standard Laserjet loaded with pre perforated A4, which we then tear off and load in to the correct coloured strip holder. The issue with this is that the printer is too big to fit on the VCR desk and so is at the back of the room and,when busy, we can't keep getting up to collect and tear off strips.
What we'd really like is for a proper thermal printer running off Windows to just churn out the strips on the desk. None of the generic thermal printers (Dymo, Epson etc), seem to support the size of strips.
It's been suggested that hospital wristbands are of the same width, so that's another option we're perusing.

Very limited budget for this project, so appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks

We discovered pretty early that there are no printers solely for ATC strips (not 8 years ago anyway) and that the ones used in ATC are actually designed primarily for "Airport Baggage Handling Agents" so you might have some luck googling for that purpose.

Have you seen this site: Flightstrips, Flight Progress Strip Holders, Flightstrip Papers

Used to work for a company developing ATC systems. As stated before, the only provider that we used was IER. Coincidentaly there is one of their printers (non-functional) on ebay!

IER-512-Thermal-baggage-tag-flight-strip-printer

These are very simple printers that are controlled using ascii characters and control sequences, so basically all you require to do is create a text file or text string and send it to the printer via a COM port. There may be a driver for Windows but we never hosted on it, so don't know!

Internally the printer is very 'heath-robinson' - there are guides that you can set for your selected strip width. Considering the size of the printer casing, there is very little inside, however they are built to last so are quiet heavy! From memory I would estimate the size as 22cm w x 22cm h x 45cm d.

Depending on our customers' choice we used roll or fan-fold strips. There is a cutter mechanism to use with roll feed and IIRC a sensor to detect strip start on fan-fold.

Squadgy,

The printer we have looks to be exactly the one in the eBay link posted above.

We use rolls of strips and each strip is perforated.

Have you considered thermal EPOS receipt printers? These are quite compact and available with cutters. Being a thermal printer it is not a problem if the strip does not cover the whole print area - so a guide could be made to ensure correct alignment (approx 80mm -> 25mm).

Your only problems then would be - is the thermal head man enough to 'burn' flight strip paper, will the cutter be able to cut it and can you drive it easily :eek:

Thanks guys. I had seen the printer on Ebay and asked the vendor why it's u/s.

Also been in contact with a contact in NATS who has the BOCA Lemur (expensive!), and the Citizen CL-S521.

Hopefully we will find a solution soon :-)

We have IER thermal printers that feed a continuous roll and cut it to size. These are driven by Copperchase FDMS but that's built on Windows so you may have a cheap-ish solution with your ebay link if you can get it working.

The memory is a bit hazy - going back over a decade! but, IIRC the print functionality of any single IER 512 is configured by an EPROM.

So, if in it's previous life it was a baggage tag printer, in all probability you will need to change the EPROM to print flight strips. Also I don't think all variants had cutters fitted. You may need to ask more questions!

Spares shouldn't be a problem if you have facilities to repair electronic/mechanical devices - getting a particular flight strip EPROM may be! :hmm:

I think with a little programming you should be able to do it all with this -

Zebra Technologies LP2824 Plus

I don't know how we managed before without Google!

All this for Barton AFIS?
Stick to manual. Much more reliable.
Or revert to A/G...

Sorry if I am being a bit too enthusiastic but when your at home ...

Having perused the net a bit more it seems that you should be able to print directly from excel to the Zebra Technologies LP2824 Plus using the supplied drivers.

Using your current formatting you should only need to setup the print media and mapping appropriately.

I would suggest that you try installing the printer drivers and generate a print preview!

LP-2824-drivers

If you do decide to try please report how you get on.

I've worked with the BOCA flight strip printer (bocasystems.com), which is the printer used in the FAA in the U.S.. It plugs into USB and shows up in Windows as a regular printer. You can print to it from any app, including Word. It treats the strips like a really wide and short piece of paper. Or for special functionality like changing fonts or drawing lines, it has a command set you put in brackets within the string you're printing. I found it very easy to use. It's about $2,500 U.S. though. They also sell strips, and will sell in single quantities.

Loads of great suggestions here, thanks.

Control Eng, the LP2824 seems to be the best solution, and your idea of downloading the drivers and running a print preview before we buy a device is great - will try this out and let you knkw the outcome. Thanks again! :)

I just had a go at downloading the drivers and having a play as Control Eng suggested.

Although not having the actual device connected limits investigations slightly, but with the use of Print Preview, it certainly seems like this is probably an efficient achievable way to enable FPS printing, especially if you can get your Excel spreadsheet to be very user friendly.

It would be useful if you could link up your "Obtain PPR" page from your website to automatically print a FPS when someone sends their completed PPR request!

Let us know how you get on at Barton.

I suspect Control Eng has lost some Aviation Software Developers some income world wide!:D:D Well done!