RFID Active Reader Tracking System (RTLS)

Count zones, not square metres. An active reader such as the F530 takes up to four antennas, and each antenna is aimed at the area you want reported as one location — so a yard with six meaningful zones needs six antenna positions, which at four ports per reader already means a second reader rather than a bigger one. On the BLE side a gateway typically covers a room or a corridor, and the ID-AOA-GW25 anchor is planned at a coverage radius of roughly twice its install height, so ceiling height rather than floor area tends to drive anchor count in a high-bay warehouse. Treat all of this as open-space planning: racking, machinery and walls shorten every range figure any RTLS vendor quotes, ours included. Send a floor plan marked with the zones you need told apart and we will size reader, gateway and anchor counts against it.

There is no per-square-foot figure worth quoting; an RTLS is priced against a written specification. Four things move the number. First, the count of powered tags, because unlike a passive UHF label every active tag or beacon is a small battery-powered device. Second, form factor and sensors, since a sealed industrial beacon or a vehicle tag costs more than a coin-cell asset tag, and accelerometer or temperature variants more again. Third, infrastructure: how many readers, gateways or AoA anchors your zones demand, plus the PoE cabling to reach them. Fourth, the accuracy target itself, because zone-level RSSI reporting is markedly cheaper than sub-metre AoA positioning. Send us item count, area and the accuracy you genuinely need, and we will quote it line by line against that specification.

No — active tracking sits on a different band. The active tags and BLE beacons used here work in the 2.4 GHz ISM band (2400–2483.5 MHz), which India treats as licence-exempt for low-power devices as of 2026, so no frequency licence is normally involved; WPC's current notification is the authority, so confirm the position before a large rollout. 865–868 MHz is India's delicensed passive UHF band under the 2021 WPC short-range-device rules, and that is where our UHF readers and antennas operate. They are WPC-approved for India's licence-exempt UHF RFID band, and Identium is BIS certified. The distinction matters when you write a specification: EPC Gen2, ISO/IEC 18000-63 and RAIN RFID describe the passive UHF air interface only, so a battery-powered 2.4 GHz active tag or BLE beacon is not a Gen2 device and cannot satisfy a tender clause demanding Gen2 compliance. Our BIS and WPC compliance guide on the Identium blog sets out the paperwork.

Yes, with the right housing and realistic expectations about accuracy. Outdoors and in washdown areas specify sealed hardware — the AT507 rugged active tag for vehicles, containers and outdoor plant, or an IP68-rated industrial beacon from the BLE family — because condensation and jetted water defeat unsealed enclosures sooner than impact does. Then plan around two physical constraints. Metal and concrete reflect 2.4 GHz, so signal strength varies and any distance derived from RSSI should be read as an estimate rather than a measurement; in steel-heavy bays specify zone-level reporting instead of a coordinate, and treat published ranges as typical open-space figures. And 2.4 GHz shares spectrum with Wi-Fi, so on a congested site the channel plan is worth reviewing with your network team before installation rather than after.

Yes, and the interface is worth agreeing before hardware lands. Active readers report over TCP/IP, sending keep-alive and detection messages a server-side listener consumes. The ID-BGW-02 BLE gateway pushes scan data out over UDP, TCP or MQTT, so on a site that already runs a broker the beacon layer can publish straight into it. The platform's own APIs require authentication and push live updates over WebSocket, which is what a dashboard or an alerting rule in your MES would subscribe to. Where the same site also runs passive UHF at gates or dock doors, those readers ship with an SDK, demo app and source code, so both layers can land in a single integration rather than two. Tell us which system is the system of record and we will scope the interface around it.