Indiana company RP Global Technology Solutions claims to have developed a new technology that expands the read range of RFID tags up to seven miles. The company’s new LongEAR tags have apparently attracted the interest of the Coast Guard as a potentially cost-efficient way to track shipping in harbors, the Great Lakes, and along the nation’s shorelines.
“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,” says RP Global partner Chris Pavelich. Pavelich describes LongEARs as a family of low-cost semi-passive tags, which are capable of reading and storing the condition of tagged items - for example, a ship’s data would include tonnage, speed, course, and crew size. In a situation involving shoreline surveillance, the stored data can be transmitted to on-shore antennas, which can be used to triangulate precise ship locations.
“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,” says Pavelich in a press release.
Though Pavelich says early interest in the technology has been expressed by the U.S. Air Force as well as the Coast Guard, RP Global did not indicate that any deal to deploy the LongEAR solution has been struck yet. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/rfidnews-4.gif)
