RFID Provides Advantages For The Mobile Worker Of The Future

By Rachel Blair Winkler, product manager, Trimble Mobile Computing Solutions, www.trimble.com

The rate of RFID adoption is rising — here’s why, and how it can help you.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been around for decades, but in the past few years the rate of adoption for identifying and data collection of assets has skyrocketed. Why? Three reasons: the continuing drop in cost to create RFID tags, the stabilization of the standards around ultra high frequency (UHF) RFID bands, and the increased performance level available with new technology readers.

UHF RFID does seem to be the RFID technology of the future. A quick reminder of the different kinds of RFID tags: low frequency (LF), high frequency (HF), and ultra high frequency. LF RFID is the kind often used for animal tracking and can read one tag at a time. HF RFID has more capabilities for encryption and security, but requires high data storage power in the reader and is relatively slow in read-write capability. UHF RFID offers fast read-write protection and anti-cloning security, takes a third of the space for data storage as HF, and offers excellent multi-read capability to collect several tags at once.