Identifying equipment and assets in the field has always been a difficulty in rugged environs. with serial numbers becoming obscured and damaged.
Advances in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) in recent years has benefited the industry greatly. RFID’s can now be placed on metal – whereas previously it was not possible.
Simply touching the RFID reader of the tag, will instantly display the equipment and have it ready for any safety inspection.
This has enabled the use of rugged RFID’s such as the ones from Holland 1916 (pictured) to be used in the lifting industry and other rugged environments.
Some PDA’s come with an in-built RFID reader but wireless Bluetooth models are also available.
Other automatic Field Identification (Field Id’s) are available such as barcoding (1&2d) but for rugged environments RFID is the obvious choice as they can withstand the harshest elements thrown at them.
Holland1916 & Infochip are one of the main suppliers of rugged RFID’s to the market, but generally our customers source their own supplier or buy through us. Below are some info sheets of their most popular tags.
The unofficial RFID frequency for the lifting industry is 13.56mhz and we see this becoming the most popular frequency for identifying assets. NFC (Near Phone Communication) has become popular with Google using it for their “Mobile Wallet” for mobile payments, this also uses 13.56mhz and it is a huge saving having the reader inbuilt to the Tablet/Smartphone.
i-Phone 5 was largely anticipated to have NFC inbuilt but it did not come to pass. Maybe next time?
UHF is the other frequency popular with Asset identification.
There are some ready-to-go “Bluetooth” models available for Apple products from ID-Blue.