RFID Weapon Management

There is no list price for an armoury build; Identium quotes against a written specification. Five things move the figure: the number of weapons and ancillary items to be tagged; tag type, since a compact ceramic on-metal UHF tag for a steel receiver is typically dearer per piece than a polymer hard tag for a stock; the number of read points, since each door needs a reader, antennas and sometimes a shielded portal rather than a room-wide read; how many Android handhelds duty staff need for rack counts; and customisation such as laser marking, serial numbering and EPC encoding. Tags are manufactured at our New Delhi factory, and custom tag builds typically run a five to ten day turnaround, with units tested in-house before dispatch. Send the item count, rack layout and door count and we will scope it.

Two separate things, and buyers often conflate them. On the equipment side, passive UHF in India runs in the 865-868 MHz band, which as of 2026 is delicensed for low-power operation under the 2021 WPC short-range-device rules, so an end user does not need a separate frequency licence provided the equipment conforms to the WPC notification for that band and power level. Identium's UHF readers and antennas are WPC-approved for India's licence-exempt UHF RFID band and Identium Tech Solutions is BIS certified. Confirm the current position with WPC before you freeze a specification, as notifications do change. On the record-keeping side, treat RFID as corroboration rather than replacement: whatever weapon registers your unit is required to maintain stay the record of account, and the RFID issue-and-return log sits beside them as supporting evidence. Settle that framing with your licensing or controlling authority rather than assuming a digital log suffices.

Not with passive tags, and it is the commonest misunderstanding in armoury projects. A passive EPC Gen2 UHF tag has no battery and no transmitter of its own; it answers only while it is inside a powered reader's field, so what you get is presence at a chokepoint — the weapon crossed the armoury door outbound, then inbound. Even that field is typically a few metres at best, and shorter for a small on-metal tag in a packed steel rack, so treat any figure as environment-dependent. Between the two events the weapon is unlocated. Continuous position — a convoy, a large campus, a live exercise — is an active or BLE beacon problem, with its own battery life, tag cost and infrastructure. A common split is passive UHF at the door and racks, with BLE added only where live location earns it; active RFID vs BLE vs passive UHF sets out the trade-offs.

Yes, but at different granularity, and it is worth settling before you order tags. Magazines, optics, cleaning kits and slings are tagged individually — a small on-metal UHF tag for a steel magazine, a TPU or silicone tag for fabric items — so they muster on the same list as the weapon itself. Ammunition is practical to track by sealed box or transit crate rather than by round: tagging individual cartridges is realistic neither to apply nor to survive handling, and a dense pack of brass and steel would shorten the read badly in any case. That gives you a box-level chain of custody, with the count inside each box still established by the issuing procedure and the physical seal rather than by a tag. Tag the crate and the rack position as well, so a box's whereabouts is a read rather than a search.

By designing for it, because a tag in a densely packed steel rack can be missed on a first sweep. The system works from an expected list, so a count resolves into three groups: read as expected, expected but not read, and read but unexpected. Duty staff re-sweep the second group with a handheld from a different angle and height, since metal shadowing is directional, and anything still missing is physically verified before the count is closed and signed. A tag that repeatedly fails is replaced and its placement reviewed rather than argued with. The measure worth tracking is not one flawless sweep but the time to a signed-off count and how many items needed manual verification, which should fall as tag placement and reader settings settle. That is also the sensible thing to write into an acceptance test.