FORT WAYNE, Ind. (PRESS RELEASE) --- The previous records for the distance over which an RFID tag can be read have been shattered by a Fort Wayne company.

Today’s state-of-the-art active RFID tags can be read from about a football field away – 300 to 400 feet – but a new technology dubbed LongEAR by its developer, RP Global Technology Solutions, extends that range to seven miles (almost 37,000 feet)!

According to Chris Palevich, a partner in RP Global, interested early adopters of the LongEAR technology include the United States Coast Guard, who sees LongEAR as an efficient, cost-effective way to track ship traffic in U.S. harbors and seaports. Similar applications in the Great Lakes, and eventually along the entire U.S. shoreline, will allow precision tracking of ship traffic all around the border, a possibility of obvious interest to both the Coast Guard and Homeland Security.(br>

Mr. Palevich explained the features of LongEAR that piqued the interest of the Coast Guard and other military services, “LongEAR extends the reading range of RFID tags to distances that make it possible to track inventory up to seven miles away with 100% accuracy. The ‘inventory’ of a harbor is made up of ships, boats and other watercraft; the ability to track each individual vessel with just a few inexpensive reader antennae dotted along the coast was the solution the Coast Guard was looking for.

“They’d investigated Global Positioning System (GPS) systems, but compared to long-distance RFID, the equipment is prohibitively expensive, doesn’t perform well inside buildings and other large structures, and is limited in the amount of information it can transmit.

“LongEAR tags, on the other hand, are quite inexpensive in comparison, can be read through most structure walls and in all sorts of atmospheric conditions – rain, fog, snow, overcast, even in storms – and can convey a tremendous amount of variable information. Being semi-passive devices, meaning that they have an on-board power supply, they are able to read the current condition of the item being tracked (in the case of ships, such readings might be tonnage, speed, course, and crew-on-board) and write that data to the tag’s information block, which can then be read, and even written to, by an on-shore reader. Simple triangulation between readers can pinpoint the precise position of each vessel in the harbor, in much the same way that airport control towers can track individual aircraft.”

There are many commercial applications for LongEAR technology, according to Palevich, “Nowadays, many companies have inventory in many locations scattered around their central location; steel mills, for example, may have huge coils of steel warehoused in storage barns and depots that are miles apart. Believe it or not, even things as massive as steel coils get lost. LongEAR allows tracking over very wide areas, both indoors and out, with coverage areas from 4.5 square miles for LongEAR I, up to a really incredible 154 square miles for LongEAR II. Steel coils can’t hide any more. Neither can much of anything else.”

RP Global Technology Solutions is a Fort Wayne based developer of RFID hardware and software, with integrated solutions for both military and commercial applications. For more information, visit www.rpglobalsolutions.com

Source: RP Global Technology Solutions