As you perhaps already know, RFID is an acronym for ‘Radio Frequency Identification’ – it is the thing that makes ID tags work – but you probably only started hearing about it over the last couple of years. So, how much do you know about RFID? In this piece of writing, I want to take a short look at the history of this seemingly new invention, which has entered almost every facet of a city-dweller’s life and that of many livestock farmers as well.

The start of it all was in 1915, say some, when the British come up with a system called IFF, which is an acronym for ‘Identification: Friend or Foe’. Whoever invented it, the first known installation of the IFF transponder was into the FuG German aircraft in 1940 during the Second World War.

However, IFF does not identify enemy aircraft, it can only identify friendly aircraft. All others have to be treated with suspicion. The same type of technology is still in use in military and civilian aircraft today. The British managed to decode the FuG’s signals and reply properly, giving them a false positive, which gave them the advantage in a dog fight.

At the end of the war and the commencement of the Cold War, Leon Theremin invented a device for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves and other audio details. It is not true RFID, but it is accredited with being a predecessor of RFID, because it was a passive device which was activated by an outside source.

In 1948, Harry Stockman wrote a paper called: “Communication by Means of Reflected Power”, in which he stated: “… considerable research and development work has to be done before the remaining basic problems in reflected-power communication are solved, and before the field of useful applications is explored”.

This was true. The problems were basically threefold: the devices needed a lot of power to work properly; they were too large for use in anything but large items like aircraft and they were very expensive. However, people could already imagine uses for the technology when these three problems had been surmounted.

(In 2009, researchers at Bristol University stuck RFID units to live ants to track their movements).

The first modern predecessor of the RFID device was something that Mario Cardullo demonstrated to the New York Port Authority in 1971. It was a passive transponder which transmitted information using power supplied by an external resource. It’s proposed use was to identify ships to the Port Authority for the purpose of collecting toll charges.

Steven Depp, Alfred Koelle, and Robert Freyman demonstrated a system in 1974 which used RFID tags. This has become the basis of the system which is now extensively used all over the world to collect toll fees on motorways and in car parks.

Charles Walton was granted the first patent to include the acronym RFID in 1983.

The largest user of RFID tags is the US Department of Defense and after that the civil aviation industry, although the manufacturing industry is catching up quickly with RFID tags being used to track items from manufacture to point-of-sale.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on quite a few topics, but is now concerned with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

RFID is an acronym for ‘Radio Frequency Identification’. It involves the utilization of an article normally made of plastic or metal to identify an object in a similar way to bar codes identify items. In fact, they are used in a very similar way to bar codes and, at least for the immediate future, are normally together with bar codes.

However, RFID tags are a lot more powerful than a piece of paper with a few black lines on it. RFID tags can be and are being sewn into clothing and fitted under the skins of animals and humans for ease of tracking. Many of the items you buy in supermarkets these days have RFID tags sewn into them, but do not try looking for them because they can be minuscule. They could also be under the labels of those cans of beans in your cupboard.

An RFID tag is deployed to be able to follow an item from manufacturer to consumer, but especially when it is in the storehouse or supermarket waiting to be sold. A tag reader will be able to relay the tag’s information back to a computer to notify management that something is close to its sell-by-date, for example.

Tags in livestock permit the slaughterhouse to be able to track the animal back to a farm and hand this information on to the butcher. An RFID tag under your dog’s skin or your car’s bonnet will permit it to be found if lost or stolen.

There are basically two types of RFID tags: the passive sort and the active kind and there is a hybrid as well. The passive tag is similar to a bar code. It carries the same information and then more besides. Like a bar code, it can do nothing on its own, but when it is read it will disclose its data. These tag readers give the tag sufficient power to be able to reflect the information back to it.

The active tags have a battery and a transmitter built into them, so that they can actively transmit the data all the time and the hybrids will only broadcast when ’switched on’ by a tag reader.

There is still some dispute about how far away a tag reader can read a tag. In the instance of a passive tag, it depends on the power that the reader can impart over a long distance. Most are designed to work over only a few inches or feet, but more high-capacity ones could be built. Active and hybrid tags actively broadcast, so they can be read from 100 metres (300 feet) or more.

These tags have been around for a very long time in one form or another, but certainly since the Second World War, when they were used to identify home-coming British planes to save them from the RADAR-directed anti-aircraft guns.

The concern as far as many organizations are concerned, is that technology has advanced so much that the tags can be almost invisible and the readers could be anywhere, which evokes concerns for personal privacy.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on quite a few topics, but is currently involved with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.